ARTICLES

Choi, D. and Shen-Bayh, F. 2025. How Oppositions Turn Authoritarian. Journal of Democracy.

Ríos-Figueora, J. and Shen-Bayh, F. 2025. Courts in the Global South. Annual Review of Political Science.

Kitagawa, R., and Shen-Bayh, F. 2024. Measuring Political Narratives in African News Media: A Word Embeddings Approach. The Journal of Politics.

Choi, D., Harris, J. A., and Shen-Bayh, F. 2022. Ethnic Bias in Judicial Decision-Making: Evidence from Criminal Appeals in Kenya. American Political Science Review.

• Fiona McGillivray Best Paper Award (2020) from the Political Economy section of the American Political Science Association (APSA)

Shen-Bayh, F. 2018. Strategies of Repression: Judicial and Extrajudicial Methods of Autocratic Survival. World Politics.

• Best Article Award (2019) from Democracy and Autocracy, an organized section of APSA

BOOK CHAPTERS

Shen-Bayh, Fiona, Autocratic Legalism, in Anne Wolf (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Authoritarian Politics (online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Jan. 2024).

Gloppen, S., Wang, V., Kanyongolo, E. and Shen-Bayh, F. 2022. “Malawi: Democratic Fits and Starts” In Democratic Backsliding in Africa? Autocratization, Resilience, and Contention, eds. L. Arriola, L. Rakner, and N. van de Walle, Oxford University Press

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Unpacking Judicial Bias in Africa. Democracy in Africa Blog

Does ethnicity influence judicial decisions in Kenya? London School of Economics Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa

Shen-Bayh, F. 2022. Reimagining the judiciary: Women’s representation on high courts worldwide. By Escobar-Lemmon, Maria C., Hoekstra, Valerie J., Kang, Alice J., and Kittilson, Miki Caul, New York: Oxford University Press. 2021. pp. 201. $67.43 (cloth). Governance. https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12748

Shen-Bayh, F. 2021. Regime threats and state solutions: Bureaucratic loyalty and embeddedness in Kenya, Hassan, Mai, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2020. 308 pp. $99.99 (cloth). Governance. https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12624

Arriola, L., Dow, D., and Shen-Bayh, F. 2017. “Regional Responses to Human Rights Violations.” Featured in Amnesty International Report: Africa: Counting Gains, Filling Gaps: Strengthening African Union’s Response to Human Rights Violations Committed in Conflict Situations

Combating Corruption in African Countries: Foreign Creditors and Domestic Institutions (with Leonardo Arriola)
Featured in The Calculus of Corruption Reform in Autocratic Regimes. Democracy & Autocracy. Vol. 20(1), 43-48.

Although many governments have adopted measures to investigate and prosecute malfeasance by public officials, there remains considerable cross-national variation in institutional responses to high-level corruption. Under what conditions have governments established anti-corruption agencies? What impact have such agencies had on the prevalence of corruption? In addressing such questions, we argue that the origin of anti-corruption agencies ultimately undermined their purpose in African countries. Because governments established agencies to address the concerns of foreign creditors, principally multilateral institutions and Western donors, these agencies have been largely detached from domestic constituencies that might have otherwise demanded results. Moreover, since anti-corruption agencies are tangential to the primary interests of multilateral institutions, they have had little incentive to consistently ensure that agencies fulfill their mandates in practice. We assess these claims by analyzing original cross-national time-series data. Our findings show that anti-corruption agencies were established more rapidly in countries with greater debt service obligations, regardless of domestic political or economic conditions. We further show that anti-corruption agencies have had a negative effect on corruption: perceived levels have grown faster in countries that established agencies early on to satisfy foreign creditors.