Eva Lieberman
Biographic Data
| ID | 389694 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eva Lieberman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eva |
| FAMILY NAME | Lieberman |
| SIGNATURE | LIEBERMAN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9242-5687 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 859 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Beyond the tap
The value of dignity appeals
In recent decades, activists and leaders of government and nongovernment organizations have increasingly and explicitly called for greater attention to human dignity in their efforts to promote pro-social relations. In this study, we investigate whether appeals to this core human value actually influence how individuals act with regard to those who might be otherwise ignored or neglected. Using the digital advertising platform on Facebook, we ran…
Government Responses to Climate Change
Social scientists should be more deliberate in how they define and measure government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The authors highlight key distinctions among three dimensions of climate policy: the commitments made by governments, the actions that governments take, and the outcomes they produce. In turn, the authors detail the challenges of measuring these dimensions, and discuss the tradeoffs of alternative measurement strategie…
Politician responses to material incentives for participation in surveys
Political scientists routinely focus their investigations on the attitudes and behaviours of politicians and increasingly study them through systematic surveys. As with all surveys, researchers aim to maximize response rates, but we know little about the incentives that motivate politicians to participate in survey research. In this paper, we consider whether financial incentives in the form of small cash payments or participation in lotteries fo…
Response to Robert I. Rotberg’s Review of Until We have Won Our Liberty
Experiential Avoidance and Emotion Dysregulation as Mediators in the LGBTQ Minority Stress Model
Until We Have Won Our Liberty
A fresh and compelling account of South Africa’s post-Apartheid democracy At a time when many democracies are under strain around the world, Until We Have Won Our Liberty shines new light on the signal achievements of one of the contemporary era’s most closely watched transitions away from minority rule. South Africa’s democratic development has been messy, fiercely contested, and sometimes violent. But as Evan Lieberman argues, it has also offer…
South Africa's Resilient Democracy
During a period of rising authoritarian populism around the globe, South Africa stands out as a surprising democratic success story. For example, the 2021 local-government elections were the most competitive yet in the postapartheid era, defying early predictions of long-term, single-party domination. And for more than a quarter-century, citizens have been able to positively influence policy and the quality of governance. To be sure, the country …
Self-Efficacy and Citizen Engagement in Development
Recent studies of efforts to increase citizen engagement in local governance through information campaigns report mixed results. We consider whether low levels of self-efficacy beliefs limit engagement, especially among poor citizens in poor countries. Citizens may be caught in an “efficacy trap” which limits their realization of better public goods provision. We describe results from a series of experimental studies conducted with over 2,200 cit…
When Do Strong Parties “Throw the Bums Out”? Competition and Accountability in South African Candidate Nominations
Do online newspapers promote or undermine nation‐building in divided societies? Evidence from Africa
Seminal contributions to the study of nation‐building emphasized the role of newspapers in the development of national consciousness. But do such theories apply in the modern context of online news sites, especially in diverse, postcolonial societies? Because online news sites contain forums for reader comments, this provides an opportunity to assess the relationship between exposure to media content and citizen sentiments. We investigate the ext…
How information about race-based health disparities affects policy preferences
Beyond 'Yes Means Yes
Nuanced Accountability
Various theories of democratic governance posit that citizens should vote for incumbent politicians when they provide good service, and vote for the opposition when service delivery is poor. But does electoral accountability work as theorized, especially in developing country contexts? Studying Southern African democracies, where infrastructural investment in basic services has expanded widely but not universally, we contribute a new empirical an…
Census Enumeration and Group Conflict
Does the enumeration of ethnic, racial, and/or religious categories on national household censuses increase the likelihood of conflict? The authors propose a theory of intergroup relations that emphasizes the conflictual effects of institutionalizing boundaries between social identity groups. The article investigates the relationship between counting and various forms of conflict with an original, global data set that classifies the type of enume…
Response to Symposium Reviewers
This response to Prof. Lieberman’s essay questions its analogy between “biomedical research” and the academic discipline of political science. Focused on the disanalogy of scope and scale between the two, it takes issue not with the “criterial framework” he offers, but with the quality of argumentation that leads us there. Supplementing the essay’s impressionistic account of editorial practice with evidence drawn from the New England Journal of M…
Can the Biomedical Research Cycle be a Model for Political Science
In sciences such as biomedicine, researchers and journal editors are well aware that progress in answering difficult questions generally requires movement through a research cycle: Research on a topic or problem progresses from pure description, through correlational analyses and natural experiments, to phased randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In biomedical research all of these research activities are valued and find publication outlets in ma…
The Comparative Politics of Service Delivery in Developing Countries
This article focuses on the comparative politics of service delivery in developing countries from 1990 to mid-2011. It first reviews the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence related to the provision of basic public services such as education, water, electricity, and health care before turning to the determinants of service provision. The link between accountability and the quality of service provision is emphasized. The article also consi…
Advances in Comparative-Historical Analysis
Against the backdrop of an explosion of interest in new techniques for data collection and theory testing, this volume provides a fresh programmatic statement about comparative-historical analysis. It examines the advances and distinctive contributions that CHA has made to theory generation and the explanation of large-scale outcomes that newer approaches often regard as empirically intractable. An introductory essay locates the sources of CHA's …
Does Information Lead to More Active Citizenship? Evidence from an Education Intervention in Rural Kenya
The Ethnicity–Policy Preference Link in Sub-Saharan Africa
Scholars have begun to investigate the mechanisms that link ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision but have paid only minimal attention to the role of preferences for public policies. Some argue that ethnic groups hold culturally distinctive preferences for goods and policies, and that such differences impede effective policy making, but these studies provide little evidence to support this claim. Others argue that preferences d…
Conceptualizing and Measuring Ethnic Politics
The Institutional Origins of Ethnic Violence
Descriptive representation and Aids policy in South Africa
The global AIDS pandemic raises key questions with respect to Pitkin's seminal concerns for the descriptive and substantive representation of diverse citizen interests. Specifically, are there ‘group interests’ for AIDS-related policies, and are they represented by political leaders? One might expect all politicians to prioritize a response to the global pandemic as a matter of public interest, especially in high prevalence countries. Alternative…
The perils of polycentric governance of infectious disease in South Africa
Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative Research
Despite repeated calls for the use of "mixed methods" in comparative analysis, political scientists have few systematic guides for carrying out such work. This paper details a unified approach which joins intensive case-study analysis with statistical analysis. Not only are the advantages of each approach combined, but also there is a synergistic value to the nested research design: for example, statistical analyses can guide case selection for i…
The Ethnicity–Policy Preference Link in Sub-Saharan Africa
Scholars have begun to investigate the mechanisms that link ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision but have paid only minimal attention to the role of preferences for public policies. Some argue that ethnic groups hold culturally distinctive preferences for goods and policies, and that such differences impede effective policy making, but these studies provide little evidence to support this claim. Others argue that preferences d…
Taxation data as indicators of state-society relations
Causal Inference in Historical Institutional Analysis
Although emerging streams of historical institutional (HI) analysis have generated substantial insights in the field of comparative politics, this scholarship has lacked a self-conscious approach to methodology. This article specifies the comparative historical methods that many HI scholars have implicitly used for estimating the causal effect of political institutions on key policy and other political outcomes. It demonstrates how various period…
Nuanced Accountability
Various theories of democratic governance posit that citizens should vote for incumbent politicians when they provide good service, and vote for the opposition when service delivery is poor. But does electoral accountability work as theorized, especially in developing country contexts? Studying Southern African democracies, where infrastructural investment in basic services has expanded widely but not universally, we contribute a new empirical an…
The Institutional Origins of Ethnic Violence
Does Information Lead to More Active Citizenship? Evidence from an Education Intervention in Rural Kenya
Census Enumeration and Group Conflict
Does the enumeration of ethnic, racial, and/or religious categories on national household censuses increase the likelihood of conflict? The authors propose a theory of intergroup relations that emphasizes the conflictual effects of institutionalizing boundaries between social identity groups. The article investigates the relationship between counting and various forms of conflict with an original, global data set that classifies the type of enume…
Ethnic Politics, Risk, and Policy-Making
What explains country policy responses to the AIDS pandemic? The author highlights ethnic politics as a negative influence on AIDS-related expenditures and other policies. When societies are ethnically divided and fragmented, elites are less likely to mobilize around the idea of risk from a stigmatized condition, fearing that their group will suffer reputational consequences. They are more likely to emphasize that the risks are contained within o…
Bridging the Qualitative-Quantitative Divide
The proliferation of historically oriented replication data has provided great opportunities for political scientists to develop and to test theories relevant to a range of macrohistorical phenomena. But what is the quality of such data? Are the codings or quantitative mappings of historical events, processes, and unit characteristics based on sufficiently solid foundations equivalent to those found in detailed case studies? This article evaluate…
How information about race-based health disparities affects policy preferences
National Political Community and the Politics of Income Taxation in Brazil and South Africa in the Twentieth Century
Why was the South African state so much more successful than the Brazilian state in its attempts to collect income taxes during the twentieth century? Nationally distinctive tax policies and patterns of administration can be explained by examining the impact of contrasting definitions of National Political Community, specified in critical constitutions written around the turn of the century. The ways in which racial and spatial cleavages were add…
Conceptualizing and Measuring Ethnic Politics
Boundary institutions and HIV/Aids policy in Brazil and South Africa
Can the Biomedical Research Cycle be a Model for Political Science
In sciences such as biomedicine, researchers and journal editors are well aware that progress in answering difficult questions generally requires movement through a research cycle: Research on a topic or problem progresses from pure description, through correlational analyses and natural experiments, to phased randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In biomedical research all of these research activities are valued and find publication outlets in ma…
Self-Efficacy and Citizen Engagement in Development
Recent studies of efforts to increase citizen engagement in local governance through information campaigns report mixed results. We consider whether low levels of self-efficacy beliefs limit engagement, especially among poor citizens in poor countries. Citizens may be caught in an “efficacy trap” which limits their realization of better public goods provision. We describe results from a series of experimental studies conducted with over 2,200 cit…
When Do Strong Parties “Throw the Bums Out”? Competition and Accountability in South African Candidate Nominations
Do online newspapers promote or undermine nation‐building in divided societies? Evidence from Africa
Seminal contributions to the study of nation‐building emphasized the role of newspapers in the development of national consciousness. But do such theories apply in the modern context of online news sites, especially in diverse, postcolonial societies? Because online news sites contain forums for reader comments, this provides an opportunity to assess the relationship between exposure to media content and citizen sentiments. We investigate the ext…
South Africa's Resilient Democracy
During a period of rising authoritarian populism around the globe, South Africa stands out as a surprising democratic success story. For example, the 2021 local-government elections were the most competitive yet in the postapartheid era, defying early predictions of long-term, single-party domination. And for more than a quarter-century, citizens have been able to positively influence policy and the quality of governance. To be sure, the country …
Politician responses to material incentives for participation in surveys
Political scientists routinely focus their investigations on the attitudes and behaviours of politicians and increasingly study them through systematic surveys. As with all surveys, researchers aim to maximize response rates, but we know little about the incentives that motivate politicians to participate in survey research. In this paper, we consider whether financial incentives in the form of small cash payments or participation in lotteries fo…
Experiential Avoidance and Emotion Dysregulation as Mediators in the LGBTQ Minority Stress Model
Mask and Masculinity
Though ignored or reviled by critics of the Mexican cinema because of their folkloric character, the films of lucha libre star El Santo are important texts for understanding the transitions taking place in Mexican culture in the 1960s and 1970s. The Santo film's representations of technology, modernity, and most significantly gender relations mark a decisive shift away from traditional formulations to point towards a contemporary engagement of th…
National Political Community and the Politics of Income Taxation in Brazil and South Africa in the Twentieth Century
Why was the South African state so much more successful than the Brazilian state in its attempts to collect income taxes during the twentieth century? Nationally distinctive tax policies and patterns of administration can be explained by examining the impact of contrasting definitions of National Political Community, specified in critical constitutions written around the turn of the century. The ways in which racial and spatial cleavages were add…
Causal Inference in Historical Institutional Analysis
Although emerging streams of historical institutional (HI) analysis have generated substantial insights in the field of comparative politics, this scholarship has lacked a self-conscious approach to methodology. This article specifies the comparative historical methods that many HI scholars have implicitly used for estimating the causal effect of political institutions on key policy and other political outcomes. It demonstrates how various period…
How South African Citizens Evaluate Their Economic Obligations to the State
This article explores the relationship between feelings about political community and citizen evaluations of the state's demands for taxation. It finds preliminary support for the hypothesis that to the extent that individuals identify themselves with the state-sponsored view of the nation, they will perceive the allocation of costs and benefits to be more 'fair', and will be more inclined to comply with demands for taxation. This conclusion is b…
Taxation data as indicators of state-society relations
Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation in Brazil and South Africa
Nationally-specific definitions of citizenship proved decisive for the development of the Tax State in Brazil and South Africa in the twentieth century. Although both countries had been divided along racial and regional lines in the late nineteenth century, watershed constitutions addressed these political problems in very different ways. South Africa's institutionalized white supremacy created a level of political solidarity that contributed to …
Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative Research
Despite repeated calls for the use of "mixed methods" in comparative analysis, political scientists have few systematic guides for carrying out such work. This paper details a unified approach which joins intensive case-study analysis with statistical analysis. Not only are the advantages of each approach combined, but also there is a synergistic value to the nested research design: for example, statistical analyses can guide case selection for i…
Boundary institutions and HIV/Aids policy in Brazil and South Africa
Ethnic Politics, Risk, and Policy-Making
What explains country policy responses to the AIDS pandemic? The author highlights ethnic politics as a negative influence on AIDS-related expenditures and other policies. When societies are ethnically divided and fragmented, elites are less likely to mobilize around the idea of risk from a stigmatized condition, fearing that their group will suffer reputational consequences. They are more likely to emphasize that the risks are contained within o…
Relative Response
The aim of this article is to support efforts to hold governments accountable for their commitments to respond to HIV and AIDS. It describes a new approach to ranking countries' responses in order to facilitate cross-country comparisons. The method uses the United Nations General/Assembly Speecial Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS) Declaration of Commitment as its point of departure and was designed to rank countries in terms of their efforts to fight …
Boundaries of Contagion
Why have governments responded to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in such different ways? During the past quarter century, international agencies and donors have disseminated vast resources and a set of best practice recommendations to policymakers around the globe. Yet the governments of developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean continue to implement widely varying policies. Boundaries of Contagion is the first sys…
The Politics of Demanding Sacrifice
Joseph Schumpeter's stirring conclusion in a 1918 text, that “the spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare – all this and more is written in its fiscal history,” serves as a mantra for a large body of fiscal sociological scholarship. However, the statement is, of course, hyperbole. Even the most ardent student of fiscal history could not read, as if off a tarot card, all of a state's or a soci…
Mask and Masculinity
Though ignored or reviled by critics of the Mexican cinema because of their folkloric character, the films of lucha libre star El Santo are important texts for understanding the transitions taking place in Mexican culture in the 1960s and 1970s. The Santo film's representations of technology, modernity, and most significantly gender relations mark a decisive shift away from traditional formulations to point towards a contemporary engagement of th…
Bridging the Qualitative-Quantitative Divide
The proliferation of historically oriented replication data has provided great opportunities for political scientists to develop and to test theories relevant to a range of macrohistorical phenomena. But what is the quality of such data? Are the codings or quantitative mappings of historical events, processes, and unit characteristics based on sufficiently solid foundations equivalent to those found in detailed case studies? This article evaluate…
The perils of polycentric governance of infectious disease in South Africa
Conceptualizing and Measuring Ethnic Politics
The Institutional Origins of Ethnic Violence
Descriptive representation and Aids policy in South Africa
The global AIDS pandemic raises key questions with respect to Pitkin's seminal concerns for the descriptive and substantive representation of diverse citizen interests. Specifically, are there ‘group interests’ for AIDS-related policies, and are they represented by political leaders? One might expect all politicians to prioritize a response to the global pandemic as a matter of public interest, especially in high prevalence countries. Alternative…
The Ethnicity–Policy Preference Link in Sub-Saharan Africa
Scholars have begun to investigate the mechanisms that link ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision but have paid only minimal attention to the role of preferences for public policies. Some argue that ethnic groups hold culturally distinctive preferences for goods and policies, and that such differences impede effective policy making, but these studies provide little evidence to support this claim. Others argue that preferences d…
Does Information Lead to More Active Citizenship? Evidence from an Education Intervention in Rural Kenya
The Comparative Politics of Service Delivery in Developing Countries
This article focuses on the comparative politics of service delivery in developing countries from 1990 to mid-2011. It first reviews the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence related to the provision of basic public services such as education, water, electricity, and health care before turning to the determinants of service provision. The link between accountability and the quality of service provision is emphasized. The article also consi…
Advances in Comparative-Historical Analysis
Against the backdrop of an explosion of interest in new techniques for data collection and theory testing, this volume provides a fresh programmatic statement about comparative-historical analysis. It examines the advances and distinctive contributions that CHA has made to theory generation and the explanation of large-scale outcomes that newer approaches often regard as empirically intractable. An introductory essay locates the sources of CHA's …
Response to Symposium Reviewers
This response to Prof. Lieberman’s essay questions its analogy between “biomedical research” and the academic discipline of political science. Focused on the disanalogy of scope and scale between the two, it takes issue not with the “criterial framework” he offers, but with the quality of argumentation that leads us there. Supplementing the essay’s impressionistic account of editorial practice with evidence drawn from the New England Journal of M…
Can the Biomedical Research Cycle be a Model for Political Science
In sciences such as biomedicine, researchers and journal editors are well aware that progress in answering difficult questions generally requires movement through a research cycle: Research on a topic or problem progresses from pure description, through correlational analyses and natural experiments, to phased randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In biomedical research all of these research activities are valued and find publication outlets in ma…
Nuanced Accountability
Various theories of democratic governance posit that citizens should vote for incumbent politicians when they provide good service, and vote for the opposition when service delivery is poor. But does electoral accountability work as theorized, especially in developing country contexts? Studying Southern African democracies, where infrastructural investment in basic services has expanded widely but not universally, we contribute a new empirical an…
Census Enumeration and Group Conflict
Does the enumeration of ethnic, racial, and/or religious categories on national household censuses increase the likelihood of conflict? The authors propose a theory of intergroup relations that emphasizes the conflictual effects of institutionalizing boundaries between social identity groups. The article investigates the relationship between counting and various forms of conflict with an original, global data set that classifies the type of enume…
Political science (34 works) · Law (25 works) · Economics (24 works) · Politics (22 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Development economics (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Economic growth (10 works)