Authoritarian leaders maintain their grip on power primarily through preventive repression, routinely exercised by specialized security agencies with the aim of preventing any opponents from organizing and threatening their power. We develop a formal model to analyze the moral hazard problems inherent in the principal-agent relationship between rulers and their security agents in charge of preventive repression. The model distinguishes two types of moral hazard: “politics,” through which the security agents can exert political influence to increase their payoff by decreasing the ruler’s rents from power, and “corruption,” through which the agents can increase their payoff by engaging in rent-seeking activities that do not decrease the ruler’s rents from power. The surprising conclusion is that both the ruler and the security agent are better off when the only moral hazard problem available is politics rather than when the agent can choose between politics and corruption. We also show that the equilibrium probability of ruler’s survival in power is higher when politics is the only moral hazard available to the agent. These findings lead to our central conclusion that opportunities for corruption undermine authoritarian rule by distorting the incentives of the security agencies tasked with preventing potential threats to an authoritarian ruler’s grip on power.

Leveraging novel experimental designs and 2,160 months of Constituency Development Fund (CDF) spending by legislators in Ghana, I examine whether and how fairer elections promote democratic responsiveness. The results show that incumbents elected from constituencies that were randomly assigned to intensive election-day monitoring during Ghana’s 2012 election spent 19 percentage points more of their CDFs during their terms in office compared with those elected from constituencies with fewer monitors. Legislators from all types of constituencies are equally present in parliament, suggesting that high levels of monitoring do not cause politicians to substitute constituency service for parliamentary work. Tests of causal mechanisms provide suggestive evidence that fairer elections motivate high performance through incumbents’ expectations of electoral sanction and not the selection of better candidates. The article provides causal evidence of the impact of election integrity on democratic accountability.

We examine the effect of electoral institutions on two important features of representation that are often studied separately: policy responsiveness and the quality of legislators. Theoretically, we show that while a proportional electoral system is better than a majoritarian one at representing popular preferences in some contexts, this advantage can come at the price of undermining the selection of good politicians. To empirically assess the relevance of this trade-off, we analyze an unusually controlled electoral reform in Switzerland early in the twentieth century. To account for endogeneity, we exploit variation in the intensive margin of the reform, which introduced proportional representation, based on administrative constraints and data on voter preferences. A difference-in-difference analysis finds that higher reform intensity increases the policy congruence between legislators and the electorate and reduces legislative effort. Contemporary evidence from the European Parliament supports this conclusion.

Since most social science research relies on multiple data sources, merging data sets is an essential part of researchers’ workflow. Unfortunately, a unique identifier that unambiguously links records is often unavailable, and data may contain missing and inaccurate information. These problems are severe especially when merging large-scale administrative records. We develop a fast and scalable algorithm to implement a canonical model of probabilistic record linkage that has many advantages over deterministic methods frequently used by social scientists. The proposed methodology efficiently handles millions of observations while accounting for missing data and measurement error, incorporating auxiliary information, and adjusting for uncertainty about merging in post-merge analyses. We conduct comprehensive simulation studies to evaluate the performance of our algorithm in realistic scenarios. We also apply our methodology to merging campaign contribution records, survey data, and nationwide voter files. An open-source software package is available for implementing the proposed methodology.

The level of journalistic resources dedicated to coverage of local politics is in a long-term decline in the US news media, with readership shifting to national outlets. We investigate whether this trend is demand- or supply-driven, exploiting a recent wave of local television station acquisitions by a conglomerate owner. Using extensive data on local news programming and viewership, we find that the ownership change led to (1) substantial increases in coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics, (2) a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage, and (3) a small decrease in viewership, all relative to the changes at other news programs airing in the same media markets. These results suggest a substantial supply-side role in the trends toward nationalization and polarization of politics news, with negative implications for accountability of local elected officials and mass polarization.

Political competition is widely recognized as a mediator of public goods provision through its salutary effect on incumbents’ electoral incentives. We argue that political competition additionally mediates public goods provision by reducing the efficiency of legislative bargaining. These countervailing forces may produce a net negative effect in places with weak parties and low transparency—typical of many young democracies. We provide evidence of a robust negative relationship between political competition and local public goods using panel data from Mali. Tests of mechanisms corroborate our interpretation of this relationship as evidence of legislative bargaining inefficiencies. To explore the generalizability of these findings, we analyze cross-country panel data and show that political competition leads to better (worse) public goods provision under high (low) levels of party system institutionalization. The paper sheds light on why political competition is only selectively beneficial, and underscores the importance of considering both the electoral and legislative arenas.

Recent work on counter-insurgency, client states, foreign aid, and proxy wars uses a principal–agent framework to study the principal’s ability to induce an agent to exert effort on the principal’s behalf. This work broadly emphasizes the moral hazard problem and the actors’ limited commitment power. The latter is usually addressed through the logic of repeated games in which reneging on an agreement triggers future punishment. This study analyzes a related incentive problem that undermines the principal’s ability to induce an agent to exert effort on its behalf. The repeated-game’s enforcement mechanism tends to break down if the principal is trying to get the agent to resolve a problem that, if resolved, (i) creates an ongoing problem for the agent and (ii) simultaneously significantly reduces the agent’s ability to impose future costs on the principal. The principal cannot induce the agent to exert much effort in these circumstances, and the problem persists.

This paper investigates the opportunities for non-democratic regimes to rely on fraud by documenting the alteration of vote tallies during the 1988 presidential election in Mexico. In particular, I study how the alteration of vote returns came after an electoral reform that centralized the vote-counting process. Using an original image database of the vote-tally sheets for that election and applying Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to analyze the sheets, I find evidence of blatant alterations in about a third of the tallies in the country. This empirical analysis shows that altered tallies were more prevalent in polling stations where the opposition was not present and in states controlled by governors with grassroots experience of managing the electoral operation. This research has implications for understanding the ways in which autocrats control elections as well as for introducing a new methodology to audit the integrity of vote tallies.

It is well documented that voter turnout is lower among persons who grow up in families from a low socioeconomic status compared with persons from high-status families. This paper examines whether reforms in education can help reduce this gap. We establish causality by exploiting a pilot scheme preceding a large reform of Swedish upper secondary education in the early 1990s, which gave rise to exogenous variation in educational attainment between individuals living in different municipalities or born in different years. Similar to recent studies employing credible identification strategies, we fail to find a statistically significant average effect of education on political participation. We move past previous studies, however, and show that the reform nevertheless contributed to narrowing the voting gap between individuals of different social backgrounds by raising turnout among those from low socioeconomic status households. The results thus square well with other recent studies arguing that education is particularly important for uplifting politically marginalized groups.

Despite strong theoretical reasons to expect that democratization equalizes income distributions, existing empirical studies do not find a statistically significant effect of democratization on measures of income inequality. This paper starts from the simple observation that autocracies are heterogeneous and govern quite extreme distributional outcomes (also egalitarian). Democratization may drive extreme income distributions to a “middle ground.” We thus examine the extent to which initial inequality levels determine the path of distributional dynamics following democratization. Using fixed-effects and instrumental variable regressions, we demonstrate that egalitarian autocracies become more unequal following democratization, whereas democratization has an equalizing effect in highly unequal autocracies. The effect appears to be driven by changes in gross (market) inequality, suggesting that democratization has led, on average, to redistribution of market opportunities, rather than to direct fiscal redistribution. We then investigate which kinds of (heterogeneous) reforms are at work following democratizations that may rationalize our findings.

In conflict-prone societies, the fear of expropriation that accompanies a regime change reduces capital investment. These reductions in investments, in turn, harm the economy, amplifying the likelihood of regime change. This article studies the implications of these feedback channels on the interactions between globalization, capital control, state repression, and regime change. I show that processes that facilitate capital movements (e.g., globalization, economic modernization, and technologies that reduce transportation costs) amplify the likelihood of regime change in conflict-prone societies and strengthen the elite’s demand for a strong coercive state. In particular, to limit their collective action problem and manage the political risk of regime change, capitalists support a state that imposes capital control. We identify two conflicting forces, the Boix Effect and the Marx Effect, which determine when capital control and state repression become complements (Nazi Germany) or substitutes (Latin American military regimes) in right-wing regimes.

How do parties protect themselves from electoral manipulation? To answer this question, we study the drivers of polling station party representatives’ presence and their impact on electoral outcomes in an environment where electoral irregularities are common. Using election data from the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, we find a robust positive correlation between the presence of party representatives and that party’s vote share. The evidence suggests that this correlation can be attributed to party representatives influencing the electoral results. We also formulate a game theoretic model of the levels of representation chosen by parties in a given precinct and structurally estimate its parameters. We find that parties send their representatives where they expect their opponents to send their own. The finding suggests representatives play a primarily protective role, even when they are often involved in irregularities themselves.

We leverage innovative spatial modeling techniques and data on the precise geo-locations of more than 32,000 Constituency Development Fund (CDF) projects in Kenya to test whether Members of Parliament (MPs) reward their supporters. We find only weak evidence that MPs channel projects disproportionately to areas inhabited by their political allies, once we control for other factors that affect where projects are placed, such as population density, poverty rates, ethnic demographics, and distance to paved roads. Notwithstanding this result, we find evidence for cross-constituency variation in political targeting, driven in large part by the spatial segregation of the MP’s supporters and opponents. Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom about the centrality of clientelistic transfers in Africa and underscore how local conditions generate particular incentives and opportunities for the strategic allocation of political goods. We also highlight the benefits and challenges of analyzing allocations at the project level rather than aggregated to the administrative unit.

Violent protests are dramatic political events, yet we know little about the effect of these events on political behavior. While scholars typically treat violent protests as deliberate acts undertaken in pursuit of specific goals, due to a lack of appropriate data and difficulty in causal identification, there is scant evidence of whether riots can actually increase support for these goals. Using geocoded data, we analyze measures of policy support before and after the 1992 Los Angeles riot—one of the most high-profile events of political violence in recent American history—that occurred just prior to an election. Contrary to some expectations from the academic literature and the popular press, we find that the riot caused a marked liberal shift in policy support at the polls. Investigating the sources of this shift, we find that it was likely the result of increased mobilization of both African American and white voters. Remarkably, this mobilization endures over a decade later.

I study the effect of taste-based discrimination on the assimilation decisions of immigrant minorities. Do discriminated minority groups increase their assimilation efforts in order to avoid discrimination and public harassment or do they become alienated and retreat in their own communities? I exploit an exogenous shock to native attitudes, anti-Germanism in the United States during World War I, to empirically identify the reactions of German immigrants to increased native hostility. I use two measures of assimilation efforts: naming patterns and petitions for naturalization. In the face of increased discrimination, Germans increase their assimilation investments by Americanizing their own and their children’s names and filing more petitions for US citizenship. These responses are stronger in states that registered higher levels of anti-German hostility, as measured by voting patterns and incidents of violence against Germans.

Few, if any, elected representatives are capable of unilaterally implementing their platforms. Rather, they choose between options generated by other actors and/or external events. We present a theory of voters’ preferences over representatives who will cast votes on their behalf, and show that in this setting voters’ preferences over candidates’ platforms will not look like voters’ preferences over policies. We demonstrate that these induced preferences for representation tend to favor more extreme representatives, and we present two models of electoral competition in which induced preferences over representatives lead to elite polarization.

Do ethnic riots affect prosocial behavior? A common view among scholars of ethnic violence is that riots increase cooperation within the warring groups, while cooperation across groups is reduced. We revisit this hypothesis by studying the aftermath of the 2010 Osh riot in Kyrgyzstan, which saw Kyrgyz from outside the city kill over 400 Uzbeks. We implement a representative survey, which includes unobtrusive experimental measures of prosocial behavior. Our causal identification strategy exploits variation in the distance of neighborhoods to armored military vehicles, which were instrumental in orchestrating the riot. We find that victimized neighborhoods show substantially lower levels of prosocial behavior. Importantly, we demonstrate that the reduction is similarly stark both within and across groups. Using qualitative interviews, we parse out two mechanisms that help explain the surprising reduction in ingroup prosociality: Victimized Uzbeks felt abandoned by their coethnics, and variation in victimization created a feeling of suspicion.

Lobbying is a potential source of corruption but is also a valuable source of information for policy-makers. We analyze a game-theoretic model that shows how the threat of corruption affects the incentives of noncorrupt politicians to enlist the help of lobbyists to make more informed decisions. Politicians face a dilemma because voters cannot always tell whether a politician allows access to lobbyists to solicit corruption or to seek information. Thus, a noncorrupt politician may deny access to lobbyists to signal that she is noncorrupt even though doing so impedes her ability to make good policy. This signaling may decrease the welfare of the voters depending on the value of the lost policy information relative to the value of screening out corrupt politicians.

How does an increase in cultural diversity affect state–society interactions? Do institutional differences between heterogeneous and homogeneous communities influence economic activity? I argue that heterogeneity not only impedes informal cooperation but also increases demand for third-party enforcement provided by the state. Over time, the greater willingness of heterogeneous communities to engage with state institutions facilitates the accumulation of state capacity and, in common-interest states, promotes private economic activity. I test this argument using original data on post-WWII population transfers in Poland. I find that homogeneous migrant communities were initially more successful in providing local public goods through informal enforcement, while heterogeneous migrant communities relied on the state for the provision of public goods. Economically similar during state socialism, heterogeneous communities collected higher tax revenues and registered higher incomes and entrepreneurship rates following the transition to the market. These findings challenge the predominant view of diversity as harmful to economic development.

Many authoritarian regimes use frightening acts of repression to suppress dissent. Theory from psychology suggests that emotions should affect how citizens perceive and process information about repression risk and ultimately whether or not they dissent. I test the effects of emotions on dissent in autocracy by running a lab-in-the-field experiment with 671 opposition supporters in Zimbabwe that randomly assigns some participants to an exercise that induces a mild state of fear, whereas others complete a neutral placebo. The fear treatment significantly reduces hypothetical and behavioral measures of dissent by substantively large amounts. It also increases pessimism about parameters that enter into the dissent decision as well as risk aversion. These results show that emotions interact in important ways with strategic considerations. Fear may be a powerful component of how unpopular autocrats exclude large portions of their populations from mobilizing for regime change.