Horacio Larreguy
Biographic Data
| ID | 922029 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Horacio Larreguy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Horacio |
| FAMILY NAME | Larreguy |
| SIGNATURE | LARREGUY H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8491-6400 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 415 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Get Out the Volunteer: Encouraging Diverse Political Party Activism
Political parties in advanced democracies face a dual challenge: fewer citizens are willing to volunteer, and those who remain active are disproportionately older and male. This is troubling given the central role that volunteers play in campaigns and party processes. Whether party leaders can recruit a larger and more diverse activist base remains an open question. We partnered with a major party in the Netherlands and conducted two field experi…
Accountability in Developing Democracies: The Impact of the Internet, Social Media, and Polarization
This article reviews the recent literature on accountability in developing democracies through the lens of two nested principal–agent problems: the relationship between voters and elected politicians and that between elected politicians and bureaucrats. We focus on two global trends that we view as reshaping these accountability relationships in important ways: the rise of the internet and social media on the one hand and increasing political pol…
Missionary Activity, Education, and Long-Run Political Development: Evidence Across Regime Types in Africa
In Africa, missionaries used schooling to gain adherents. We study how historical missionary activity shaped long-run education and political development across regime types. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to Catholic missionaries generated by their territorial administration system. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that proximity to historical diocese headquarters generally led to an increased presence of Ca…
Family Ties, Social Control, and Authoritarian Distribution to Elites
Authoritarian survival theories maintain that dictators distribute rents to elites who can control the masses. Yet, it is unclear how dictators choose beneficiary elites. We argue that elites centrally placed in their locality's family network enjoy greater influence on other community members and, thus, are more likely to be co-opted through distribution. We test this argument by compiling a novel dataset of Paraguayan family networks that we li…
Who Debates, Who Wins? At-Scale Experimental Evidence on the Supply of Policy Information in a Liberian Election
We examine how the effects of initiatives intended to promote programmatic competition are conditioned by candidates' often mixed incentives to participate in them. In a nationwide debate initiative designed to solicit and widely rebroadcast policy promises from Liberian legislative candidates, we analyze the randomized encouragement of debate participation across districts. The intervention substantially increased the debate participation of lea…
Sustaining Exposure to Fact-Checks: Misinformation Discernment, Media Consumption, and Its Political Implications
Exposure to misinformation can affect citizens' beliefs, political preferences, and compliance with government policies. However, little is known about how to durably reduce susceptibility to misinformation, particularly in the Global South. We evaluate an intervention in South Africa that encouraged individuals to consume biweekly fact-checks-as text messages or podcasts-via WhatsApp for six months. Sustained exposure to these fact-checks induce…
When does education increase political participation? Evidence from Senegal
We argue that education's effect on political participation in developing democracies depends on the strength of democratic institutions. Education increases awareness of, and interest in, politics, which help citizens to prevent democratic erosion through increased political participation. We examine Senegal, a stable but developing democracy where presidential over-reach threatened to weaken democracy. For causal identification, we use a differ…
Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation
Who Gets Hired? Political Patronage and Bureaucratic Favoritism
Most research on biased public sector hiring highlights local politicians' incentives to distribute government positions to partisan supporters. Other studies instead point to the role of bureaucratic managers in allocating government jobs to close contacts. We jointly consider the relative importance of each source of biased hiring as an allocation problem between managers and politicians who have different preferences regarding public sector hi…
Able and Mostly Willing: An Empirical Anatomy of Information's Effect on Voter‐Driven Accountability in Senegal
Political accountability may be constrained by the reach and relevance of information campaigns in developing democracies and—upon receiving information—voters' ability and will to hold politicians accountable. To illuminate voter‐level constraints and information relevance absent dissemination constraints, we conducted a field experiment around Senegal's 2017 parliamentary elections to examine the core theoretical steps linking receiving differe…
Empowering women facing gender-based violence amid Covid-19 through media campaigns
COVID-19 heightened women’s exposure to gender-based and intimate partner violence, especially in low-income and middle-income countries. We tested whether edutainment interventions shown to successfully combat gender-based and intimate partner violence when delivered in person can be effectively delivered using social (WhatsApp and Facebook) and traditional (TV) media. To do so, we randomized the mode of implementation of an intervention conduct…
Political Competition and State Capacity: Evidence from a Land Allocation Program in Mexico
We develop a model of the politics of state capacity building undertaken by incumbent parties that have a comparative advantage in clientelism rather than in public goods provision. The model predicts that, when challenged by opponents, clientelistic incumbents have the incentive to prevent investments in state capacity. We provide empirical support for the model’s implications by studying policy decisions by the Institutional Revolutionary Party…
Diffusing Political Concerns: How Unemployment Information Passed between Social Ties Influences Danish Voters
National audience
Testing Models of Social Learning on Networks: Evidence From Two Experiments
We theoretically and empirically study an incomplete information model of social learning. Agents initially guess the binary state of the world after observing a private signal. In subsequent rounds, agents observe their network neighbors' previous guesses before guessing again. Agents are drawn from a mixture of learning types—Bayesian, who face incomplete information about others' types, and DeGroot, who average their neighbors' previous period…
An Informational Theory of Electoral Targeting in Young Clientelistic Democracies: Evidence from Senegal
Existing theories of electoral targeting focus on voter partisanship and thus are at odds with the significant vote switching and weakly institutionalized parties that characterize young clientelistic democracies. We propose and test a theory of group-level targeting driven by groups’ capacity to coordinate votes and parties’ differential information about such capacity. Unlike current theories, ours assumes that most groups are nonpartisan and r…
Publicising Malfeasance: When the Local Media Structure Facilitates Electoral Accountability in Mexico
Malfeasance in local governments is common in developing democracies. Electoral accountability could mitigate such malfeasance, but may require media market structures that incentivise profit-maximising local media to report on incumbent malfeasance. We test this claim in Mexico, leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in the pre-election release of municipal audits revealing misallocated spending and access to broadcast media. We find that each…
How Weakly Institutionalized Parties Monitor Brokers in Developing Democracies: Evidence from Postconflict Liberia
Political parties in sub‐Saharan Africa's developing democracies are often considered to lack sufficiently sophisticated machines to monitor and incentivize their political brokers. We challenge this view by arguing that the decentralized pyramidal structure of their machines allows them to engage in broker monitoring and incentivizing to mobilize voters, which ultimately improves their electoral performance. This capacity is concentrated (a) amo…
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 …
Information Provision, Voter Coordination, and Electoral Accountability: Evidence from Mexican Social Networks
How do social networks moderate the way political information influences electoral accountability? We propose a simple model in which incumbent malfeasance revelations can facilitate coordination around less malfeasant challenger parties in highly connected voter networks, even when voters update favorably about incumbent party malfeasance. We provide evidence from Mexico of this mechanism by leveraging a field experiment in a context where the p…
Agents of the Regime? Traditional Leaders and Electoral Politics in South Africa
Traditional leaders are often given subnational authority in developing democracies. Although ubiquitous, the electoral consequences of their power have received little attention, often due to empirical challenges. We argue that traditional leaders, whose power and resources largely depend on the state, have incentives to support incumbent political parties who can guarantee their survival and provide them with rents. We study this quid pro quo i…
The Effect of Education on Civic and Political Engagement in Nonconsolidated Democracies: Evidence from Nigeria
Developing democracies are experiencing unprecedented increases in primary and secondary schooling. To identify education's long-run political effects, we use a difference-in-differences design that leverages variation across local government areas and gender in the intensity of Nigeria's 1976 universal primary education reform—one of Africa's largest ever educational expansions—to instrument for education. We find large increases in basic civic …
Political Brokers: Partisans or Agents? Evidence from the Mexican Teachers' Union
Political brokers mobilize voters all over the world, yet little is known about what motivates them to do so. This article theorizes about two drivers of brokers' efforts: (1) incentives—monetary rewards or sanctions—and monitoring and (2) partisan attachment. We examine our theory using data on the Mexican National Educational Workers Union (SNTE), Latin America's largest union and a well‐known political machine. Consistent with the role of teac…
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 …
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 …
Parties, Brokers, and Voter Mobilization: How Turnout Buying Depends Upon the Party's Capacity to Monitor Brokers
Despite its prevalence, little is known about when parties buy turnout. We emphasize the problem of parties monitoring local brokers with incentives to shirk. Our model suggests that parties extract greater turnout buying effort from their brokers where they can better monitor broker performance and where favorable voters would not otherwise turn out. Exploiting exogenous variation in the number of polling stations-and thus electoral information …
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 …
Parties, Brokers, and Voter Mobilization: How Turnout Buying Depends Upon the Party's Capacity to Monitor Brokers
Despite its prevalence, little is known about when parties buy turnout. We emphasize the problem of parties monitoring local brokers with incentives to shirk. Our model suggests that parties extract greater turnout buying effort from their brokers where they can better monitor broker performance and where favorable voters would not otherwise turn out. Exploiting exogenous variation in the number of polling stations-and thus electoral information …
Agents of the Regime? Traditional Leaders and Electoral Politics in South Africa
Traditional leaders are often given subnational authority in developing democracies. Although ubiquitous, the electoral consequences of their power have received little attention, often due to empirical challenges. We argue that traditional leaders, whose power and resources largely depend on the state, have incentives to support incumbent political parties who can guarantee their survival and provide them with rents. We study this quid pro quo i…
Political Brokers: Partisans or Agents? Evidence from the Mexican Teachers' Union
Political brokers mobilize voters all over the world, yet little is known about what motivates them to do so. This article theorizes about two drivers of brokers' efforts: (1) incentives—monetary rewards or sanctions—and monitoring and (2) partisan attachment. We examine our theory using data on the Mexican National Educational Workers Union (SNTE), Latin America's largest union and a well‐known political machine. Consistent with the role of teac…
Publicising Malfeasance: When the Local Media Structure Facilitates Electoral Accountability in Mexico
Malfeasance in local governments is common in developing democracies. Electoral accountability could mitigate such malfeasance, but may require media market structures that incentivise profit-maximising local media to report on incumbent malfeasance. We test this claim in Mexico, leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in the pre-election release of municipal audits revealing misallocated spending and access to broadcast media. We find that each…
Information Provision, Voter Coordination, and Electoral Accountability: Evidence from Mexican Social Networks
How do social networks moderate the way political information influences electoral accountability? We propose a simple model in which incumbent malfeasance revelations can facilitate coordination around less malfeasant challenger parties in highly connected voter networks, even when voters update favorably about incumbent party malfeasance. We provide evidence from Mexico of this mechanism by leveraging a field experiment in a context where the p…
Able and Mostly Willing: An Empirical Anatomy of Information's Effect on Voter‐Driven Accountability in Senegal
Political accountability may be constrained by the reach and relevance of information campaigns in developing democracies and—upon receiving information—voters' ability and will to hold politicians accountable. To illuminate voter‐level constraints and information relevance absent dissemination constraints, we conducted a field experiment around Senegal's 2017 parliamentary elections to examine the core theoretical steps linking receiving differe…
How Weakly Institutionalized Parties Monitor Brokers in Developing Democracies: Evidence from Postconflict Liberia
Political parties in sub‐Saharan Africa's developing democracies are often considered to lack sufficiently sophisticated machines to monitor and incentivize their political brokers. We challenge this view by arguing that the decentralized pyramidal structure of their machines allows them to engage in broker monitoring and incentivizing to mobilize voters, which ultimately improves their electoral performance. This capacity is concentrated (a) amo…
Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation
Diffusing Political Concerns: How Unemployment Information Passed between Social Ties Influences Danish Voters
National audience
Political Competition and State Capacity: Evidence from a Land Allocation Program in Mexico
We develop a model of the politics of state capacity building undertaken by incumbent parties that have a comparative advantage in clientelism rather than in public goods provision. The model predicts that, when challenged by opponents, clientelistic incumbents have the incentive to prevent investments in state capacity. We provide empirical support for the model’s implications by studying policy decisions by the Institutional Revolutionary Party…
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 …
An Informational Theory of Electoral Targeting in Young Clientelistic Democracies: Evidence from Senegal
Existing theories of electoral targeting focus on voter partisanship and thus are at odds with the significant vote switching and weakly institutionalized parties that characterize young clientelistic democracies. We propose and test a theory of group-level targeting driven by groups’ capacity to coordinate votes and parties’ differential information about such capacity. Unlike current theories, ours assumes that most groups are nonpartisan and r…
Who Gets Hired? Political Patronage and Bureaucratic Favoritism
Most research on biased public sector hiring highlights local politicians' incentives to distribute government positions to partisan supporters. Other studies instead point to the role of bureaucratic managers in allocating government jobs to close contacts. We jointly consider the relative importance of each source of biased hiring as an allocation problem between managers and politicians who have different preferences regarding public sector hi…
Who Debates, Who Wins? At-Scale Experimental Evidence on the Supply of Policy Information in a Liberian Election
We examine how the effects of initiatives intended to promote programmatic competition are conditioned by candidates' often mixed incentives to participate in them. In a nationwide debate initiative designed to solicit and widely rebroadcast policy promises from Liberian legislative candidates, we analyze the randomized encouragement of debate participation across districts. The intervention substantially increased the debate participation of lea…
When does education increase political participation? Evidence from Senegal
We argue that education's effect on political participation in developing democracies depends on the strength of democratic institutions. Education increases awareness of, and interest in, politics, which help citizens to prevent democratic erosion through increased political participation. We examine Senegal, a stable but developing democracy where presidential over-reach threatened to weaken democracy. For causal identification, we use a differ…
Empowering women facing gender-based violence amid Covid-19 through media campaigns
COVID-19 heightened women’s exposure to gender-based and intimate partner violence, especially in low-income and middle-income countries. We tested whether edutainment interventions shown to successfully combat gender-based and intimate partner violence when delivered in person can be effectively delivered using social (WhatsApp and Facebook) and traditional (TV) media. To do so, we randomized the mode of implementation of an intervention conduct…
Missionary Activity, Education, and Long-Run Political Development: Evidence Across Regime Types in Africa
In Africa, missionaries used schooling to gain adherents. We study how historical missionary activity shaped long-run education and political development across regime types. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to Catholic missionaries generated by their territorial administration system. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that proximity to historical diocese headquarters generally led to an increased presence of Ca…
Family Ties, Social Control, and Authoritarian Distribution to Elites
Authoritarian survival theories maintain that dictators distribute rents to elites who can control the masses. Yet, it is unclear how dictators choose beneficiary elites. We argue that elites centrally placed in their locality's family network enjoy greater influence on other community members and, thus, are more likely to be co-opted through distribution. We test this argument by compiling a novel dataset of Paraguayan family networks that we li…
Sustaining Exposure to Fact-Checks: Misinformation Discernment, Media Consumption, and Its Political Implications
Exposure to misinformation can affect citizens' beliefs, political preferences, and compliance with government policies. However, little is known about how to durably reduce susceptibility to misinformation, particularly in the Global South. We evaluate an intervention in South Africa that encouraged individuals to consume biweekly fact-checks-as text messages or podcasts-via WhatsApp for six months. Sustained exposure to these fact-checks induce…
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 …
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 …
Parties, Brokers, and Voter Mobilization: How Turnout Buying Depends Upon the Party's Capacity to Monitor Brokers
Despite its prevalence, little is known about when parties buy turnout. We emphasize the problem of parties monitoring local brokers with incentives to shirk. Our model suggests that parties extract greater turnout buying effort from their brokers where they can better monitor broker performance and where favorable voters would not otherwise turn out. Exploiting exogenous variation in the number of polling stations-and thus electoral information …
The Effect of Education on Civic and Political Engagement in Nonconsolidated Democracies: Evidence from Nigeria
Developing democracies are experiencing unprecedented increases in primary and secondary schooling. To identify education's long-run political effects, we use a difference-in-differences design that leverages variation across local government areas and gender in the intensity of Nigeria's 1976 universal primary education reform—one of Africa's largest ever educational expansions—to instrument for education. We find large increases in basic civic …
Political Brokers: Partisans or Agents? Evidence from the Mexican Teachers' Union
Political brokers mobilize voters all over the world, yet little is known about what motivates them to do so. This article theorizes about two drivers of brokers' efforts: (1) incentives—monetary rewards or sanctions—and monitoring and (2) partisan attachment. We examine our theory using data on the Mexican National Educational Workers Union (SNTE), Latin America's largest union and a well‐known political machine. Consistent with the role of teac…
Agents of the Regime? Traditional Leaders and Electoral Politics in South Africa
Traditional leaders are often given subnational authority in developing democracies. Although ubiquitous, the electoral consequences of their power have received little attention, often due to empirical challenges. We argue that traditional leaders, whose power and resources largely depend on the state, have incentives to support incumbent political parties who can guarantee their survival and provide them with rents. We study this quid pro quo i…
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 …
Information Provision, Voter Coordination, and Electoral Accountability: Evidence from Mexican Social Networks
How do social networks moderate the way political information influences electoral accountability? We propose a simple model in which incumbent malfeasance revelations can facilitate coordination around less malfeasant challenger parties in highly connected voter networks, even when voters update favorably about incumbent party malfeasance. We provide evidence from Mexico of this mechanism by leveraging a field experiment in a context where the p…
Testing Models of Social Learning on Networks: Evidence From Two Experiments
We theoretically and empirically study an incomplete information model of social learning. Agents initially guess the binary state of the world after observing a private signal. In subsequent rounds, agents observe their network neighbors' previous guesses before guessing again. Agents are drawn from a mixture of learning types—Bayesian, who face incomplete information about others' types, and DeGroot, who average their neighbors' previous period…
An Informational Theory of Electoral Targeting in Young Clientelistic Democracies: Evidence from Senegal
Existing theories of electoral targeting focus on voter partisanship and thus are at odds with the significant vote switching and weakly institutionalized parties that characterize young clientelistic democracies. We propose and test a theory of group-level targeting driven by groups’ capacity to coordinate votes and parties’ differential information about such capacity. Unlike current theories, ours assumes that most groups are nonpartisan and r…
Publicising Malfeasance: When the Local Media Structure Facilitates Electoral Accountability in Mexico
Malfeasance in local governments is common in developing democracies. Electoral accountability could mitigate such malfeasance, but may require media market structures that incentivise profit-maximising local media to report on incumbent malfeasance. We test this claim in Mexico, leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in the pre-election release of municipal audits revealing misallocated spending and access to broadcast media. We find that each…
How Weakly Institutionalized Parties Monitor Brokers in Developing Democracies: Evidence from Postconflict Liberia
Political parties in sub‐Saharan Africa's developing democracies are often considered to lack sufficiently sophisticated machines to monitor and incentivize their political brokers. We challenge this view by arguing that the decentralized pyramidal structure of their machines allows them to engage in broker monitoring and incentivizing to mobilize voters, which ultimately improves their electoral performance. This capacity is concentrated (a) amo…
Political Competition and State Capacity: Evidence from a Land Allocation Program in Mexico
We develop a model of the politics of state capacity building undertaken by incumbent parties that have a comparative advantage in clientelism rather than in public goods provision. The model predicts that, when challenged by opponents, clientelistic incumbents have the incentive to prevent investments in state capacity. We provide empirical support for the model’s implications by studying policy decisions by the Institutional Revolutionary Party…
Diffusing Political Concerns: How Unemployment Information Passed between Social Ties Influences Danish Voters
National audience
Able and Mostly Willing: An Empirical Anatomy of Information's Effect on Voter‐Driven Accountability in Senegal
Political accountability may be constrained by the reach and relevance of information campaigns in developing democracies and—upon receiving information—voters' ability and will to hold politicians accountable. To illuminate voter‐level constraints and information relevance absent dissemination constraints, we conducted a field experiment around Senegal's 2017 parliamentary elections to examine the core theoretical steps linking receiving differe…
Empowering women facing gender-based violence amid Covid-19 through media campaigns
COVID-19 heightened women’s exposure to gender-based and intimate partner violence, especially in low-income and middle-income countries. We tested whether edutainment interventions shown to successfully combat gender-based and intimate partner violence when delivered in person can be effectively delivered using social (WhatsApp and Facebook) and traditional (TV) media. To do so, we randomized the mode of implementation of an intervention conduct…
When does education increase political participation? Evidence from Senegal
We argue that education's effect on political participation in developing democracies depends on the strength of democratic institutions. Education increases awareness of, and interest in, politics, which help citizens to prevent democratic erosion through increased political participation. We examine Senegal, a stable but developing democracy where presidential over-reach threatened to weaken democracy. For causal identification, we use a differ…
Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation
Who Gets Hired? Political Patronage and Bureaucratic Favoritism
Most research on biased public sector hiring highlights local politicians' incentives to distribute government positions to partisan supporters. Other studies instead point to the role of bureaucratic managers in allocating government jobs to close contacts. We jointly consider the relative importance of each source of biased hiring as an allocation problem between managers and politicians who have different preferences regarding public sector hi…
Accountability in Developing Democracies: The Impact of the Internet, Social Media, and Polarization
This article reviews the recent literature on accountability in developing democracies through the lens of two nested principal–agent problems: the relationship between voters and elected politicians and that between elected politicians and bureaucrats. We focus on two global trends that we view as reshaping these accountability relationships in important ways: the rise of the internet and social media on the one hand and increasing political pol…
Missionary Activity, Education, and Long-Run Political Development: Evidence Across Regime Types in Africa
In Africa, missionaries used schooling to gain adherents. We study how historical missionary activity shaped long-run education and political development across regime types. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to Catholic missionaries generated by their territorial administration system. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that proximity to historical diocese headquarters generally led to an increased presence of Ca…
Family Ties, Social Control, and Authoritarian Distribution to Elites
Authoritarian survival theories maintain that dictators distribute rents to elites who can control the masses. Yet, it is unclear how dictators choose beneficiary elites. We argue that elites centrally placed in their locality's family network enjoy greater influence on other community members and, thus, are more likely to be co-opted through distribution. We test this argument by compiling a novel dataset of Paraguayan family networks that we li…
Who Debates, Who Wins? At-Scale Experimental Evidence on the Supply of Policy Information in a Liberian Election
We examine how the effects of initiatives intended to promote programmatic competition are conditioned by candidates' often mixed incentives to participate in them. In a nationwide debate initiative designed to solicit and widely rebroadcast policy promises from Liberian legislative candidates, we analyze the randomized encouragement of debate participation across districts. The intervention substantially increased the debate participation of lea…
Sustaining Exposure to Fact-Checks: Misinformation Discernment, Media Consumption, and Its Political Implications
Exposure to misinformation can affect citizens' beliefs, political preferences, and compliance with government policies. However, little is known about how to durably reduce susceptibility to misinformation, particularly in the Global South. We evaluate an intervention in South Africa that encouraged individuals to consume biweekly fact-checks-as text messages or podcasts-via WhatsApp for six months. Sustained exposure to these fact-checks induce…
Get Out the Volunteer: Encouraging Diverse Political Party Activism
Political parties in advanced democracies face a dual challenge: fewer citizens are willing to volunteer, and those who remain active are disproportionately older and male. This is troubling given the central role that volunteers play in campaigns and party processes. Whether party leaders can recruit a larger and more diverse activist base remains an open question. We partnered with a major party in the Netherlands and conducted two field experi…
Political science (23 works) · Politics (21 works) · Economics (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (10 works) · Media Influence and Politics (8 works) · Democracy (7 works) · Sociology (7 works)