Scott Radnitz
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 750332 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Scott Radnitz |
| PRENOMES | Scott |
| SOBRENOME | Radnitz |
| ASSINATURA | RADNITZ S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2621-080X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 29 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 253 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2004 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Responses to contested information amid polarized politics
People increasingly encounter news in politicized spaces online, where various actors contest the veracity of information. This paper assesses how the context surrounding claims of disinformation shapes people’s beliefs. We conducted original survey experiments in the US and Taiwan, randomly varying the identities of the actors alleging disinformation and those supposedly spreading disinformation. Our framework advances on previous work by incorp…
The Conspiracist Theory of Power
In recent years, conspiracy theories have surged in democratic politics, enabling illiberal parties, movements, and politicians to win the votes of constituents who are disillusioned with mainstream democratic politics. Yet scholars of democratic backsliding have not fully grappled with the implications of conspiracism as the basis for a governing ideology. In this article, we argue that challenges to liberal democracy can be better understood by…
Contesting Authority to Adjudicate Misinformation
In recent years, analysts have raised concerns about the threat misinformation poses to democracy, yet efforts to counter misinformation have been met with charges of bias and censorship, predominantly from the political right. This article asks who sets the terms of debate over misinformation: what it is, how much there is, whether it is a problem, and what to do about it. It frames the past decade’s controversies around misinformation as an imp…
Dilemmas of Distrust
Conspiracy theories are playing an increasingly prominent role worldwide in both political rhetoric and popular belief. Previous research has emphasized the individual-level factors behind conspiracy belief but paid less attention to the role of elite framing, while focusing mostly on domestic political contexts. This study assesses the relative weight of official conspiracy claims and motivated biases in producing conspiracy beliefs, in two coun…
Why Democracy Fuels Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy theories are an increasingly popular form of political rhetoric around the globe. The use of conspiracy theories by public officials stems from long-term factors such as distrust, inequality, and political polarization, and is facilitated by one of the preconditions for democracy: competition. This essay explains why conspiracy theories are abundant in the politics of democracies and autocracies alike. It looks at the effects of conspi…
Solidarity through Cynicism? The Influence of Russian Conspiracy Narratives Abroad
As conspiracy theories have become a popular form of political discourse worldwide, states have promoted conspiratorial ideas to advance their foreign policy goals. Yet, despite recent attention to the spread of propaganda abroad, scholars have not addressed whether and how conspiracy theories spread across borders. This study assesses this question in the post-Soviet region, by examining the relationship between exposure to Russian state propaga…
Revealing Schemes
Conspiracy theories have come to play an increasingly prominent role in political systems around the world. In Revealing Schemes, Scott Radnitz moves beyond psychological explanations for why people believe conspiracy theories to explore the politics surrounding them, placing two questions at the center of his account: What leads regimes to promote conspiracy claims? And what effects do those claims have on politics and society? Focusing on the f…
Studying states and regimes in Central Asia
This article surveys research on regimes and states in Central Asia and assesses its contribution to Political Science, specifically the subfield of comparative politics. It discusses three areas in which research on the region has been influenced by and, in turn, fruitfully shaped the comparative political analysis of state and regime: a turn from macro- to micro-level topics; innovations in research design; and the embrace of interdisciplinarit…
Perceived threats and the trade-off between security and human rights
It is well established that exposure to threats causes citizens to prioritize security considerations and accept restrictions on civil liberties. Yet most studies on which these findings are based come from longstanding democracies and do not distinguish among types of threat. This article argues that the effects of internal and external threats are conditional on regime type. It tests the argument via an experiment embedded in an original survey…
Allies or Agitators? How Partisan Identity Shapes Public Opinion about Violent or Nonviolent Protests
In recent years, scholars have argued that protests that employ nonviolent tactics attract greater support and are therefore more likely to succeed than those that use violence. We argue that how protest tactics are perceived is not a purely objective determination, but can be influenced in part by observer characteristics – in particular, by partisan identity. We conducted a survey experiment on two independent samples through the MTurk platform…
Reinterpreting the enemy
Between Russia and a Hard Place
This essay asks how Central Asian states have responded to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and salvos against the West, as a means to assess how Russia and the Central Asian states understand their national interests and exercise state power. It argues that the post-Soviet region shares a cynical and geopolitically driven view of the exercise of global power. Yet Russia has sometimes deployed its resources to advance short-term ideological objec…
Crashes and Clashes
The Euromaidan and the ensuing war in Ukraine constituted signal geopolitical events, but their ramifications at the micro-level have been less explored. The articles by Toal et al. and Hale et al
Ethnic Cues and Redistributive Preferences in Post-Soviet Georgia
A Protest Letter in Support of the Central European University
Is Belief in Conspiracy Theories Pathological? A Survey Experiment on the Cognitive Roots of Extreme Suspicion
What are the origins of belief in conspiracy theories? The dominant approach to studying conspiracy theories links belief to social stresses or personality type, and does not take into account the situational and fluctuating nature of attitudes. In this study, a survey experiment, subjects are presented with a mock news article designed to induce conspiracy belief. Subjects are randomly assigned three manipulations hypothesized to heighten conspi…
Paranoia with a purpose
This article considers the political uses of conspiracy theories (CTs). It is widely accepted that post-Soviet citizens are prone to believe CTs, but there has been little research about the conditions under which politicians endorse conspiracy narratives and why those narratives sometimes become hegemonic. I argue that in times of high uncertainty, CTs have properties that are useful in providing political elites with a focal point for coordinat…
Historical narratives and post-conflict reconciliation
How malleable are the attitudes of people in a post-conflict society toward their former adversaries? I conduct a laboratory experiment in Azerbaijan, which fought a war against its neighbor Armenia in the 1990s, to investigate whether reconsideration of the roots of the conflict can influence interethnic attitudes. Subjects are assigned differing interpretations of the conflict and asked to think about or discuss their reactions. The results ind…
Author–critic forum
Weapons of the wealthy: predatory regimes and elite-led protests in Central Asia, by Scott Radnitz, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 2010, 231pp., US$49.95 (hardback), US$24.95 (paperbac
Oil in the family
This article argues that Azerbaijan did not display a backlash against the 'colour revolutions' in the post-Soviet space because the primary threat to the regime came from within, and not from below. Thanks to the overlap of power and property in Azerbaijan, the ruling elite's revenues from oil resources, and the failure of international actors to support the opposition, civil society did not pose a major challenge to the regime's dominance durin…
Informal Politics and the State
Many theories of the state are implicitly premised on modernization theory—a linear transition from agrarian to industrial society and increasing centralization and extractive capacity of the state, while preexisting societal networks are eradicated or gradually absorbed into the political system. As a society becomes wealthier and more mobile, particularist allegiances are broadened to encompass the whole polity and rulers increas ingly govern t…
The Color of Money
What accounts for the “colored revolutions” of the former Soviet Union? Analysis of postcommunist political economies reveals that states that underwent reform saw the emergence of a new capitalist class whose interests sometimes put them at odds with the regime. Following fraudulent elections, business elites played an active role in financing mobilization and signaling mass discontent, which undermined regime support and hastened regime change.…
The Origins of Social Capital
This article investigates the determinants of social capital by analyzing an original survey of post-Soviet Central Asia. It tests hypotheses derived from two related questions: whether networks, norms, and trust are empirically related and the extent to which four factors—culture, regime type, perceptions of government responsiveness, and development interventions—predict levels of social capital. The results show that trust and norms diverge fr…
Informal Politics
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Weighing the political and economic motivations for migration in post-soviet Space
This article investigates the micro-level considerations leading to the decision to migrate within the former Soviet Union. By conducting a survey and focus group of minorities in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, it specifies hypotheses from the theoretical literature on migration centred on political/national and economic factors and their interaction, and then tests them in the field. The results indicate that economic factors were of primary importance i…
What Really Happened in Kyrgyzstan
This article is an analysis of the causes of Kyrgyzstan's "Tulip Revolution" of March 2005, and its implications for post-revolutionary politics. The mass mobilization was the result of community support for local elites after disputed parliamentary elections. The government was overthrown when an improvised alliance of opposition leaders and business elites unified uncoordinated protests around the country. Unlike Georgia and Ukraine's revolutio…
Allies or Agitators? How Partisan Identity Shapes Public Opinion about Violent or Nonviolent Protests
In recent years, scholars have argued that protests that employ nonviolent tactics attract greater support and are therefore more likely to succeed than those that use violence. We argue that how protest tactics are perceived is not a purely objective determination, but can be influenced in part by observer characteristics – in particular, by partisan identity. We conducted a survey experiment on two independent samples through the MTurk platform…
Is Belief in Conspiracy Theories Pathological? A Survey Experiment on the Cognitive Roots of Extreme Suspicion
What are the origins of belief in conspiracy theories? The dominant approach to studying conspiracy theories links belief to social stresses or personality type, and does not take into account the situational and fluctuating nature of attitudes. In this study, a survey experiment, subjects are presented with a mock news article designed to induce conspiracy belief. Subjects are randomly assigned three manipulations hypothesized to heighten conspi…
The Color of Money
What accounts for the “colored revolutions” of the former Soviet Union? Analysis of postcommunist political economies reveals that states that underwent reform saw the emergence of a new capitalist class whose interests sometimes put them at odds with the regime. Following fraudulent elections, business elites played an active role in financing mobilization and signaling mass discontent, which undermined regime support and hastened regime change.…
Informal Politics and the State
Many theories of the state are implicitly premised on modernization theory—a linear transition from agrarian to industrial society and increasing centralization and extractive capacity of the state, while preexisting societal networks are eradicated or gradually absorbed into the political system. As a society becomes wealthier and more mobile, particularist allegiances are broadened to encompass the whole polity and rulers increas ingly govern t…
Networks, localism and mobilization in Aksy, Kyrgyzstan
Oil in the family
This article argues that Azerbaijan did not display a backlash against the 'colour revolutions' in the post-Soviet space because the primary threat to the regime came from within, and not from below. Thanks to the overlap of power and property in Azerbaijan, the ruling elite's revenues from oil resources, and the failure of international actors to support the opposition, civil society did not pose a major challenge to the regime's dominance durin…
Weighing the political and economic motivations for migration in post-soviet Space
This article investigates the micro-level considerations leading to the decision to migrate within the former Soviet Union. By conducting a survey and focus group of minorities in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, it specifies hypotheses from the theoretical literature on migration centred on political/national and economic factors and their interaction, and then tests them in the field. The results indicate that economic factors were of primary importance i…
The Origins of Social Capital
This article investigates the determinants of social capital by analyzing an original survey of post-Soviet Central Asia. It tests hypotheses derived from two related questions: whether networks, norms, and trust are empirically related and the extent to which four factors—culture, regime type, perceptions of government responsiveness, and development interventions—predict levels of social capital. The results show that trust and norms diverge fr…
Studying states and regimes in Central Asia
This article surveys research on regimes and states in Central Asia and assesses its contribution to Political Science, specifically the subfield of comparative politics. It discusses three areas in which research on the region has been influenced by and, in turn, fruitfully shaped the comparative political analysis of state and regime: a turn from macro- to micro-level topics; innovations in research design; and the embrace of interdisciplinarit…
Between Russia and a Hard Place
This essay asks how Central Asian states have responded to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and salvos against the West, as a means to assess how Russia and the Central Asian states understand their national interests and exercise state power. It argues that the post-Soviet region shares a cynical and geopolitically driven view of the exercise of global power. Yet Russia has sometimes deployed its resources to advance short-term ideological objec…
Paranoia with a purpose
This article considers the political uses of conspiracy theories (CTs). It is widely accepted that post-Soviet citizens are prone to believe CTs, but there has been little research about the conditions under which politicians endorse conspiracy narratives and why those narratives sometimes become hegemonic. I argue that in times of high uncertainty, CTs have properties that are useful in providing political elites with a focal point for coordinat…
Historical narratives and post-conflict reconciliation
How malleable are the attitudes of people in a post-conflict society toward their former adversaries? I conduct a laboratory experiment in Azerbaijan, which fought a war against its neighbor Armenia in the 1990s, to investigate whether reconsideration of the roots of the conflict can influence interethnic attitudes. Subjects are assigned differing interpretations of the conflict and asked to think about or discuss their reactions. The results ind…
Dilemmas of Distrust
Conspiracy theories are playing an increasingly prominent role worldwide in both political rhetoric and popular belief. Previous research has emphasized the individual-level factors behind conspiracy belief but paid less attention to the role of elite framing, while focusing mostly on domestic political contexts. This study assesses the relative weight of official conspiracy claims and motivated biases in producing conspiracy beliefs, in two coun…
Why Democracy Fuels Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy theories are an increasingly popular form of political rhetoric around the globe. The use of conspiracy theories by public officials stems from long-term factors such as distrust, inequality, and political polarization, and is facilitated by one of the preconditions for democracy: competition. This essay explains why conspiracy theories are abundant in the politics of democracies and autocracies alike. It looks at the effects of conspi…
Solidarity through Cynicism? The Influence of Russian Conspiracy Narratives Abroad
As conspiracy theories have become a popular form of political discourse worldwide, states have promoted conspiratorial ideas to advance their foreign policy goals. Yet, despite recent attention to the spread of propaganda abroad, scholars have not addressed whether and how conspiracy theories spread across borders. This study assesses this question in the post-Soviet region, by examining the relationship between exposure to Russian state propaga…
Reinterpreting the enemy
Contesting Authority to Adjudicate Misinformation
In recent years, analysts have raised concerns about the threat misinformation poses to democracy, yet efforts to counter misinformation have been met with charges of bias and censorship, predominantly from the political right. This article asks who sets the terms of debate over misinformation: what it is, how much there is, whether it is a problem, and what to do about it. It frames the past decade’s controversies around misinformation as an imp…
Informal Politics
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Look Who's Talking! Islamic Discourse in the Chechen Wars
In any contemporary conflict, the war of ideas may be just as important as the war on the battlefield. Throughout history, propaganda has been used as a tool of psychological warfare. The prevalence of technology makes the mass media an ever more vital tool in spreading one's message, both to combatants and throughout the world. The case of the Chechen wars demonstrates the importance both sides placed on publicity in the course of fighting. In a…
Working with the warlords
This article asks what type of ethno-federal system would best suit a post-Taliban Afghanistan. It surveys Nigeria and India to extract lessons for Afghanistan in terms of geographic divisions, representation and rules. It argues that aspects of both systems can be used, such as creating cross-cutting cleavages, granting large ethnic groups majority status in several regions, and generating incentives for interethnic cooperation at the national l…
Networks, localism and mobilization in Aksy, Kyrgyzstan
Weighing the political and economic motivations for migration in post-soviet Space
This article investigates the micro-level considerations leading to the decision to migrate within the former Soviet Union. By conducting a survey and focus group of minorities in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, it specifies hypotheses from the theoretical literature on migration centred on political/national and economic factors and their interaction, and then tests them in the field. The results indicate that economic factors were of primary importance i…
Look Who's Talking! Islamic Discourse in the Chechen Wars
In any contemporary conflict, the war of ideas may be just as important as the war on the battlefield. Throughout history, propaganda has been used as a tool of psychological warfare. The prevalence of technology makes the mass media an ever more vital tool in spreading one's message, both to combatants and throughout the world. The case of the Chechen wars demonstrates the importance both sides placed on publicity in the course of fighting. In a…
What Really Happened in Kyrgyzstan
This article is an analysis of the causes of Kyrgyzstan's "Tulip Revolution" of March 2005, and its implications for post-revolutionary politics. The mass mobilization was the result of community support for local elites after disputed parliamentary elections. The government was overthrown when an improvised alliance of opposition leaders and business elites unified uncoordinated protests around the country. Unlike Georgia and Ukraine's revolutio…
Informal Politics
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Origins of Social Capital
This article investigates the determinants of social capital by analyzing an original survey of post-Soviet Central Asia. It tests hypotheses derived from two related questions: whether networks, norms, and trust are empirically related and the extent to which four factors—culture, regime type, perceptions of government responsiveness, and development interventions—predict levels of social capital. The results show that trust and norms diverge fr…
The Color of Money
What accounts for the “colored revolutions” of the former Soviet Union? Analysis of postcommunist political economies reveals that states that underwent reform saw the emergence of a new capitalist class whose interests sometimes put them at odds with the regime. Following fraudulent elections, business elites played an active role in financing mobilization and signaling mass discontent, which undermined regime support and hastened regime change.…
Informal Politics and the State
Many theories of the state are implicitly premised on modernization theory—a linear transition from agrarian to industrial society and increasing centralization and extractive capacity of the state, while preexisting societal networks are eradicated or gradually absorbed into the political system. As a society becomes wealthier and more mobile, particularist allegiances are broadened to encompass the whole polity and rulers increas ingly govern t…
Oil in the family
This article argues that Azerbaijan did not display a backlash against the 'colour revolutions' in the post-Soviet space because the primary threat to the regime came from within, and not from below. Thanks to the overlap of power and property in Azerbaijan, the ruling elite's revenues from oil resources, and the failure of international actors to support the opposition, civil society did not pose a major challenge to the regime's dominance durin…
Author–critic forum
Weapons of the wealthy: predatory regimes and elite-led protests in Central Asia, by Scott Radnitz, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 2010, 231pp., US$49.95 (hardback), US$24.95 (paperbac
Historical narratives and post-conflict reconciliation
How malleable are the attitudes of people in a post-conflict society toward their former adversaries? I conduct a laboratory experiment in Azerbaijan, which fought a war against its neighbor Armenia in the 1990s, to investigate whether reconsideration of the roots of the conflict can influence interethnic attitudes. Subjects are assigned differing interpretations of the conflict and asked to think about or discuss their reactions. The results ind…
Paranoia with a purpose
This article considers the political uses of conspiracy theories (CTs). It is widely accepted that post-Soviet citizens are prone to believe CTs, but there has been little research about the conditions under which politicians endorse conspiracy narratives and why those narratives sometimes become hegemonic. I argue that in times of high uncertainty, CTs have properties that are useful in providing political elites with a focal point for coordinat…
Ethnic Cues and Redistributive Preferences in Post-Soviet Georgia
A Protest Letter in Support of the Central European University
Is Belief in Conspiracy Theories Pathological? A Survey Experiment on the Cognitive Roots of Extreme Suspicion
What are the origins of belief in conspiracy theories? The dominant approach to studying conspiracy theories links belief to social stresses or personality type, and does not take into account the situational and fluctuating nature of attitudes. In this study, a survey experiment, subjects are presented with a mock news article designed to induce conspiracy belief. Subjects are randomly assigned three manipulations hypothesized to heighten conspi…
Between Russia and a Hard Place
This essay asks how Central Asian states have responded to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and salvos against the West, as a means to assess how Russia and the Central Asian states understand their national interests and exercise state power. It argues that the post-Soviet region shares a cynical and geopolitically driven view of the exercise of global power. Yet Russia has sometimes deployed its resources to advance short-term ideological objec…
Crashes and Clashes
The Euromaidan and the ensuing war in Ukraine constituted signal geopolitical events, but their ramifications at the micro-level have been less explored. The articles by Toal et al. and Hale et al
Reinterpreting the enemy
Revealing Schemes
Conspiracy theories have come to play an increasingly prominent role in political systems around the world. In Revealing Schemes, Scott Radnitz moves beyond psychological explanations for why people believe conspiracy theories to explore the politics surrounding them, placing two questions at the center of his account: What leads regimes to promote conspiracy claims? And what effects do those claims have on politics and society? Focusing on the f…
Studying states and regimes in Central Asia
This article surveys research on regimes and states in Central Asia and assesses its contribution to Political Science, specifically the subfield of comparative politics. It discusses three areas in which research on the region has been influenced by and, in turn, fruitfully shaped the comparative political analysis of state and regime: a turn from macro- to micro-level topics; innovations in research design; and the embrace of interdisciplinarit…
Perceived threats and the trade-off between security and human rights
It is well established that exposure to threats causes citizens to prioritize security considerations and accept restrictions on civil liberties. Yet most studies on which these findings are based come from longstanding democracies and do not distinguish among types of threat. This article argues that the effects of internal and external threats are conditional on regime type. It tests the argument via an experiment embedded in an original survey…
Allies or Agitators? How Partisan Identity Shapes Public Opinion about Violent or Nonviolent Protests
In recent years, scholars have argued that protests that employ nonviolent tactics attract greater support and are therefore more likely to succeed than those that use violence. We argue that how protest tactics are perceived is not a purely objective determination, but can be influenced in part by observer characteristics – in particular, by partisan identity. We conducted a survey experiment on two independent samples through the MTurk platform…
Dilemmas of Distrust
Conspiracy theories are playing an increasingly prominent role worldwide in both political rhetoric and popular belief. Previous research has emphasized the individual-level factors behind conspiracy belief but paid less attention to the role of elite framing, while focusing mostly on domestic political contexts. This study assesses the relative weight of official conspiracy claims and motivated biases in producing conspiracy beliefs, in two coun…
Why Democracy Fuels Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy theories are an increasingly popular form of political rhetoric around the globe. The use of conspiracy theories by public officials stems from long-term factors such as distrust, inequality, and political polarization, and is facilitated by one of the preconditions for democracy: competition. This essay explains why conspiracy theories are abundant in the politics of democracies and autocracies alike. It looks at the effects of conspi…
Political science (28 obras) · Politics (22 obras) · Law (21 obras) · Sociology (19 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Political economy (15 obras) · Economics (12 obras) · Psychology (12 obras) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (9 obras) · Social Psychology (9 obras)