G Grossman
Biographic Data
| ID | 725172 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Grossman |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Grossman |
| SIGNATURE | GROSSMAN G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6980-6390 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 964 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1967 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 19 |
Calculation and Conscience: Motivations for the Substantive Representation of Ethnic Minorities
Existing work shows that minority legislators are more likely to represent their group’s interests compared to dominant group legislators. However, it is unclear whether this is due to intrinsic motivations or electoral incentives. We use a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to analyze ethnic minority representation in the UK Parliament. By comparing white MPs who narrowly beat minority candidates to minority MPs who narrowly beat white candid…
Can community policing improve police-community relations in a low-income country setting?
Community-oriented policing (COP) is one of the most widely touted mechanisms for building bridges between police forces and the communities they serve. But evidence on the effectiveness of COP is surprisingly scant. We present results from one of the first randomized controlled trials to evaluate the impact of COP in the Global South. The COP initiative we study was locally designed and funded by the Ugandan government. Contrary to our expectati…
Political Science under Pressure: Competition and Collaboration in a Growing Discipline, 2003–23
Political scientists face a persistent tension between calls for methodological and topical pluralism and the pressures of “publish or perish.” To assess how professional incentives have reshaped the discipline, we analyzed more than 140,000 articles published across 174 political science journals between 2003 and 2023. Our analyses show that publication volume has tripled during that time, driven by new entrants and increasing collaboration. The…
The Politics of Climate Change in the Developing World
Climate change politics in the developing world remains understudied, despite the region's acute vulnerability and centrality to climate futures. This article synthesizes emerging research across three domains: public opinion and climate salience, the political effects of climate exposure, and the institutional production of climate risk. We highlight a central paradox: Widespread public concern often exists alongside low climate literacy, sugges…
Voted in, standing out: Public response to immigrants' political accession
How do dominant‐group natives react to immigrants' political integration? We argue that ethnic minority immigrants winning political office makes natives feel threatened, triggering animosity. We test this dynamic across the 2010–2019 UK general elections, using hate crime police records, public opinion data, and text data from over 500,000 regional and local newspaper articles. While past work has not established a causal relationship between mi…
Do More Disaggregated Electoral Results Deter Aggregation Fraud
The level of aggregation at which electoral results are published can impact election integrity. Publishing results at a more granular level – such as at the level of the polling station – enables civil society watchdogs to independently verify vote totals, helping to deter aggregation fraud. While this logic undergirds the recommendations of the international organizations monitoring elections to publish more granular electoral results, to date …
Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust
How can societies effectively reduce crime without exacerbating adversarial relationships between the police and citizens? In recent decades, perhaps the most celebrated innovation in police reform has been the introduction of community policing, where citizens are involved in building channels of dialogue and improving police-citizen collaboration. Despite the widespread adoption of community policing in the United States and increasingly in the…
The Effect of Sustained Transparency on Electoral Accountability
Transparency is expected to strengthen electoral accountability. Yet, initiatives disseminating politician performance information directly prior to elections have reported mixed results. We argue that to be effective, transparency needs to be sustained: The dissemination of politician performance information needs to occur early, regularly, and predictably throughout the term. Using a formal model of electoral accountability under nonprogrammati…
Turnout Turnaround: Ethnic Minority Victories Mobilize White Voters
In Western democracies, like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, the number of ethnic minority representatives has been steadily increasing. How is this trend shaping electoral behavior? Past work has focused on the effects of minority representation on ethnic minorities' political engagement, with less attention to the electoral behavior of majority-group members. We argue that increased minorities' representation can be experien…
Inclusive refugee-hosting can improve local development and prevent public backlash
Large arrivals of refugees raise concerns about potential tensions with host communities, particularly if refugees are viewed as an out-group competing for limited material resources and crowding out public services. To address these concerns, calls have increased to allocate humanitarian aid in ways that also benefit host communities. This study tests whether the increased presence of refugees, when coupled with humanitarian aid, improves public…
Oil discoveries and political windfalls: Evidence on presidential support in Uganda
Oil discoveries, paired with delays in production, have created a new phenomenon: sustained post-discovery, pre-production periods. While research on the resource curse has debated the effects of oil on governance and conflict, less is known about the political effects of oil discoveries absent production. Using comprehensive electoral data from Uganda and a difference-in-differences design with heterogeneous effects, we show that oil discoveries…
Locked Down, Lashing Out: Covid-19 Effects on Asian Hate Crimes in Italy
COVID-19 caused a major health crisis and an economic crisis, conditions identified as conducive to stigmatization and hostility against minority groups. It is however unclear whether the threat of infection triggers hate crimes in addition to stigmatization and whether such a reaction can happen at the onset of an unexpected economic shock, before social hierarchies can be disrupted. Leveraging variation across Italian municipalities, we show th…
How the Ultrarich Use Media Ownership as a Political Investment
Can the ultrarich shape electoral results by controlling media outlets that openly propagate their political interests? Whether consumers discount slanted media coverage is a question gaining urgency as a growing number of billionaires mix ownership of major media outlets with business interests and political agendas. We study this question in the context of Israel, where billionaire Sheldon Adelson launched in 2007 Israel Hayom, a right-leaning …
Forced Displacement and Asylum Policy in the Developing World
Little theoretical or empirical work examines migration policy in the developing world. We develop and test a theory that distinguishes the drivers of policy reform and factors influencing the direction of reform. We introduce an original data set of de jure asylum and refugee policies covering more than ninety developing countries that are presently excluded from existing indices of migration policy. Examining descriptive trends in the data, we …
Who Registers? Village Networks, Household Dynamics, and Voter Registration in Rural Uganda
Who registers to vote? Although extensive research has examined the question of who votes, our understanding of the determinants of political participation will be limited until we know who is missing from the voter register. Studying voter registration in lower-income settings is particularly challenging due to data constraints. We link the official voter register with a complete social network census of 16 villages to analyze the correlates of …
Government Responsiveness in Developing Countries
When and how do governments deliver public goods and services in response to citizen preferences? We review the current literature on government responsiveness, with a focus on public goods and service delivery in developing countries. We identify three types of actors that are commonly present in these accounts: politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens. Much of this literature examines interactions between dyads of these actors. The study of elect…
Public trust, policing, and the Covid-19 pandemic: Evidence from an electoral authoritarian regime
Liberal Displacement Policies Attract Forced Migrants in the Global South
Most forced migrants around the world are displaced within the Global South. We study whether and how de jure policies on forced displacement affect where forced migrants flee in the developing world. Recent evidence from the Global North suggests migrants gravitate toward liberal policy environments. However, existing analyses expect de jure policies to have little effect in the developing world, given strong presumptions that policy enforcement…
Community policing does not build citizen trust in police or reduce crime in the Global South
Easier said than done High-profile instances of police brutality in the last few years have brought attention to patterns of abuse that have existed since the inception of modern policing. There have been many calls for police reform, a process that in many countries has taken the form of increased police engagement with communities. Blair et al . report the results of a large-scale experiment testing the effectiveness of this approach across six…
The Majoritarian Threat to Liberal Democracy
Incumbents often seek to wield power in ways that are formally legal but informally proscribed. Why do voters endorse these power grabs? Prior literature focuses on polarization. We propose instead that many voters are majoritarian , in that they view popularly elected leaders’ actions as inherently democratic – even when those actions undermine liberal democracy. We find support for this claim in two original survey experiments, arguing that maj…
Viral Voting: Social Networks and Political Participation
Social context theory suggests that an important driver of political participation is the behavior of family, friends, co-workers and neighbors. How do social ties between individuals shape equilibrium behavior in larger populations? Despite theoretical inroads into this question, direct empirical tests remain scarce due to data limitations. We fill this gap using full social network data from 15 villages in rural Uganda, where village-level turn…
The Americas: When Do Voters Support Power Grabs
This article examines the nature of democratic fragilities in the Americas through survey experiments in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. Encouragingly, strong majorities of citizens recognize violations of democratic principles, laws, and norms. Moreover, how incumbents justify antidemocratic actions has little impact on how citizens view them. Yet there are minorities, ranging from 10 to 35 percent of the population, who suppor…
Information Technology and Political Engagement: Mixed Evidence from Uganda
This study integrates three related field experiments to learn about how information communications technology (ICT) innovations can affect who communicates with politicians. We implemented a nationwide experiment in Uganda following a smaller-scale framed field experiment that suggested that ICTs can lead to significant "flattening": marginalized populations used short message service (SMS) based communication at relatively higher rates compared…
The Effect of Election Proximity on Government Responsiveness and Citizens’ Participation: Evidence From English Local Elections
Does political engagement depend on government responsiveness? Identifying the drivers of political action is challenging because it requires disentangling instrumental from expressive motives for engagement and because government responsiveness is likely endogenous. We overcome the first challenge by studying citizens’ reporting of street-problems—a form of participation arguably driven by instrumental considerations. We overcome the second chal…
It Takes a Village: Peer Effects and Externalities in Technology Adoption
Do social networks matter for the adoption of new forms of political participation? We develop a formal model showing that the quality of communication that takes place in social networks is central to understanding whether a community will adopt forms of political participation where benefits are uncertain and where there are positive externalities associated with participation. Early adopters may exaggerate benefits, leading others to discount …
The Political Legacies of Combat: Attitudes Toward War and Peace Among Israeli Ex-Combatants
Recent research has highlighted combat's positive effects for political behavior, but it is unclear whether they extend to attitudes toward the conflict itself. We exploit the assignment of health rankings determining combat eligibility in the Israel Defense Forces to examine the effect of combat exposure on support for peaceful conflict resolution. Given the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to global affairs, and its apparent intra…
Deliberate Disengagement: How Education Can Decrease Political Participation in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes
A large literature examining advanced and consolidating democracies suggests that education increases political participation. However, in electoral authoritarian regimes, educated voters may instead deliberately disengage. If education increases critical capacities, political awareness, and support for democracy, educated citizens may believe that participation is futile or legitimizes autocrats. We test this argument in Zimbabwe-a paradigmatic …
Do Men and Women Have Different Policy Preferences in Africa? Determinants and Implications of Gender Gaps in Policy Prioritization
Policies designed to increase women’s representation in Africa are often motivated by the assumption that men and women have different policy preferences. This article finds that gender differences in policy priorities are actually quite small on average, but vary significantly across policy domains and countries. The study leverages this variation to show that the economic and social empowerment of women influences the size of gender gaps in the…
Administrative Unit Proliferation
Numerous developing countries have substantially increased their number of subnational administrative units in recent years. The literature on this phenomenon is, nonetheless, small and suffers from several theoretical and methodological shortcomings: in particular, a unit of analysis problem that causes past studies to mistakenly de-emphasize the importance of local actors. We posit that administrative unit proliferation occurs where and when th…
Government Responsiveness in Developing Countries
When and how do governments deliver public goods and services in response to citizen preferences? We review the current literature on government responsiveness, with a focus on public goods and service delivery in developing countries. We identify three types of actors that are commonly present in these accounts: politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens. Much of this literature examines interactions between dyads of these actors. The study of elect…
Information Dissemination, Competitive Pressure, and Politician Performance between Elections: A Field Experiment in Uganda
Politicians shirk when their performance is obscure to constituents. We theorize that when politician performance information is disseminated early in the electoral term, politicians will subsequently improve their performance in anticipation of changes in citizens' evaluative criteria and possible challenger entry in the next election. However, politicians may only respond in constituencies where opposition has previously mounted. We test these …
How Sanctions Affect Public Opinion in Target Countries: Experimental Evidence From Israel
How do economic sanctions affect the political attitudes of individuals in targeted countries? Do they reduce or increase support for policy change? Are targeted, “smart” sanctions more effective in generating public support? Despite the importance of these questions for understanding the effectiveness of sanctions, they have received little systematic attention. We address them drawing on original data from Israel, where the threat of economic s…
The Impact of Elections on Cooperation: Evidence from a Lab‐in‐the‐Field Experiment in Uganda
Communities often rely on sanctioning to induce public goods contributions. Past studies focus on how external agencies or peer sanctioning induce cooperation. In this article, we focus instead on the role played by centralized authorities, internal to the community. Combining “lab‐in‐the‐field” experiments with observational data on 1,541 Ugandan farmers from 50 communities, we demonstrate the positive effect of internal centralized sanctioning …
The Majoritarian Threat to Liberal Democracy
Incumbents often seek to wield power in ways that are formally legal but informally proscribed. Why do voters endorse these power grabs? Prior literature focuses on polarization. We propose instead that many voters are majoritarian , in that they view popularly elected leaders’ actions as inherently democratic – even when those actions undermine liberal democracy. We find support for this claim in two original survey experiments, arguing that maj…
I wld like u WMP to extend electricity 2 our village: On Information Technology and Interest Articulation
How does access to information communication technology (ICT) affect who gets heard and what gets communicated to politicians? On the one hand, ICT can lower communication costs for poorer constituents; on the other, technological channels may be used disproportionately more by the already well connected. To assess the flattening effects of ICTs, we presented a representative sample of constituents in Uganda with an opportunity to send a text mes…
Forced Displacement and Asylum Policy in the Developing World
Little theoretical or empirical work examines migration policy in the developing world. We develop and test a theory that distinguishes the drivers of policy reform and factors influencing the direction of reform. We introduce an original data set of de jure asylum and refugee policies covering more than ninety developing countries that are presently excluded from existing indices of migration policy. Examining descriptive trends in the data, we …
Contested Ground: Disentangling Material and Symbolic Attachment to Disputed Territory
Territorial disputes are prone to conflict because of the value of territory to publics, whether due to its strategic and material worth, or to its intangible, symbolic value. Yet despite the implications of the distinction for both theory and policy, empirically disentangling the material from the symbolic has posed formidable methodological challenges. We propose a set of tools for assessing the nature of individual territorial attachment, draw…
The Americas: When Do Voters Support Power Grabs
This article examines the nature of democratic fragilities in the Americas through survey experiments in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. Encouragingly, strong majorities of citizens recognize violations of democratic principles, laws, and norms. Moreover, how incumbents justify antidemocratic actions has little impact on how citizens view them. Yet there are minorities, ranging from 10 to 35 percent of the population, who suppor…
Government Fragmentation and Public Goods Provision
We investigate the effects of territorial government fragmentation on the quality of public services. We argue that an increase in the number of regional governments has two effects: (1) it redistributes fiscal and administrative resources to underserved regions and (2) encourages yardstick competition. Extreme government fragmentation, however, limits efficiency gains by reducing administrative capacity, economies of scale, and enabling capture.…
Descriptive Representation and Judicial Outcomes in Multiethnic Societies
The extent to which judicial outcomes depend on judges' identities is a central question in multiethnic societies. Past work on the impact of the racial composition of appellate courts has narrowly focused on civil rights cases in the United States. We expand this literature by testing for ethnicity‐based panel effects in criminal appeals in Israel. Using randomness in the assignment of cases to panels, we find that appeal outcomes for Jewish def…
Renewalist Christianity and the Political Saliency of LGBTs: Theory and Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
One key political development in the past decade in many, but not all, countries across Africa has been the growing saliency of morality politics in general, and of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics in particular. I argue that the uneven upward trend in the political saliency of LGBTs is closely related to two recent political processes: (1) a rapid growth of Pentecostal, Evangelical, and related Renewalist or Spirit-filled …
How the Ultrarich Use Media Ownership as a Political Investment
Can the ultrarich shape electoral results by controlling media outlets that openly propagate their political interests? Whether consumers discount slanted media coverage is a question gaining urgency as a growing number of billionaires mix ownership of major media outlets with business interests and political agendas. We study this question in the context of Israel, where billionaire Sheldon Adelson launched in 2007 Israel Hayom, a right-leaning …
Liberal Displacement Policies Attract Forced Migrants in the Global South
Most forced migrants around the world are displaced within the Global South. We study whether and how de jure policies on forced displacement affect where forced migrants flee in the developing world. Recent evidence from the Global North suggests migrants gravitate toward liberal policy environments. However, existing analyses expect de jure policies to have little effect in the developing world, given strong presumptions that policy enforcement…
Border Walls and Smuggling Spillovers
A growing number of states are erecting physical barriers along their borders to stem the illicit flow of goods and people. Though border fortification policies are both controversial and politically salient, their distributional consequences remain largely unexplored. We study the impact of a border wall project on smuggling in Israel. We use the initial phase of the wall construction to causally estimate spillover effects on cross-border smuggl…
Information Technology and Political Engagement: Mixed Evidence from Uganda
This study integrates three related field experiments to learn about how information communications technology (ICT) innovations can affect who communicates with politicians. We implemented a nationwide experiment in Uganda following a smaller-scale framed field experiment that suggested that ICTs can lead to significant "flattening": marginalized populations used short message service (SMS) based communication at relatively higher rates compared…
Texting Complaints to Politicians: Name Personalization and Politicians’ Encouragement in Citizen Mobilization
Poor public service provision and government accountability is commonplace in low-income countries. Although mobile phone–based platforms have emerged to allow constituents to report service deficiencies to government officials, they have been plagued by low citizen participation. We question whether low participation may root in low political efficacy to politically participate. In the context of a text message–reporting platform in Uganda, we i…
Crowdsourcing accountability: ICT for service delivery
We examine the effect on service delivery outcomes of a new information communication technology (ICT) platform that allows citizens to send free and anonymous messages to local government officials, thus reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of communication about public services. In particular, we use a field experiment to assess the extent to which the introduction of this ICT platform improved monitoring by the district, effort by s…
Do Better Monitoring Institutions Increase Leadership Quality in Community Organizations? Evidence from Uganda
We offer a framework for analyzing the impact of monitoring—a commonly recommended solution to poor leadership—on the quality of democratically elected leaders in community organizations in low‐income countries. In our model, groups may face a trade‐off between leader ability and effort. If the group's ability to monitor the leader is low, then the leader may exert too little effort. A higher level of monitoring increases leader effort, raising t…
Inclusive refugee-hosting can improve local development and prevent public backlash
Large arrivals of refugees raise concerns about potential tensions with host communities, particularly if refugees are viewed as an out-group competing for limited material resources and crowding out public services. To address these concerns, calls have increased to allocate humanitarian aid in ways that also benefit host communities. This study tests whether the increased presence of refugees, when coupled with humanitarian aid, improves public…
The Effect of Election Proximity on Government Responsiveness and Citizens’ Participation: Evidence From English Local Elections
Does political engagement depend on government responsiveness? Identifying the drivers of political action is challenging because it requires disentangling instrumental from expressive motives for engagement and because government responsiveness is likely endogenous. We overcome the first challenge by studying citizens’ reporting of street-problems—a form of participation arguably driven by instrumental considerations. We overcome the second chal…
Economic Systems
Journal Article G. Grossman. Economic Systems Get access Economic Systems. By G. Grossman. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Pp. viii + 120. 36s. (cloth), 14s. (paper).) Joan Robinson Joan Robinson Newnham College, Cambridge. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 77, Issue 308, 1 December 1967, Pages 871–873, https://doi.org/10.2307/2229578 Published: 01 December 19…
Essays in Socialism and Planning in Honor of Carl Landauer
Journal Article Grossman(G.), (Ed.). Essays in Socialism and Planning in Honor of Carl Landauer. Get access Essays in Socialism and Planning in Honor of Carl Landauer. Edited by G. Grossman. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970. Pp. 211. £5.50.) Maurice Dobb Maurice Dobb Trinity College, Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 81, Issue 323, 1 September 1971, Pa…
Essays in Socialism and Planning in Honor of Carl Landauer
End-of-life impacts of pervasive computing
RFID technology is one of the forerunners of pervasive computing, and as such is expected to play an important role in many applications of daily life, especially in the form of smart labels. However, market investigations and a material analysis of a smart label shows that the use of smart labels does not considerably affect the recycling or disposal of packaging materials, if precautionary measures are taken, such as eco-design and, where neces…
Courage to Refuse
In January 2002, a group of 51 Israeli reserve combat officers and soldiers published a “combatant letter” to the Israeli public declaring, “We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders i
The Impact of Elections on Cooperation: Evidence from a Lab‐in‐the‐Field Experiment in Uganda
Communities often rely on sanctioning to induce public goods contributions. Past studies focus on how external agencies or peer sanctioning induce cooperation. In this article, we focus instead on the role played by centralized authorities, internal to the community. Combining “lab‐in‐the‐field” experiments with observational data on 1,541 Ugandan farmers from 50 communities, we demonstrate the positive effect of internal centralized sanctioning …
Do Selection Rules Affect Leader Responsiveness? Evidence from Rural Uganda
Community organizations in developing countries often suffer from self-serving elites. This study examines whether the responsiveness and accountability of local leaders can be strengthened through the introduction of more inclusive and participatory leader selection rules. To address identification problems, I take advantage of natural conditions that resulted in exogenous variation in the rules for selecting leaders of farmer associations in Ug…
Do Better Monitoring Institutions Increase Leadership Quality in Community Organizations? Evidence from Uganda
We offer a framework for analyzing the impact of monitoring—a commonly recommended solution to poor leadership—on the quality of democratically elected leaders in community organizations in low‐income countries. In our model, groups may face a trade‐off between leader ability and effort. If the group's ability to monitor the leader is low, then the leader may exert too little effort. A higher level of monitoring increases leader effort, raising t…
Administrative Unit Proliferation
Numerous developing countries have substantially increased their number of subnational administrative units in recent years. The literature on this phenomenon is, nonetheless, small and suffers from several theoretical and methodological shortcomings: in particular, a unit of analysis problem that causes past studies to mistakenly de-emphasize the importance of local actors. We posit that administrative unit proliferation occurs where and when th…
I wld like u WMP to extend electricity 2 our village: On Information Technology and Interest Articulation
How does access to information communication technology (ICT) affect who gets heard and what gets communicated to politicians? On the one hand, ICT can lower communication costs for poorer constituents; on the other, technological channels may be used disproportionately more by the already well connected. To assess the flattening effects of ICTs, we presented a representative sample of constituents in Uganda with an opportunity to send a text mes…
Renewalist Christianity and the Political Saliency of LGBTs: Theory and Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
One key political development in the past decade in many, but not all, countries across Africa has been the growing saliency of morality politics in general, and of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics in particular. I argue that the uneven upward trend in the political saliency of LGBTs is closely related to two recent political processes: (1) a rapid growth of Pentecostal, Evangelical, and related Renewalist or Spirit-filled …
The Political Legacies of Combat: Attitudes Toward War and Peace Among Israeli Ex-Combatants
Recent research has highlighted combat's positive effects for political behavior, but it is unclear whether they extend to attitudes toward the conflict itself. We exploit the assignment of health rankings determining combat eligibility in the Israel Defense Forces to examine the effect of combat exposure on support for peaceful conflict resolution. Given the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to global affairs, and its apparent intra…
Deliberate Disengagement: How Education Can Decrease Political Participation in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes
A large literature examining advanced and consolidating democracies suggests that education increases political participation. However, in electoral authoritarian regimes, educated voters may instead deliberately disengage. If education increases critical capacities, political awareness, and support for democracy, educated citizens may believe that participation is futile or legitimizes autocrats. We test this argument in Zimbabwe—a paradigmatic …
Descriptive Representation and Judicial Outcomes in Multiethnic Societies
The extent to which judicial outcomes depend on judges' identities is a central question in multiethnic societies. Past work on the impact of the racial composition of appellate courts has narrowly focused on civil rights cases in the United States. We expand this literature by testing for ethnicity‐based panel effects in criminal appeals in Israel. Using randomness in the assignment of cases to panels, we find that appeal outcomes for Jewish def…
Deliberate Disengagement: How Education Can Decrease Political Participation in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes
A large literature examining advanced and consolidating democracies suggests that education increases political participation. However, in electoral authoritarian regimes, educated voters may instead deliberately disengage. If education increases critical capacities, political awareness, and support for democracy, educated citizens may believe that participation is futile or legitimizes autocrats. We test this argument in Zimbabwe-a paradigmatic …
Government Fragmentation and Public Goods Provision
We investigate the effects of territorial government fragmentation on the quality of public services. We argue that an increase in the number of regional governments has two effects: (1) it redistributes fiscal and administrative resources to underserved regions and (2) encourages yardstick competition. Extreme government fragmentation, however, limits efficiency gains by reducing administrative capacity, economies of scale, and enabling capture.…
Texting Complaints to Politicians: Name Personalization and Politicians’ Encouragement in Citizen Mobilization
Poor public service provision and government accountability is commonplace in low-income countries. Although mobile phone–based platforms have emerged to allow constituents to report service deficiencies to government officials, they have been plagued by low citizen participation. We question whether low participation may root in low political efficacy to politically participate. In the context of a text message–reporting platform in Uganda, we i…
Crowdsourcing accountability: ICT for service delivery
We examine the effect on service delivery outcomes of a new information communication technology (ICT) platform that allows citizens to send free and anonymous messages to local government officials, thus reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of communication about public services. In particular, we use a field experiment to assess the extent to which the introduction of this ICT platform improved monitoring by the district, effort by s…
How Sanctions Affect Public Opinion in Target Countries: Experimental Evidence From Israel
How do economic sanctions affect the political attitudes of individuals in targeted countries? Do they reduce or increase support for policy change? Are targeted, “smart” sanctions more effective in generating public support? Despite the importance of these questions for understanding the effectiveness of sanctions, they have received little systematic attention. We address them drawing on original data from Israel, where the threat of economic s…
Do Men and Women Have Different Policy Preferences in Africa? Determinants and Implications of Gender Gaps in Policy Prioritization
Policies designed to increase women’s representation in Africa are often motivated by the assumption that men and women have different policy preferences. This article finds that gender differences in policy priorities are actually quite small on average, but vary significantly across policy domains and countries. The study leverages this variation to show that the economic and social empowerment of women influences the size of gender gaps in the…
Information Dissemination, Competitive Pressure, and Politician Performance between Elections: A Field Experiment in Uganda
Politicians shirk when their performance is obscure to constituents. We theorize that when politician performance information is disseminated early in the electoral term, politicians will subsequently improve their performance in anticipation of changes in citizens' evaluative criteria and possible challenger entry in the next election. However, politicians may only respond in constituencies where opposition has previously mounted. We test these …
Information, Accountability, and Cumulative Learning: Lessons from Metaketa I
Throughout the world, voters lack access to information about politicians, government performance, and public services. Efforts to remedy these informational deficits are numerous. Yet do informational campaigns influence voter behavior and increase democratic accountability? Through the first project of the Metaketa Initiative, sponsored by the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) research network, this book aims to address this substantiv…
Border Walls and Smuggling Spillovers
A growing number of states are erecting physical barriers along their borders to stem the illicit flow of goods and people. Though border fortification policies are both controversial and politically salient, their distributional consequences remain largely unexplored. We study the impact of a border wall project on smuggling in Israel. We use the initial phase of the wall construction to causally estimate spillover effects on cross-border smuggl…
A Signaling Theory of Distributive Policy Choice: Evidence from Senegal
A recent literature emphasizes political economy factors behind the wave of administrative splits across the developing world. While previous studies have focused on why some groups are more likely to obtain new administrative units, they do not explain why vote-maximizing incumbents use this arguably less efficient policy in the first place. We contribute to this literature by embedding administrative splits within incumbents’ broader electoral …
Contested Ground: Disentangling Material and Symbolic Attachment to Disputed Territory
Territorial disputes are prone to conflict because of the value of territory to publics, whether due to its strategic and material worth, or to its intangible, symbolic value. Yet despite the implications of the distinction for both theory and policy, empirically disentangling the material from the symbolic has posed formidable methodological challenges. We propose a set of tools for assessing the nature of individual territorial attachment, draw…
Political science (45 works) · Politics (32 works) · Law (30 works) · Economics (29 works) · Law (25 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Business (15 works) · Political economy (15 works) · Public relations (13 works) · Psychology (12 works)