How does the social structure of a neighborhood affect the linkage strategieschosen by politicians? We develop an argument that links the centrality ofindividuals and the social density of neighborhoods to the incidence of clientelismand targeted pork, respectively. We test the resulting hypotheses using acombination of original network, experimental and non-experimental survey datacollected across 7,452 households in 167 slums across three cities in India. Weprovide survey experimental evidence that targeted pork is an importantphenomenon in poor neighborhoods, on par with individual clientelism. We alsofind that socially central individuals are more likely to be targeted with privateclientelism and that more socially dense neighborhoods are more likely tocoordinate votes, attract pork, and achieve the legal prerequisites forcorresponding local public services.

Government efforts to restrict civic space have increased dramatically, including the proliferationof laws that constrain the operations of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Despite theseactions conflicting with the interests and objectives of many foreign donors, this proliferationhas been especially dramatic in aid-receiving countries. How do donors respond to these attacks,and do their responses vary according to how they prioritize support for advocacy work? Onone hand, advocacy-oriented donors may push back by increasing funding to projects thatsupport advocacy relative to other donors. Alternatively, advocacy-oriented donors may backdown by disproportionately decreasing support for advocacy as it becomes more difficult towork with local partners. We test these arguments using dyadic data on aid flows, originalglobal data tracking the enactment of restrictive NGOs laws, and a variety of research designsincluding two-way fixed effects event study models, synthetic control analysis, and placebo tests.We find strong evidence that advocacy-oriented donors back down. The findings advance ourunderstanding of the costs and benefits aid-receiving countries face when engaging in democraticbacksliding

One crucial feature of the ongoing global wave of democratic backsliding is that aspiringautocrats seek to influence the media, oftentimes through legal restrictions on the press andsocial media. Yet little research has examined how formal and social media respond to thoselegal restrictions targeting the free flow of information. We develop an original argumentlinking key characteristics of media sources to the regulatory environment and examine howthe content and sentiment of their coverage responds to restrictive media laws. We test ourclaims using an enormous corpus of electronic media in Tanzania and employ two state-of-the-art neural network models to classify the topics and sentiment of news stories. We thenestimate diff-in-diff models exploiting a significant legal change that targeted media houses.We find that critical news sources censor the tone of their coverage, even as they continueto cover the same issues; we also find that international news sources are unable to fill thehole left by a critical domestic press. The paper sheds light on the conditions under whichthe press can be resilient in the face of legal threats

The third wave of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s was accompanied by a spectac-ular decline in the international influence of authoritarian governments. Culminating withthe collapse of the Soviet Union, the ascendance of advanced democracies resulted in pres-sure on smaller and poorer countries to liberalize both their economies and their politicalsystems. However, the last 15 years has seen the most powerful non-democracies becomemore autocratic and more assertive in their foreign policies (Diamond,2020). Lead primarilyby China and Russia, this resurgence of authoritarian influence (RAI) has caused concernamong policymakers and pro-democracy advocates that powerful authoritarian governmentsare undermining democracy abroad.

There is growing affinity for audits as a tool to promote political accountabilityand reduce corruption. Nevertheless, knowledge about the mechanisms through whichaudits work remains limited. Our contribution is three-fold. First, while most work onaudits shows audits can work via citizen sanctions of bad performers, we emphasize thattheir effects can also run through prospective incentives, i.e., the desire to avoid pooraudit results in the first place. Second, we distinguish audits’ impact on prospectiveincentives and citizen sanctions using a field experiment in Ghana, where 150 districtswere randomized into two audit treatments targeting district procurement and over-sight of development projects. The timing of audits and data collection allows for aparsing of effects before and after audit results were disseminated. Third, we assess theeffect of audits on political officials using elite survey and survey experimental data. Weshow that officials respond powerfully to prospective incentives, particularly officialswho at baseline were in the worst performing districts. We also show that these ef-fects are especially strong in competitive districts, suggesting that audits prospectivelymotivate politicians to avoid future punishment from voters and/or party superiors.Findings that a crediblethreatof audit changes officials’ behavior lays groundwork tobetter design cost-effective audit systems.

In recent decades, mass deportation has become a key element of immigration policy in many countries,including the United States. To understand its impact, we draw on an original panel survey of deporteesin Guatemala. Our findings provide rare insight into their experiences. First, we find that most deporteesemigrated to the U.S. for economic reasons. Second, few committed non-migration crimes, the vastmajority worked, and many acquired assets that were left behind upon deportation. Third, deporteesfocus on security, employment, and social networks when deciding where to go upon re-entry. But, infollow-up surveys, we find they experience high unemployment and exposure to insecurity. Fourth, 78%of deportees say they might or definitely intend to remigrate in the coming year. Thus, without changesin sending country conditions, deportation is only a short-term solution for receiving countries seekingto address immigration policy, but it has enormous human impact on deportees.

State-building involves generating norms of quasi-voluntary compliance among citizensvia long-term exposure to centralized political authority. However, exposure to statehoodvaries considerably within countries and across time. To boot, state-building in the developingworld did not always displace sub-national identities by a national one; instead, elites usednational-level institutions to reify ethnic control. We argue that these facts produce conditionalquasi-voluntary compliance among ordinary citizens. Local variation in long-term exposureto the state increases citizens’ compliance with state authority if citizens’ ethnic group has ahistory of access to power. We combine a geographically-nuanced indicator of state exposurein Africa with a large sample of geo-located survey respondents to test this claim. Our resultsshow that proximity to historical centers of state administration is associated with greaterquasi-voluntary compliance for respondents with an ethnic identity that matches groups witha history of access to power. A case study of the precolonial kingdom of Buganda providesadditional qualitative and quantitative evidence in support of our argument.

Over the last decade a host of economists, sociologists, statisticians and social network analysts have been developing a body of knowledge on what features of networks, i.e., of social context, matter for human well-being. The key insight of this body of work is that the structure of community relations forms an underlying social safety net. The basic point is that challenges of economic resilience and local governance happen in particular communities that hugely vary in their internal organization, capacity for problem solving and collective action. Similarly, just as local communities have distinctive social, economic and political networks tying together their members, economic and governance systems have network ties that bind citizen/service users with neighborhood leaders, frontline providers, administrators and political officials.

We develop an argument linking the social density of neighborhoods to their ability to exchange votes for basic public services. We begin with resource-constrained politicians who allocate public investments to those neighborhoods where they have strong “vote banks”; we argue that slum-level social and political networks condition the capacity of local voters to coordinate on campaign and electoral behavior that define whether or not they can function as successful vote banks. We also provide evidence that many of the key assumptions underpinning standard, aspatial models of distributive politics do not hold. Our evidence comes from two rounds of surveys in 30 slums in Udaipur, India

Though weak states are associated with civil war, terrorism and other threats to humanity, the social sciences provide scant insight into why states vary in their capacity to govern across territory. This paper seeks to understand why states govern where they do in post-civil war settings where leaders face stark geographic choices about extending state capacity across territory in the face of resource constraints. We propose hypotheses derived from the distributive politics literature and test them using satellite data in six countries (Burundi, Côte Ivoire, Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Uganda). Contrary to several well-established theories, we find that state builders do not reward core supporters or target swing districts. They do focus benefits on capital cities, but this does not generalize to other urban settings. Instead, state leaders focus their efforts on areas that have a history of violence.

This draft Evidence Review Paper is one of several in a series commissioned by the USAID’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance. It was prepared by Jonathan Rodden, PhD (Stanford University) and Erik Wibbels, PhD (Duke University) through Social Impact. All rights reserved. The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the author(s) and should not be attributed in any manner whatsoever to USAID.

Reading the OECD welfare state literature as an outsider produces a profound sense of drama and mystery (at least by academic standards). Twenty years ago it was fashionable to forecast the death of the welfare state in the face of “globalization”, vaguely construed. Ten years ago, the diversity of welfare states were safe again thanks to a powerful coalition of beneficiaries and some modest, market-friendly tax reforms. Today, new threats have arisen in the guise of immigrants and bond markets; the former ostensibly reduce support for generous tax-transfer systems from inside the nation-state, while the latter insist on austerity from the outside. It is not obvious how much actual empirical change OECD welfare states have undergone, but the academic coverage has had an almost breathless excitement to it. From a death foretold to peace and prosperity and back again in nary two decades!

The correlation between natural resource abundance, authoritarianism and poor developmental outcomes—typically referred to as the resource curse—is one of the few findings in comparative politics and political economy on which there is something approaching a scholarly consensus. That the case, there is widespread disagreement as to the causal mechanisms behind the correlation. Indeed, we count 11 distinct causal stories linking resource abundance to political-economic outcomes. This dissensus persists in large part due to the empirical difficulty of testing alternative hypotheses cross-nationally and limits our understanding of the causal processes at work. We address this difficulty with two innovations: first, we integrate insights from the traditional “enclave economy” argument with work on economic geography to develop a new hypothesis to account for the negative relationship between resource dependence and poor developmental outcomes; second, we test our hypothesis against the 11 hypotheses culled from the literature in a new, better empirical context. We find support for our hypothesis and several others while discarding most of the conventional wisdom. In doing so, we serve to sharpen the debate on the factors underpinning the resource curse.

The social sciences have seen an explosion of interest in how group identities shape all manner of outcomes, from voting to civil conflict. One area where this research has been particularly prominent is that on how group identities—be they religious, ethnic, racial or otherwise—influence redistribution. Empirical research suggests that heterogeneous societies redistribute less, have smaller governments and deliver fewer public goods, and individual-level data indicates that religiosity and ethnic identity have important implications for preferences for redistribution (Luttmer 2001; Alesina and Glaeser 2004). At the same time, the various theoretical models that might explain these findings provide very different arguments and often bear loose resemblance to the empirical work. The result is that we have apparently robust empirical findings without a clear understanding of their theoretical underpinnings.

The social sciences have seen an explosion of interest in how group identities shape all manner of outcomes, from voting to civil conflict. One area where this research has been particularly prominent is that on how group identities—be they religious, ethnic, racial or otherwise—influence redistribution. Empirical research suggests that heterogeneous societies redistribute less, have smaller governments and deliver fewer public goods, and individual-level data indicates that religiosity and ethnic identity have important implications for preferences for redistribution (Luttmer 2001; Alesina and Glaeser 2004). At the same time, the various theoretical models that might explain these findings provide very different arguments and often bear loose resemblance to the empirical work. The result is that we have apparently robust empirical findings without a clear understanding of their theoretical underpinnings.

From Spain and Greece to Brazil and South Africa, dualized labor markets are a worldwide phenomenon. In many countries, workers are divided between those with permanent contracts that come with valuable benefits and extensive labor market protections and those who work under contingent contracts or no contracts at all. This latter group receives few or no labor market protections and lower levels of social benefits. They are the world’s labor market outsiders, and recent research has suggested that this pool of outsiders has important implications for the nature of democratic politics in the 21st century