Can Government-Controlled Media Cause Social Change? Television and Fertility in India *

Abstract Does exposure to government-controlled media shape social attitudes and behaviors? Governments routinely enlist public broadcasting to advance progressive social change. However, the efficacy of so-called "developmental communications" is unclear. Modernization theorists contend that the media serve as an important instrument of persuasion in poor countries-especially among certain population groups. Yet, where institutionalization is weak, government-controlled outlets are often dominated by ruling-party propaganda, which may induce distrust in the media and its messaging campaigns. To adjudicate which of these propositions holds sway, we investigate television's impact on fertility preferences and behaviors in India. Exploiting unique data, as well as plausibly exogenous variation in TV ownership due to electromagnetic wave refraction, we show that exposure to India's monopolistic state broadcaster, Doordarshan, caused women to desire fewer children-especially fewer girls-while increasing family planning discussions and contraceptive use. The results demonstrate that even biased state media can engender far-reaching societal transformation. * We than

Hindu-Muslim Violence in India: A Postscript from the Twenty-First Century

The importance of religious conflict today can hardly be overstated. The appalling situation in Syria—stemming from the activism of the Islamic State (ISIS)—is just one cruel reminder of the utter devastation that religious extremism can wreak. The tragic humanitarian crisis in Myanmar involving the displacement of the Rohingya Muslims has strong religious overtones, as do the attacks on Muslims and Christians by Buddhist nationalist groups in Sri Lanka

Voter information campaigns and political accountability: cumulative findings from a preregistered meta-analysis of coordinated trials

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives’ performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning

Replication Data for: The Majority-Minority Divide in Attitudes toward Internal Migration: Evidence from Mumbai

Rapid urbanization is among the major processes affecting the developing world. The influx of migrants to cities frequently provokes antagonism on the part of long-term residents, manifested in labor-market discrimination, political nativism, and violence. We implemented a novel, face-to-face survey experiment on a representative sample of Mumbai's population to elucidate the causes of anti-migrant hostility. Our findings point to the centrality of material self-interest in the formation of native attitudes. Dominant-group members fail to heed migrants' ethnic attributes, yet for minority-group respondents, considerations of ethnicity and economic threat cross-cut. We introduce a new political mechanism to explain this divergence. Minority communities facing persistent discrimination view in-migration by co-ethnics as a means of enlarging their demographic and electoral base, thereby achieving "safety in numbers." Our paper sheds light on the drivers of preferences over internal migration, while contributing insights to the international immigration literature, and to policy debates over urban expansion

Replication Data for: Secular Party Rule and Religious Violence in Pakistan

Replication files for Secular Party Rule and Religious Violence in Pakista

The Electoral Consequences of Mass Religious Events: India’s Kumbh Mela

Mass ritualized gatherings like pilgrimages are central to religious practice globally. Do they generate votes for religious parties? The events may heighten religiosity, enlarging support for parties seen as owning religious policy issues. Such parties might also co-opt the events to organize and campaign. We evaluate the electoral impact of India’s Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival considered the world’s biggest human assembly, leveraging its astrologically determined timing combined with districts’ proximity by rail to the festival sites. The Kumbh Mela boostsHindu nationalists’ vote share. Mechanisms tests suggest it does so by increasing religious orthodoxy—seen in the adoption of Brahminical dietary practices—and by strengthening Hindu nationalist party infrastructure. Communal violence is unaffected, but the events are electorally polarizing; they cause India’s main secular-leaning party to perform better in regions with denser concentrations of religious minorities. Our study offers a new account of how confessional parties make inroads in multiethnic democracies

Poverty and Prejudice Before Genocide

Genocides rank among the darkest episodes in our history. What drives prejudice against targeted outgroups in the lead-up to mass killings? We theorize the role played by democratization, ethnoreligious threat perceptions, and economic discontent in generating antiminority hatred. We assess these factors’ predictive strength using a new 22,000-person survey of Islamophobia in Myanmar, fielded shortly before the 2017 ethnic cleansing of the country’s Muslim Rohingya population. Integrating survey responses with administrative data, events data, and geodata, we document a robust association between poverty and anti-Muslim attitudes among members of Myanmar’s Buddhist majority. The relationship holds ecologically and by individual. Further tests point to scapegoating rather than resource competition as the most likely mechanism. Other commonly cited drivers of intolerance receive little empirical support. By leveraging a critical contemporary case, our paper sheds light on the material foundations of polarized social preferences in settings at high risk of intergroup violenc

The Electoral Consequences of Mass Religious Events

Mass ritualized gatherings like pilgrimages are central to religious practice globally. Do they generate votes for religious parties? Theoretically, the events may heighten religiosity, enlarging support for parties seen as “owning” religious policy issues. Such parties might also engage in “platform co-optation,” piggybacking on the events to organize and campaign. We evaluate the electoral impact of India’s Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival considered the world’s largest human assembly, leveraging its astrologically determined timing combined with districts’ proximity by rail to the festival sites. The Kumbh Mela boosts Hindu nationalists’ vote share. Tests of mechanisms suggest it does so by fomenting identity change—evidenced by increases in communal violence and the adoption of orthodox dietary practices—and by bolstering party infrastructure. India’s main secular-leaning party loses support, but not in regions with denser concentrations of religious minorities. Our study offers a new account of how confessional parties make inroads in multiethnic democracies

Replication Data for: Does Electing Extremist Parties Increase Violence and Intolerance?

We estimate the effect of incumbency by Islamist parties on the incidence of religious violence and intolerance in Indonesia, exploiting discontinuities in the proportional representation system used to allocate seats in district legislative elections---the most local tier of parliamentary government. We find that the presence of additional Islamist (as opposed to secular nationalist) legislators exacerbates religious conflict according to certain measures. There is no evidence that Islamist rule affects average attitudes toward religious minorities among majority-group survey respondents, although it does increase expressions of extreme intolerance. Social emboldening may underlie these effects, as Islamist incumbency appears to boost the perceived acceptability of holding intolerant worldviews. The results shed light on the consequences of having extremist parties gain a share in local power