Lina Skoglund

I'm a fifth year PhD candidate in comparative politics at Princeton. My research examines state-building, with a particular focus on local and regional resistance to political centralization. I exploit quasi-natural experiments to identify the local determinants of variations in active and passive resistance to the state. My work explores the roots of resistance to state authority by emphasizing how local factors influence perceptions of the legitimacy of the central state, impact the ability to escape repression, and shape the capacity of actors to coordinate against the state. I am advised by Carles Boix, Rafaela Dancygier, Andreas Wiedemann and Saad Gulzar.
Prior to Princeton, I received a BA and a Master’s degree in Economics and Public Policy (Summa Cum Laude) from Sciences Po Paris. I also spent time at the University of Tokyo and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. I speak French and Swedish.

[Twitter] [CV]

Working Papers & Work in Progress

Voices in the wilderness? The spatial distribution of the costs of environmental policy and anti-state mobilization [Abstract]

This paper exploits a quasi-natural experiment based on temporal variations in the geographic spread of bears and wolves in France since the 1990s as the result of wildlife policies to study how exposure to the negative externalities of state decisions affect local politics. First, I examine how exposure to costs of state decisions that are unevenly geographically distributed affect turnout in national elections at the municipal level. Then, my goal is to compare the intensity and nature of backlash against the state depending on the spatial spread of the costs. Due to specie-specific traits, the costs incurred by the return of wolves are distributed across locations dispersed throughout Eastern France whereas locations exposed to bear reintroductions are clustered within a small mountainous area. Wildlife policy allows me to study the role of space on mobilization by keeping costs, actors, context and the type of grievance constant. My independent variable of interest - the spatial distribution of locations affeected by a policy- is the only one to vary. Preliminary results suggest that, overall, exposure to costs is associated with an increase in turnout in national elections. Second, I present evidence that clustered costs lead to more intense and violent forms of mobilization than dispersed costs.
The Revolution Will Not Be Telegraphed [Abstract]

How do communication technologies shape the diffusion of social unrest in the context of political uncertainty? Most of the scholarship examining the effect of communication technology on mobilization focuses on the capacity of challengers to solve the coordination problem. In this paper, I show that technology also affects the exercise of repression. I exploit quasi-random variations in connections between local agents and Paris during Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's coup in December 1851. Most agents communicated with Paris by the Chappe optical telegraph, a technology that could not function when visibility was low (fog, rain, snow, nightime). I posit that breakdowns in communications prevented the rapid allocation of scarce repressive resources and increased the uncertainty of local agents regarding the success of the coup. I geocode the full record of the repression of the anti-coup uprising (25 000 individual court files) and digitize all time-stamped telegraphic communications between local agents and coup plotters in Paris during the coup (1300 dispatches). I show that weaker connections with Paris resulted in higher levels of mobilization at the canton level.
Getting on like a house on fire: understanding the determinants of the unlikely alliance of local landed elites and the rural poor against the central state in XIXth century France [Abstract]

In this paper, I show that the type of resistance to state intervention depends on the economic interests of local elites. I examine the case of the plantation of the Forest of the Landes de Gascogne decided in 1857 by the French government to enhance land productivity in a large swamp in the south-west of France where property rights were never clearly delineated after the French Revolution. The policy provoked a sudden change in the type of terrain and a radical shift in the nature of property regimes. The paper shows that that where local elites appropriated the commons, the rural poor and landowners entered a bargain to mitigate the economic consequences of privatization and coordinated against state intervention through latent noncompliance. Where land was bought by outsider capitalists, elites did not act as mediators and sought state repression to enforce their property rights. There, lower classes actively resisted the policy through arson attacks against the plantations, illegally freeing grazing land. I collected data on the structure of land ownership and the prevalence of forest fires at the municipal level for the second half of the nineteenth century at departmental archives in France.