Bethany Lacina

Associate Professor of Political Science University of Rochester

  • Rochester NY

Bethany Lacina is an expert in civil and ethnic conflict.

Contact

University of Rochester

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Areas of Expertise

Migration
International Relations
Territorial Autonomy
Civil Conflict
Ethnic Conflict
Comparative Politics
Ethnic Politics

Social

Biography

Bethany Lacina researches international relations, comparative politics, migration, ethnic politics, and civil conflict. Current research examines how governments manage threats to internal security by studying the history of separatist and language conflicts in India. She is also writing papers on migration and civil violence and cross-national correlates of civil war.

She is co-author of a dataset on battle deaths in state-based armed conflicts, housed at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo.

Education

Stanford University

Ph.D

Political Science

2011

Yale University

B.A

Ethics, Politics, and Economics

2002

Affiliations

  • PRIO Battle Deaths Data

Selected Media Appearances

Is ‘Wakanda Forever’ too ‘woke’ for Marvel’s own good? That’s what some critics argue. Let’s look at the numbers.

Washington Post  online

2022-11-11

Analysis by Bethany Lacina, Nicholas Carnes and Lilly J. Goren - As one of us (Bethany Lacina) has shown, the MCU has long been more popular among Americans of color than White Americans — although MCU films are more popular than similar blockbusters with every racial demographic group.

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Spurred by the Supreme Court, a Nation Divides Along a Red-Blue Axis

New York Times  

2022-07-02

Gun rights laws like the protections for silencers in Texas “are edging back toward the idea of nullification, that states should be able to ignore federal law, an idea that grew directly out of slavery,” said Bethany Lacina, a University of Rochester political scientist who studies federalism in different countries. “But you can imagine a day where there’s a federal ban on abortion, and the governor of California says, ‘Eh, we’re just not going to do that.’ It’s all very double-edged weapons.”

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Analysis | Nearly all NFL head coaches are White. What are the odds?

Washington Post  print

2022-02-10

By Bethany Lacina - It's either a 100 to 1 chance -- or there's a pro-White bias in hiring, my research finds.

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Selected Articles

Fiscal federalism at work? Central responses to internal migration in India

World Development

Rikhil R Bhavnani, Bethany Lacina

2017

Internal migration is thought to have substantial benefits for migrants and for the development of migrant-sending and migrant-receiving areas. In order to facilitate such migration, central governments may need to use fiscal transfers to ensure services to migrants, address infrastructure shortfalls, and ameliorate labor market displacement of natives. In fact, an extensive, mostly normative “fiscal federalism” literature has argued that central governments ought to use transfers to reduce interjurisdictional externalities such as those due to population displacements. We extend this literature empirically by examining the degree to which exogenous, longterm migration prompts the redirection of central fiscal resources in India. Following the literature on distributive politics, we argue that transfers in decentralized systems addressing the costs of population movements are influenced by partisan politics. Using monsoon shocks to migration, we show that increases in migration are met with greater central transfers but that these flows are at least 50% greater if the state-level executive is in the Prime Minister’s political party. Consistent with the theory, the influence of politics is greatest on parts of the budget subject to greater executive control. This politicization may explain why Indian states maintain barriers to internal migration despite the development costs of doing so.

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Shared Territory, Regime Alignment, and Forced Displacement

Annual conference of the International Studies Association

Bethany Lacina, Karen Albert, Emily VanMeter

2017

An ethnic group is more likely to be forcibly displaced by the government when it shares territory with regime supporters. That pattern reflects the ideational significance of shared territory and a simple logic of appropriation—governments purge people with resources the regime’s constituents can easily access. We investigate forced migration using panel data on international refugee flows and limited cross-sectional data on ethnically-targeted displacement. We find that during periods in which an ethnic group’s neighbors are aligned with the regime, refugee flows from that group increase by up to 40%.

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Who opposes ethnic territorial autonomy?

Social Science Research Network

Bethany Lacina

2016

Ethnoterritorial autonomy is typically studied through outcomes like decentralization or war. The microfoundations of ethnoterritorial politics, such as position taking by individual central actors, are rarely observed. I use Indian parliamentary records to code legislators’ stances on dozens of proposals for ethnic self-rule. I consider three explanations of government opposition to autonomy—the economic value of territories at stake; central nationalism; and regional ethnic rivalries—alone and interacted with pro-autonomy violence. Regional ethnic rivalries play the clearest role; the core opposition to an autonomy demand was representatives of other ethnic groups in the same area. Legislators were also more averse to autonomy for religious minority areas. Interestingly, this pattern held even among MP’s whose own constituency was not majority Hindu. Opposition did not increase with the development or natural resources of a proposed autonomous territory. This unique study of legislative behavior suggests new hypotheses about government reactions to ethnoterritorial movements.

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