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) among incumbent parties with greater access to resources and (b) where the scope for turnout buying is higher due to the higher costs of voting. Using postwar Liberia to test our argument, we combine rich administrative data with exogenous variation in parties' ability to monitor their brokers. We show that brokers mobilize voters en masse to signal effort, that increased monitoring ability improves the incumbent party's electoral performance, and that this is particularly so in precincts in which voters must travel farther to vote and thus turnout buying opportunities are greater

The role of networks in political economy

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 154-159).This dissertation investigates the different roles that networks play in political economy. In the first chapter, I study how a political party uses electoral data to monitor and incentivize the political brokers who control its clientelistic networks. I study networks organized around rural communal lands in Mexico, which are largely controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). I use the fact that the level at which brokers operate (the communal land) does not necessarily coincide with the level at which the electoral data is disclosed (the electoral section). Guided by a simple model, I compute a measure of how informative the available electoral data is about the performance of the PRI's political brokers, as a function of the degree of overlap between communal lands and electoral sections. I compare the vote share for the PRI in communal lands where the electoral data is more or less informative, both when the PRI does and does not have access to resources to fund and incentivize brokers. The results suggest that clientelistic networks contribute significantly to the enforcement of clientelistic transactions. In the second chapter, which is co-authored with Joana Monteiro, we study the role of media in compensating political biases. In particular, we analyze how media presence, connectivity and ownership affect the distribution of federal drought relief transfers to Brazilian municipalities. We find that municipalities that are not aligned with the federal government have a lower probability of receiving funds conditional on experiencing low precipitation. However, we show that the presence of radio stations compensates for this bias. This effect is driven by municipalities that have radio stations connected to a regional network rather than by the presence of local radio stations. In addition, the effect of network-connected radio stations increases with their network coverage. These findings suggests that the connection of a radio station to a network is important because it increases the salience of disasters, making it harder for the federal government to ignore non-allies. We show that our findings are not explained by the ownership and manipulation of media by politicians. In the third chapter, which is co-authored with Arun Chandrasekhar and Emily Breza, we shed light on the relationship between network characteristics and investment decisions through a lab experiment in the field. We focus on the role for third parties to act as informal contract enforcers. Our protocol builds on a basic two-party trust game with a sender and receiver, to which we introduce a third-party to serve as either a monitor or punisher. The ex-ante benefits of a third party judge are ambiguous. On one hand, a third party may result in larger sender transfers due to her ability to punish. On the other hand, the punisher might act in a way to build reputation or may crowd-out intrinsic motivation. Importantly, these costs and benefits of a punisher might vary with her centrality in the network. Our findings are consistent with both the role for the punisher to induce efficiency and to crowd out intrinsic motivation. They are also consistent with the effects of reputation-building by the punisher. Importantly, we find that very network-peripheral punishers are detrimental to efficiency, while network-central individuals may improve outcomes when given the technology to punish. We also show that these results cannot be explained by either the fact that the punisher also acts as a monitor, or by the punisher's characteristics such as elite status, educational attainment, caste, or proxies for wealth.by Horacio Alejandro Larreguy Arbesú.Ph.D

Who Debates, Who Wins? At-Scale Experimental Evidence on the Supply of Policy Information in a Liberian Election

We examine how candidate selection into the supply of policy information determines its electoral effects. In a nationwide debate initiative designed to solicit and rebroadcast policy promises from Liberian legislative candidates, we randomized the encouragement of debate participation across districts. The intervention substantially increased the debate participation of leading candidates but led to uneven electoral returns for these candidates, with incumbents benefiting at the expense of challengers. These results are driven by differences in compliance: complying incumbents, but not challengers, positively selected into debate participation based on the alignment of their policy priorities with those of their constituents

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 strategy of distributive policies. We develop a model in which incumbents target local public goods to groups for whom this is a credible signal of commitment, namely, those with a history of reciprocal relationship. When incumbents face increased electoral competition, however, other groups require a stronger signal, which is emitted by the costly creation of new units that reduces the cost of future transfers to those groups. We test our theory using electoral and public goods data from Senegal and find robust support for its predictions

You get what you pay for: When do Certification Programs improve Public Service Delivery?

Poor local public service delivery is common across the Global South. We argue that the short-term unobservability of investments to improve service delivery combine with adverse selection to weaken incentives for governments to make such investments. While programs to certify investments can mitigate this monitoring problem, the certification process’s effectiveness can be undermined by opportunistic politicians and certifiers. We test this argument using a Mexican program designed to certify service delivery investments, where certifications are self-assessed by municipal governments and validated by corruptible third-party institutions. Difference-in-differences estimates show that the program did not ultimately improve municipal public service delivery on average. Consistent with our model, this effect is only positive when the third party is unlikely to be corruptible and when the likelihood that the incumbent is not corruptible in producing the service is large. These findings highlight the challenges in improving service delivery and the importance of incentive-compatible monitoring

Eat Widely, Vote Wisely ? Lessons from a Campaign Against Vote Buying in Uganda

We estimate the effects of one of the largest anti-vote-buying campaigns ever studied—with half a million voters exposed across 1427 villages—in Uganda’s 2016 elections. Working with civil society organizations, we designed the study to estimate how voters and candidates responded to their campaign in treatment and spillover villages, and how impacts varied with campaign intensity. Despite its heavy footprint, the campaign did not reduce politician offers of gifts in exchange for votes. However, it had sizable effects on people’s votes. Votes swung from well-funded incumbents (who buy most votes) towards their poorly-financed challengers. We argue the swing arose from changes in village social norms plus the tactical response of candidates. While the campaign struggled to instill norms of refusing gifts, it leveled the electoral playing field by convincing some voters to abandon norms of reciprocity—thus accepting gifts from politicians but voting for their preferred candidate

Information Versus Control: The Electoral Consequences of Polling Place Creation

We examine the incentives incumbents face when creating new polling places. First, doing so improves incumbents’ ability to monitor brokers and voters by reducing the number of registered voters per polling station. Second, it reduces the distance traveled by citizens to vote, which undercuts incumbents’ ability to control the electorate via turnout buying. We evaluate this trade-off in the context of Uganda, where the incumbent significantly influences electoral administration. Drawing on rich administrative data, we leverage discontinuities in the creation of polling places to causally identify the independent effects of the number of voters per polling station and distance to vote on electoral outcomes. We find that decreasing improves incumbent electoral outcomes, while reducing worsens them. The benefits for incumbent outweigh the costs, which rationalizes recent developments to expand polling infrastructure in Uganda and elsewhere

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 incum-bent 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 (PRI) that affected local state capacity across Mex-ican municipalities and over time. Our difference-in-differences and instrumental variable identification strategies exploit a national shock that threatened the Mexican government’s hegemony in the early 1960s. The intensity of this shock, which varied across municipalities, was partly explained by severe droughts that occurred during the 1950s

Can media campaigns empower women facing gender-based violence amid COVID-19?

Women’s exposure to gender-based and intimate partner violence (GBV and IPV) is particularly acute due to COVID-19, especially in the Global South. We test whether edutainment interventions that have been shown to success-fully combat GBV and IPV when delivered in person can be effectively de-livered using social (WhatsApp and Facebook) and traditional (TV) media. To do so, we randomized the mode of implementation of an intervention con-ducted by an Egyptian women’s rights non-governmental organization seeking to support women while accommodating social distancing amid COVID-19. We found WhatsApp to be a more effective way to deliver the intervention than Facebook, but no differences across outcomes between WhatsApp and TV dis-semination. Our findings show that these media campaigns had no impact on women’s attitudes toward gender or marital equality, or the justifiability of vi-olence. However, the campaign did increase women’s knowledge, hypothetical, and reported use of resources available to those exposed to GBV and IPV

Can media campaigns empower women facing gender-based violence amid COVID-19?

Women’s exposure to gender-based and intimate partner violence (GBV and IPV) is particularly acute due to COVID-19, especially in the Global South. We test whether edutainment interventions that have been shown to success-fully combat GBV and IPV when delivered in person can be effectively de-livered using social (WhatsApp and Facebook) and traditional (TV) media. To do so, we randomized the mode of implementation of an intervention con-ducted by an Egyptian women’s rights non-governmental organization seeking to support women while accommodating social distancing amid COVID-19. We found WhatsApp to be a more effective way to deliver the intervention than Facebook, but no differences across outcomes between WhatsApp and TV dis-semination. Our findings show that these media campaigns had no impact on women’s attitudes toward gender or marital equality, or the justifiability of vi-olence. However, the campaign did increase women’s knowledge, hypothetical, and reported use of resources available to those exposed to GBV and IPV