Brigitte Seim
Biographic Data
| ID | 1187363 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brigitte Seim |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brigitte |
| FAMILY NAME | Seim |
| SIGNATURE | SEIM B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7963-4767 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 130 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Vote buying and local public goods provision
We seek to better understand the demand side of vote buying: the conditions under which voters participate in, eschew, tolerate, or punish the exchange of targeted material benefits for votes. We ask whether voters perceive vote buying as substituting for local public goods provision in office, or whether they think that candidates who buy votes will excel at securing local public goods. Voters who place great value on future public goods may opt…
Experts, coders and crowds
Political scientists increasingly use crowdworkers to produce data, predominantly in the context of coding researcher-curated text or to retrieve simple data from the internet. In this article, we provide a theoretical and empirical basis for understanding when crowdworkers can provide data of sufficient quality to substitute for other types of coders. First, we introduce a typology of data-producing actors – experts, trained coders and crowds – …
Marketing Taxation? Experimental Evidence on Enforcement and Bargaining in Malawian Markets
Understanding how to increase government revenue via taxation is a core puzzle in state development. Taxation is critical for states to fund public goods, and may have positive spillover effects on citizen-state relations. We argue that tax compliance will be higher when governments employ community-level, rather than individual-level, interventions. To test whether it is more effective to focus such interventions on top-down (TD) enforcement or …
V-Dem Codebook v14
Understanding vote buying in Nepali elections
Measuring online political activity
Political engagement is deeply enmeshed with online activity. However, there has been a lack of publicly available cross-country datasets enabling researchers and policymakers to understand how politics and digital space intersect. This paper introduces the Digital Society Project (DSP), which aims to provide systematic, cross-country measurement of political institutions and behavior that manifest online or are affected by online activity. Using…
Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding
During the past decade, analyses drawing on several democracy measures have shown a global trend of democratic retrenchment. While these democracy measures use radically different methodologies, most partially or fully rely on subjective judgments to produce estimates of the level of democracy within states. Such projects continuously grapple with balancing conceptual coverage with the potential for bias (Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Przeworski et a…
What Politicians Do Not Know Can Hurt You
Do well-informed politicians make more effective spending decisions? In experiments with 70% of all elected politicians in Malawi ($ N=460 $), we tested the effects of information on public spending. Specifically, we randomly provided information about school needs, foreign aid, and voting patterns prior to officials making real decisions about the allocation of spending. We show that these information interventions reduced inequalities in spendi…
Varieties of connections, varieties of corruption
Why do some bureaucrats engage in corruption for personal gain, yet others for political gain? We show that these forms of corruption frequently do not coincide and offer an explanation: bureaucrats hired based on political and personal connections have different identities and incentives which compel them to engage in corruption for political and personal gain respectively. List experiments with a unique sample of 6400 bureaucrats in five countr…
Avoiding “Checkbox Inclusion”
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
Drivers of successful common-pool resource management
Assessing Data Quality
Political scientists routinely face the challenge of assessing the quality (validity and reliability) of measures in order to use them in substantive research. While stand-alone assessment tools exist, researchers rarely combine them comprehensively. Further, while a large literature informs dataproducers, dataconsumerslack guidance on how to assess existing measures for use in substantive research. We delineate a three-component practical approa…
V-Dem Codebook v11
V-Dem Dataset v11.1
A Reputation Deficit? The Myths and Reality of Chinese Investment in Zambia
What drives public discontent about Chinese investment on the ground? This study probes the “ground truth” of public reaction in Zambia by documenting both the public perception and the actual impacts of Chinese investments. We find a “reputation deficit” for Chinese investment: Zambians are significantly less likely to support Chinese investment than investment from other countries. Combining results from an original household survey, interview …
V-Dem Codebook V10
Information, accountability and perceptions of public sector programme success
Honor among Chiefs
Traditional, hereditary chiefs are an integral part of the development infrastructure in many African countries. To capture chiefs’ behaviour as agents of development and understand the accountability mechanisms they face, we conduct a field experiment with 200 Malawian village chiefs, documenting how they distribute a valuable development good – iron roofing sheets – as we sequentially add monitoring by donors, subjects, and the state. We find e…
Varieties of Democracy
Varieties of Democracy is the essential user's guide to The Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem), one of the most ambitious data collection efforts in comparative politics. This global research collaboration sparked a dramatic change in how we study the nature, causes, and consequences of democracy. This book is ambitious in scope: more than a reference guide, it raises standards for causal inferences in democratization research and introduces …
How information about foreign aid affects public spending decisions
Why Low Levels of Democracy Promote Corruption and High Levels Diminish It
Theory predicts democracy should reduce corruption. Yet, scholars have found that while corruption is low at high levels of democracy, it is high at modest levels, as well as low when democracy is absent. A weakness of studies that aim to explain this inverted curvilinear relationship is that they do not disaggregate the complex concepts of democracy and corruption. By contrast, this paper disaggregates both. We demonstrate that the curvilinear r…
Corruption and the impact of law enforcement
The article argues that the impact of law enforcement efforts against corruption deserves more scholarly attention. Drawing on a mixed-methods study from Malawi in southern Africa, where a large-scale law enforcement operation has been investigating and prosecuting those involved in a 2013 corruption scandal known as 'Cashgate', the article explores the potential for corruption deterrence from the perspective of government officials in the Malawi…
V-Dem Codebook V9
What makes experts reliable? Expert reliability and the estimation of latent traits
Experts code latent quantities for many influential political science datasets. Although scholars are aware of the importance of accounting for variation in expert reliability when aggregating such data, they have not systematically explored either the factors affecting expert reliability or the degree to which these factors influence estimates of latent concepts. Here we provide a template for examining potential correlates of expert reliability…
Coethnicity and Corruption
Corruption is widespread in many developing countries, though public officials’ discretion in the solicitation of bribes may expose some citizens to more corruption than others. We derive expectations about how shared ethnicity between government officials and citizens should influence the likelihood of bribe solicitation. We evaluate these expectations through a field experiment in which Malawian confederates seek electricity connections from re…
Assessing Data Quality
Political scientists routinely face the challenge of assessing the quality (validity and reliability) of measures in order to use them in substantive research. While stand-alone assessment tools exist, researchers rarely combine them comprehensively. Further, while a large literature informs dataproducers, dataconsumerslack guidance on how to assess existing measures for use in substantive research. We delineate a three-component practical approa…
Why Low Levels of Democracy Promote Corruption and High Levels Diminish It
Theory predicts democracy should reduce corruption. Yet, scholars have found that while corruption is low at high levels of democracy, it is high at modest levels, as well as low when democracy is absent. A weakness of studies that aim to explain this inverted curvilinear relationship is that they do not disaggregate the complex concepts of democracy and corruption. By contrast, this paper disaggregates both. We demonstrate that the curvilinear r…
Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset
The Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset (Historical V-Dem) contains about 260 indicators, both factual and evaluative, describing various aspects of political regimes and state institutions. The dataset covers 91 polities globally - including most large, sovereign states, as well as some semi-sovereign entities and large colonies - from 1789 to 1920 for many cases. The majority of the indicators come from the Varieties of Democracy dataset,…
Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding
During the past decade, analyses drawing on several democracy measures have shown a global trend of democratic retrenchment. While these democracy measures use radically different methodologies, most partially or fully rely on subjective judgments to produce estimates of the level of democracy within states. Such projects continuously grapple with balancing conceptual coverage with the potential for bias (Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Przeworski et a…
What makes experts reliable? Expert reliability and the estimation of latent traits
Experts code latent quantities for many influential political science datasets. Although scholars are aware of the importance of accounting for variation in expert reliability when aggregating such data, they have not systematically explored either the factors affecting expert reliability or the degree to which these factors influence estimates of latent concepts. Here we provide a template for examining potential correlates of expert reliability…
Varieties of connections, varieties of corruption
Why do some bureaucrats engage in corruption for personal gain, yet others for political gain? We show that these forms of corruption frequently do not coincide and offer an explanation: bureaucrats hired based on political and personal connections have different identities and incentives which compel them to engage in corruption for political and personal gain respectively. List experiments with a unique sample of 6400 bureaucrats in five countr…
Who is Targeted in Corruption? Disentangling the Effects of Wealth and Power on Exposure to Bribery
Corrupt government officials must weigh the potential costs and benefits of soliciting a bribe using limited information about a citizen’s ability to pay but also to punish. We conduct a field experiment in Malawi to determine the effects of political connections and socioeconomic status on a citizen’s exposure to corruption at traffic police roadblocks. We find that political connections reduce exposure to bribery, while relative wealth only ins…
Strong states, weak elections? How state capacity in authoritarian regimes conditions the democratizing power of elections
State capacity may be a crucial factor conditioning the democratizing power of elections in authoritarian regimes. This paper develops a two-phase theory considers the different effects of state capacity on turnover in elections and democratic change after elections. In regimes with limited state capacity, manipulating elections and repressing opposition is more difficult than in regimes with extensive state capacity, rendering turnover in electi…
Measuring online political activity
Political engagement is deeply enmeshed with online activity. However, there has been a lack of publicly available cross-country datasets enabling researchers and policymakers to understand how politics and digital space intersect. This paper introduces the Digital Society Project (DSP), which aims to provide systematic, cross-country measurement of political institutions and behavior that manifest online or are affected by online activity. Using…
How information about foreign aid affects public spending decisions
A Reputation Deficit? The Myths and Reality of Chinese Investment in Zambia
What drives public discontent about Chinese investment on the ground? This study probes the “ground truth” of public reaction in Zambia by documenting both the public perception and the actual impacts of Chinese investments. We find a “reputation deficit” for Chinese investment: Zambians are significantly less likely to support Chinese investment than investment from other countries. Combining results from an original household survey, interview …
Experts, coders and crowds
Political scientists increasingly use crowdworkers to produce data, predominantly in the context of coding researcher-curated text or to retrieve simple data from the internet. In this article, we provide a theoretical and empirical basis for understanding when crowdworkers can provide data of sufficient quality to substitute for other types of coders. First, we introduce a typology of data-producing actors – experts, trained coders and crowds – …
Marketing Taxation? Experimental Evidence on Enforcement and Bargaining in Malawian Markets
Understanding how to increase government revenue via taxation is a core puzzle in state development. Taxation is critical for states to fund public goods, and may have positive spillover effects on citizen-state relations. We argue that tax compliance will be higher when governments employ community-level, rather than individual-level, interventions. To test whether it is more effective to focus such interventions on top-down (TD) enforcement or …
Drivers of successful common-pool resource management
What Politicians Do Not Know Can Hurt You
Do well-informed politicians make more effective spending decisions? In experiments with 70% of all elected politicians in Malawi ($ N=460 $), we tested the effects of information on public spending. Specifically, we randomly provided information about school needs, foreign aid, and voting patterns prior to officials making real decisions about the allocation of spending. We show that these information interventions reduced inequalities in spendi…
Coethnicity and Corruption
Corruption is widespread in many developing countries, though public officials’ discretion in the solicitation of bribes may expose some citizens to more corruption than others. We derive expectations about how shared ethnicity between government officials and citizens should influence the likelihood of bribe solicitation. We evaluate these expectations through a field experiment in which Malawian confederates seek electricity connections from re…
Who is Targeted in Corruption? Disentangling the Effects of Wealth and Power on Exposure to Bribery
Corrupt government officials must weigh the potential costs and benefits of soliciting a bribe using limited information about a citizen’s ability to pay but also to punish. We conduct a field experiment in Malawi to determine the effects of political connections and socioeconomic status on a citizen’s exposure to corruption at traffic police roadblocks. We find that political connections reduce exposure to bribery, while relative wealth only ins…
Strong states, weak elections? How state capacity in authoritarian regimes conditions the democratizing power of elections
State capacity may be a crucial factor conditioning the democratizing power of elections in authoritarian regimes. This paper develops a two-phase theory considers the different effects of state capacity on turnover in elections and democratic change after elections. In regimes with limited state capacity, manipulating elections and repressing opposition is more difficult than in regimes with extensive state capacity, rendering turnover in electi…
V-Dem Codebook V9
What makes experts reliable? Expert reliability and the estimation of latent traits
Experts code latent quantities for many influential political science datasets. Although scholars are aware of the importance of accounting for variation in expert reliability when aggregating such data, they have not systematically explored either the factors affecting expert reliability or the degree to which these factors influence estimates of latent concepts. Here we provide a template for examining potential correlates of expert reliability…
Coethnicity and Corruption
Corruption is widespread in many developing countries, though public officials’ discretion in the solicitation of bribes may expose some citizens to more corruption than others. We derive expectations about how shared ethnicity between government officials and citizens should influence the likelihood of bribe solicitation. We evaluate these expectations through a field experiment in which Malawian confederates seek electricity connections from re…
Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset
The Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset (Historical V-Dem) contains about 260 indicators, both factual and evaluative, describing various aspects of political regimes and state institutions. The dataset covers 91 polities globally - including most large, sovereign states, as well as some semi-sovereign entities and large colonies - from 1789 to 1920 for many cases. The majority of the indicators come from the Varieties of Democracy dataset,…
V-Dem Codebook V10
Information, accountability and perceptions of public sector programme success
Honor among Chiefs
Traditional, hereditary chiefs are an integral part of the development infrastructure in many African countries. To capture chiefs’ behaviour as agents of development and understand the accountability mechanisms they face, we conduct a field experiment with 200 Malawian village chiefs, documenting how they distribute a valuable development good – iron roofing sheets – as we sequentially add monitoring by donors, subjects, and the state. We find e…
Varieties of Democracy
Varieties of Democracy is the essential user's guide to The Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem), one of the most ambitious data collection efforts in comparative politics. This global research collaboration sparked a dramatic change in how we study the nature, causes, and consequences of democracy. This book is ambitious in scope: more than a reference guide, it raises standards for causal inferences in democratization research and introduces …
How information about foreign aid affects public spending decisions
Why Low Levels of Democracy Promote Corruption and High Levels Diminish It
Theory predicts democracy should reduce corruption. Yet, scholars have found that while corruption is low at high levels of democracy, it is high at modest levels, as well as low when democracy is absent. A weakness of studies that aim to explain this inverted curvilinear relationship is that they do not disaggregate the complex concepts of democracy and corruption. By contrast, this paper disaggregates both. We demonstrate that the curvilinear r…
Corruption and the impact of law enforcement
The article argues that the impact of law enforcement efforts against corruption deserves more scholarly attention. Drawing on a mixed-methods study from Malawi in southern Africa, where a large-scale law enforcement operation has been investigating and prosecuting those involved in a 2013 corruption scandal known as 'Cashgate', the article explores the potential for corruption deterrence from the perspective of government officials in the Malawi…
V-Dem Codebook v11
V-Dem Dataset v11.1
A Reputation Deficit? The Myths and Reality of Chinese Investment in Zambia
What drives public discontent about Chinese investment on the ground? This study probes the “ground truth” of public reaction in Zambia by documenting both the public perception and the actual impacts of Chinese investments. We find a “reputation deficit” for Chinese investment: Zambians are significantly less likely to support Chinese investment than investment from other countries. Combining results from an original household survey, interview …
Avoiding “Checkbox Inclusion”
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
Drivers of successful common-pool resource management
Assessing Data Quality
Political scientists routinely face the challenge of assessing the quality (validity and reliability) of measures in order to use them in substantive research. While stand-alone assessment tools exist, researchers rarely combine them comprehensively. Further, while a large literature informs dataproducers, dataconsumerslack guidance on how to assess existing measures for use in substantive research. We delineate a three-component practical approa…
Varieties of connections, varieties of corruption
Why do some bureaucrats engage in corruption for personal gain, yet others for political gain? We show that these forms of corruption frequently do not coincide and offer an explanation: bureaucrats hired based on political and personal connections have different identities and incentives which compel them to engage in corruption for political and personal gain respectively. List experiments with a unique sample of 6400 bureaucrats in five countr…
V-Dem Codebook v14
Understanding vote buying in Nepali elections
Measuring online political activity
Political engagement is deeply enmeshed with online activity. However, there has been a lack of publicly available cross-country datasets enabling researchers and policymakers to understand how politics and digital space intersect. This paper introduces the Digital Society Project (DSP), which aims to provide systematic, cross-country measurement of political institutions and behavior that manifest online or are affected by online activity. Using…
Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding
During the past decade, analyses drawing on several democracy measures have shown a global trend of democratic retrenchment. While these democracy measures use radically different methodologies, most partially or fully rely on subjective judgments to produce estimates of the level of democracy within states. Such projects continuously grapple with balancing conceptual coverage with the potential for bias (Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Przeworski et a…
What Politicians Do Not Know Can Hurt You
Do well-informed politicians make more effective spending decisions? In experiments with 70% of all elected politicians in Malawi ($ N=460 $), we tested the effects of information on public spending. Specifically, we randomly provided information about school needs, foreign aid, and voting patterns prior to officials making real decisions about the allocation of spending. We show that these information interventions reduced inequalities in spendi…
Political science (17 works) · Economics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Business (8 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Corruption and Economic Development (6 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (6 works)