Neil Ketchley
Biographic Data
| ID | 279364 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Neil Ketchley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Neil |
| FAMILY NAME | Ketchley |
| SIGNATURE | KETCHLEY N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5413-2664 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 168 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
“Ambassador, you’re really spoiling us!” Diplomatic gifts and profligate autocrats
Qatar’s “unconditional” gift of a $400 million Boeing 747-8 to Donald Trump serves as a reminder that states have long used diplomatic gifts to impress others, forge bonds, and secure favorable treatment. However, in an age where citizens and media outlets routinely scrutinize public spending, there is good reason to think that not all governments are able to justify lavishing large sums on such interactions. In this paper, we test the claim that…
Measuring Media Criticism with ALC Word Embeddings
The ability of news media to report on events and opinions that are critical of the executive branch of government is central to media freedom and a marker of meaningful democratization. Existing indices use scoring criteria or expert surveys to develop country year measures of media criticism. In this article, we introduce a computationally inexpensive and fully open-source method for estimating media criticism from news articles using à la cart…
The Chinese are coming! US think tanks and the Belt and Road Initiative in the Middle East and North Africa
Plots, Attacks, and the Measurement of Terrorism
How should we measure terrorism? Political scientists typically use executed attacks as the dependent variable and test covariates to identify factors that produce terrorism. But attacks are an imperfect measure of terrorist activity because of ‘plot attrition’ — the tendency for plots to derail due to police intervention or other factors. We examine whether the exclusion of foiled plots from event datasets constitutes a measurement problem in te…
Purging to Transform the Post-Colonial State
The post-WWII era saw junior military officers launch revolutionary coups in a number of post-colonial states. How did these events transform colonial-era state elites? We theorize that the inexperienced leaders of revolutionary coups had to choose between purging threats and delivering ambitious projects of state-led transformation, leading to a threat-competence calculation that patterned elite turnover. To illustrate our argument, we trace the…
Online calls for protest and offline mobilization in autocracies
A body of research suggests that social media has afforded new opportunities for orchestrating mobilization in autocracies. However, the mechanisms linking online coordination with offline mobilization are rarely demonstrated. We address this lacuna by exploring the impact of Farsi-language social media posts that called for protest on precise days and locations in Iran during the 2017 'Dey Protests'. To conduct our analysis, we match a dataset o…
Explaining Recruitment to Extremism
Who joins extremist movements? Answering this question is beset by methodological challenges as survey techniques are infeasible and selective samples provide no counterfactual. Recruits can be assigned to contextual units, but this is vulnerable to problems of ecological inference. In this article, we elaborate a technique that combines survey and ecological approaches. The Bayesian hierarchical case–control design that we propose allows us to i…
Anti-austerity riots in late developing states
In late developing states, labor markets are often segmented as a result of import substitution and political coalitions centered on the formally employed. Building on insider-outsider and moral economy frameworks from political economy, we theorize that in such contexts labor market insiders develop strong expectations about welfare provision and public transfers that make them more likely to riot against proposed austerity measures. We test our…
Online repression and tactical evasion
Following the 2011 Arab Spring, autocrats have sought to limit citizens’ ability to publicize offline protests over social media. In this article, we explore how users adjust to these restrictions. To do so, we analyse 33 million tweets sent from Egypt during the “Day of Anger” protests in September 2020. We find evidence of online tactical evasion in a highly repressive context. Compared to neutral users, regime opponents are more likely to issu…
Burnings, Beatings, and Bombings
What are the determinants of ethnic violence? Existing research has forwarded a range of often competing explanations, from political opportunism to economic competition to state incapacity. We argue that this diversity of accounts is attributable, in part, to scholars’ tendency to lump together distinct forms of ethnic violence that have different underlying determinants. We propose that scholars instead disaggregate ethnic violence and put forw…
Who Supported the Early Muslim Brotherhood
Scholarship on political Islam suggests that support for early Islamist movements came from literate merchants, government officials, and professionals who lacked political representation. We test these claims with a unique tranche of microlevel data drawn from a Muslim Brotherhood petition campaign in interwar Egypt. Matching the occupations of over 2,500 Brotherhood supporters to contemporaneous census data, we show that Egyptians employed in c…
Unpopular Protest
Political science has long debated the significance of protest during a democratic transition, but attention has been largely confined to its impact on elite support for democracy. Contributing to scholarship on the attitudinal consequences of mobilization, we examine how protest shaped popular perceptions of democracy during the post-Mubarak transition in Egypt. We do this by matching wave 2 of the Arab Barometer survey with georeferenced protes…
Fridays of Revolution
Focal days of protest are increasingly common to episodes of revolutionary mobilization. This paper explores the significance of focal days in patterning sustained protest in Egypt and Tunisia from 2011 to 2012. In Egypt, resource-poor activists exploited the confluence of worshippers on Fridays to mobilize mass transitory protest. This reliance on ritualized action hindered cross-sectoral coordination and meant mass protest often failed to infli…
After the Massacre
This paper draws on event data and interviews to examine the effects of repression on the gendered dynamics of Islamist mobilization in Egypt following the 2013 military coup. Our analysis shows that women’s anti-coup groups were more likely to mobilize following the killing of up to 1,000 anti-coup protestors at Rabaa al-Adawiyya in August 2013. Women’s protests were also more likely in the home districts of those killed at Rabaa. Informant test…
Fraud in the 2018 Egyptian presidential election
This research note scrutinizes official vote counts from the 2018 Egyptian presidential election. Drawing on data for 13,807 polling stations published by the Egyptian Electoral Authority, it uses the Election Forensics Toolkit to estimate a series of digit and distribution tests. The results point to statistical anomalies in voter turnout for polling stations located in Egypt’s major population centres. The findings align with journalistic accou…
Opportunity Without Organization
Prevailing understandings of labor protest and strikes take as their focus stable democratic settings where autonomous trade union structures are an established component of the organizational resources available to workers. We extend the analysis of labor mobilization to a radically different context: Egypt in the year of the January 25th Revolution, when workers mobilized en masse in the absence of union leadership. For this, we use a catalogue…
Social and Institutional Origins of Political Islam
Under what conditions did the first Islamist movements organize? Which social and institutional contexts facilitated such mobilization? A sizable literature points to social and demographic changes, Western encroachment into Muslim societies, and the availability of state and economic infrastructure. To test these hypotheses, we match a listing of Muslim Brotherhood branches founded in interwar Egypt with contemporaneous census data on over 4,000…
Sticks, Stones, and Molotov Cocktails
The literature on civil resistance finds that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed than violent insurgencies. A parallel literature on democratization poses mass mobilization as exogenous to political liberalization. Contributing to both literatures, we propose the category of unarmed collective violence to capture an empirically recurring form of unruly collective action used by civilians and then use a mixed methods research design t…
Egypt in a Time of Revolution
This book considers the diverse forms of mass mobilization and contentious politics that emerged during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and its aftermath. Drawing on a catalogue of more than 8,000 protest events, as well as interviews, video footage and still photographs, Neil Ketchley provides the first systematic account of how Egyptians banded together to overthrow Husni Mubarak, and how old regime forces engineered a return to authoritarian r…
The Educational Contexts of Islamist Activism
The literature on student activism finds that protesters come from prestigious universities and from the social sciences and humanities. Studies of political Islam, however, emphasize the prominence of engineering and medical students from secular institutions. Contributing to both literatures, this paper investigates Islamist students targeted by security forces in Egypt following the coup of 2013. Matching 1,352 arrested students to the populat…
The army and the people are one hand!' Fraternization and the 25th January Egyptian Revolution
On 28 January 2011 the Egyptian army was deployed onto Cairo's streets following three days of escalating protests. Upon entering Midan al-Tahrir, a column of newly arriving army tanks and APCs was attacked by protestors. Throwing stones and dousing the vehicles in petrol before setting them alight, protestors pulled soldiers out of their vehicles and beat them. Seizing ammunition and supplies, protestors even commandeered a tank. Minutes later t…
Sticks, Stones, and Molotov Cocktails
The literature on civil resistance finds that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed than violent insurgencies. A parallel literature on democratization poses mass mobilization as exogenous to political liberalization. Contributing to both literatures, we propose the category of unarmed collective violence to capture an empirically recurring form of unruly collective action used by civilians and then use a mixed methods research design t…
Unpopular Protest
Political science has long debated the significance of protest during a democratic transition, but attention has been largely confined to its impact on elite support for democracy. Contributing to scholarship on the attitudinal consequences of mobilization, we examine how protest shaped popular perceptions of democracy during the post-Mubarak transition in Egypt. We do this by matching wave 2 of the Arab Barometer survey with georeferenced protes…
Opportunity Without Organization
Prevailing understandings of labor protest and strikes take as their focus stable democratic settings where autonomous trade union structures are an established component of the organizational resources available to workers. We extend the analysis of labor mobilization to a radically different context: Egypt in the year of the January 25th Revolution, when workers mobilized en masse in the absence of union leadership. For this, we use a catalogue…
Social and Institutional Origins of Political Islam
Under what conditions did the first Islamist movements organize? Which social and institutional contexts facilitated such mobilization? A sizable literature points to social and demographic changes, Western encroachment into Muslim societies, and the availability of state and economic infrastructure. To test these hypotheses, we match a listing of Muslim Brotherhood branches founded in interwar Egypt with contemporaneous census data on over 4,000…
The army and the people are one hand!' Fraternization and the 25th January Egyptian Revolution
On 28 January 2011 the Egyptian army was deployed onto Cairo's streets following three days of escalating protests. Upon entering Midan al-Tahrir, a column of newly arriving army tanks and APCs was attacked by protestors. Throwing stones and dousing the vehicles in petrol before setting them alight, protestors pulled soldiers out of their vehicles and beat them. Seizing ammunition and supplies, protestors even commandeered a tank. Minutes later t…
Fridays of Revolution
Focal days of protest are increasingly common to episodes of revolutionary mobilization. This paper explores the significance of focal days in patterning sustained protest in Egypt and Tunisia from 2011 to 2012. In Egypt, resource-poor activists exploited the confluence of worshippers on Fridays to mobilize mass transitory protest. This reliance on ritualized action hindered cross-sectoral coordination and meant mass protest often failed to infli…
The Educational Contexts of Islamist Activism
The literature on student activism finds that protesters come from prestigious universities and from the social sciences and humanities. Studies of political Islam, however, emphasize the prominence of engineering and medical students from secular institutions. Contributing to both literatures, this paper investigates Islamist students targeted by security forces in Egypt following the coup of 2013. Matching 1,352 arrested students to the populat…
Online repression and tactical evasion
Following the 2011 Arab Spring, autocrats have sought to limit citizens’ ability to publicize offline protests over social media. In this article, we explore how users adjust to these restrictions. To do so, we analyse 33 million tweets sent from Egypt during the “Day of Anger” protests in September 2020. We find evidence of online tactical evasion in a highly repressive context. Compared to neutral users, regime opponents are more likely to issu…
After the Massacre
This paper draws on event data and interviews to examine the effects of repression on the gendered dynamics of Islamist mobilization in Egypt following the 2013 military coup. Our analysis shows that women’s anti-coup groups were more likely to mobilize following the killing of up to 1,000 anti-coup protestors at Rabaa al-Adawiyya in August 2013. Women’s protests were also more likely in the home districts of those killed at Rabaa. Informant test…
Fraud in the 2018 Egyptian presidential election
This research note scrutinizes official vote counts from the 2018 Egyptian presidential election. Drawing on data for 13,807 polling stations published by the Egyptian Electoral Authority, it uses the Election Forensics Toolkit to estimate a series of digit and distribution tests. The results point to statistical anomalies in voter turnout for polling stations located in Egypt’s major population centres. The findings align with journalistic accou…
Plots, Attacks, and the Measurement of Terrorism
How should we measure terrorism? Political scientists typically use executed attacks as the dependent variable and test covariates to identify factors that produce terrorism. But attacks are an imperfect measure of terrorist activity because of ‘plot attrition’ — the tendency for plots to derail due to police intervention or other factors. We examine whether the exclusion of foiled plots from event datasets constitutes a measurement problem in te…
Purging to Transform the Post-Colonial State
The post-WWII era saw junior military officers launch revolutionary coups in a number of post-colonial states. How did these events transform colonial-era state elites? We theorize that the inexperienced leaders of revolutionary coups had to choose between purging threats and delivering ambitious projects of state-led transformation, leading to a threat-competence calculation that patterned elite turnover. To illustrate our argument, we trace the…
Who Supported the Early Muslim Brotherhood
Scholarship on political Islam suggests that support for early Islamist movements came from literate merchants, government officials, and professionals who lacked political representation. We test these claims with a unique tranche of microlevel data drawn from a Muslim Brotherhood petition campaign in interwar Egypt. Matching the occupations of over 2,500 Brotherhood supporters to contemporaneous census data, we show that Egyptians employed in c…
Explaining Recruitment to Extremism
Who joins extremist movements? Answering this question is beset by methodological challenges as survey techniques are infeasible and selective samples provide no counterfactual. Recruits can be assigned to contextual units, but this is vulnerable to problems of ecological inference. In this article, we elaborate a technique that combines survey and ecological approaches. The Bayesian hierarchical case–control design that we propose allows us to i…
Anti-austerity riots in late developing states
In late developing states, labor markets are often segmented as a result of import substitution and political coalitions centered on the formally employed. Building on insider-outsider and moral economy frameworks from political economy, we theorize that in such contexts labor market insiders develop strong expectations about welfare provision and public transfers that make them more likely to riot against proposed austerity measures. We test our…
The army and the people are one hand!' Fraternization and the 25th January Egyptian Revolution
On 28 January 2011 the Egyptian army was deployed onto Cairo's streets following three days of escalating protests. Upon entering Midan al-Tahrir, a column of newly arriving army tanks and APCs was attacked by protestors. Throwing stones and dousing the vehicles in petrol before setting them alight, protestors pulled soldiers out of their vehicles and beat them. Seizing ammunition and supplies, protestors even commandeered a tank. Minutes later t…
Egypt in a Time of Revolution
This book considers the diverse forms of mass mobilization and contentious politics that emerged during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and its aftermath. Drawing on a catalogue of more than 8,000 protest events, as well as interviews, video footage and still photographs, Neil Ketchley provides the first systematic account of how Egyptians banded together to overthrow Husni Mubarak, and how old regime forces engineered a return to authoritarian r…
The Educational Contexts of Islamist Activism
The literature on student activism finds that protesters come from prestigious universities and from the social sciences and humanities. Studies of political Islam, however, emphasize the prominence of engineering and medical students from secular institutions. Contributing to both literatures, this paper investigates Islamist students targeted by security forces in Egypt following the coup of 2013. Matching 1,352 arrested students to the populat…
Opportunity Without Organization
Prevailing understandings of labor protest and strikes take as their focus stable democratic settings where autonomous trade union structures are an established component of the organizational resources available to workers. We extend the analysis of labor mobilization to a radically different context: Egypt in the year of the January 25th Revolution, when workers mobilized en masse in the absence of union leadership. For this, we use a catalogue…
Social and Institutional Origins of Political Islam
Under what conditions did the first Islamist movements organize? Which social and institutional contexts facilitated such mobilization? A sizable literature points to social and demographic changes, Western encroachment into Muslim societies, and the availability of state and economic infrastructure. To test these hypotheses, we match a listing of Muslim Brotherhood branches founded in interwar Egypt with contemporaneous census data on over 4,000…
Sticks, Stones, and Molotov Cocktails
The literature on civil resistance finds that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed than violent insurgencies. A parallel literature on democratization poses mass mobilization as exogenous to political liberalization. Contributing to both literatures, we propose the category of unarmed collective violence to capture an empirically recurring form of unruly collective action used by civilians and then use a mixed methods research design t…
Fraud in the 2018 Egyptian presidential election
This research note scrutinizes official vote counts from the 2018 Egyptian presidential election. Drawing on data for 13,807 polling stations published by the Egyptian Electoral Authority, it uses the Election Forensics Toolkit to estimate a series of digit and distribution tests. The results point to statistical anomalies in voter turnout for polling stations located in Egypt’s major population centres. The findings align with journalistic accou…
Fridays of Revolution
Focal days of protest are increasingly common to episodes of revolutionary mobilization. This paper explores the significance of focal days in patterning sustained protest in Egypt and Tunisia from 2011 to 2012. In Egypt, resource-poor activists exploited the confluence of worshippers on Fridays to mobilize mass transitory protest. This reliance on ritualized action hindered cross-sectoral coordination and meant mass protest often failed to infli…
After the Massacre
This paper draws on event data and interviews to examine the effects of repression on the gendered dynamics of Islamist mobilization in Egypt following the 2013 military coup. Our analysis shows that women’s anti-coup groups were more likely to mobilize following the killing of up to 1,000 anti-coup protestors at Rabaa al-Adawiyya in August 2013. Women’s protests were also more likely in the home districts of those killed at Rabaa. Informant test…
Unpopular Protest
Political science has long debated the significance of protest during a democratic transition, but attention has been largely confined to its impact on elite support for democracy. Contributing to scholarship on the attitudinal consequences of mobilization, we examine how protest shaped popular perceptions of democracy during the post-Mubarak transition in Egypt. We do this by matching wave 2 of the Arab Barometer survey with georeferenced protes…
Burnings, Beatings, and Bombings
What are the determinants of ethnic violence? Existing research has forwarded a range of often competing explanations, from political opportunism to economic competition to state incapacity. We argue that this diversity of accounts is attributable, in part, to scholars’ tendency to lump together distinct forms of ethnic violence that have different underlying determinants. We propose that scholars instead disaggregate ethnic violence and put forw…
Who Supported the Early Muslim Brotherhood
Scholarship on political Islam suggests that support for early Islamist movements came from literate merchants, government officials, and professionals who lacked political representation. We test these claims with a unique tranche of microlevel data drawn from a Muslim Brotherhood petition campaign in interwar Egypt. Matching the occupations of over 2,500 Brotherhood supporters to contemporaneous census data, we show that Egyptians employed in c…
Online repression and tactical evasion
Following the 2011 Arab Spring, autocrats have sought to limit citizens’ ability to publicize offline protests over social media. In this article, we explore how users adjust to these restrictions. To do so, we analyse 33 million tweets sent from Egypt during the “Day of Anger” protests in September 2020. We find evidence of online tactical evasion in a highly repressive context. Compared to neutral users, regime opponents are more likely to issu…
Explaining Recruitment to Extremism
Who joins extremist movements? Answering this question is beset by methodological challenges as survey techniques are infeasible and selective samples provide no counterfactual. Recruits can be assigned to contextual units, but this is vulnerable to problems of ecological inference. In this article, we elaborate a technique that combines survey and ecological approaches. The Bayesian hierarchical case–control design that we propose allows us to i…
Anti-austerity riots in late developing states
In late developing states, labor markets are often segmented as a result of import substitution and political coalitions centered on the formally employed. Building on insider-outsider and moral economy frameworks from political economy, we theorize that in such contexts labor market insiders develop strong expectations about welfare provision and public transfers that make them more likely to riot against proposed austerity measures. We test our…
Measuring Media Criticism with ALC Word Embeddings
The ability of news media to report on events and opinions that are critical of the executive branch of government is central to media freedom and a marker of meaningful democratization. Existing indices use scoring criteria or expert surveys to develop country year measures of media criticism. In this article, we introduce a computationally inexpensive and fully open-source method for estimating media criticism from news articles using à la cart…
The Chinese are coming! US think tanks and the Belt and Road Initiative in the Middle East and North Africa
Plots, Attacks, and the Measurement of Terrorism
How should we measure terrorism? Political scientists typically use executed attacks as the dependent variable and test covariates to identify factors that produce terrorism. But attacks are an imperfect measure of terrorist activity because of ‘plot attrition’ — the tendency for plots to derail due to police intervention or other factors. We examine whether the exclusion of foiled plots from event datasets constitutes a measurement problem in te…
Purging to Transform the Post-Colonial State
The post-WWII era saw junior military officers launch revolutionary coups in a number of post-colonial states. How did these events transform colonial-era state elites? We theorize that the inexperienced leaders of revolutionary coups had to choose between purging threats and delivering ambitious projects of state-led transformation, leading to a threat-competence calculation that patterned elite turnover. To illustrate our argument, we trace the…
Online calls for protest and offline mobilization in autocracies
A body of research suggests that social media has afforded new opportunities for orchestrating mobilization in autocracies. However, the mechanisms linking online coordination with offline mobilization are rarely demonstrated. We address this lacuna by exploring the impact of Farsi-language social media posts that called for protest on precise days and locations in Iran during the 2017 'Dey Protests'. To conduct our analysis, we match a dataset o…
“Ambassador, you’re really spoiling us!” Diplomatic gifts and profligate autocrats
Qatar’s “unconditional” gift of a $400 million Boeing 747-8 to Donald Trump serves as a reminder that states have long used diplomatic gifts to impress others, forge bonds, and secure favorable treatment. However, in an age where citizens and media outlets routinely scrutinize public spending, there is good reason to think that not all governments are able to justify lavishing large sums on such interactions. In this paper, we test the claim that…
Law (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Politics (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (12 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Democracy (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Geography (6 works)