Published or forthcoming articles:
Tempering the Taste for Vengeance: Information about Prisoners and Policy Choices in Chile (co-authored with Fernando G. Cafferata & Carlos Scartascini). Comparative Political Studies 56 (10): 1506-1536. (available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221141836)
Punitive anti-crime policies in the Americas have contributed to steadily increasing rates of incarceration. Harsh penalties are often demanded by citizens, making them attractive to politicians. Yet the contextual determinants of participation in crime are rarely understood by the public. In this article, we employ a survey experiment conducted in Chile in order to examine how the provision of information about the prison population shapes tastes for punitive anti-crime policies. Respondents in the treatment group received information about the low educational attainment of prisoners. This information led to substantial changes in policy preferences. Tasked with allocating resources to anti-crime policies using a fixed budget, treated respondents assigned between 20% to 50% more to socially oriented anti-crime policies (relative to punitive policies) than respondents in the control group, and they reduced their support for "iron fist'' policing. Our findings suggest that providing information to citizens might change the policy equilibrium in the Americas.
A Heavy Hand or a Helping Hand? Information and Citizen Preferences for Anti-Crime Policy (co-authored with Carlos Scartascini). 2022. Journal of Public Policy 42(2): 364-389 (available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0143814X21000246)
Anti-crime policy is often unresponsive to reductions in crime. To address why, we provide a model and empirical test of how citizens’ anti-crime policy preferences respond to information. Our model shows that preferences for anti-crime policy hinge on expectations about the crime rate: punitive policies are preferred in high crime contexts, whereas social policies are preferred in low crime contexts. We evaluate these expectations through an information experiment embedded in the 2017 Latin American Public Opinion Project survey conducted in Panama. As expected by our theory, a high crime message induced stronger preferences in favour of punitive policies. Unanticipated by our theory, but in line with cursory evidence and survey results, we find that a low crime message did not induce stronger preferences in favour of social policies. These findings are consistent with policy ratcheting: punitive policies increase during periods of high crime and remain in place during periods of low crime.
Pandemics and Political Development: The Electoral Legacy of the Black Death in Germany (co-authored w/ Jan Vogler). 2021. World Politics 73 (3): 393 - 440 (available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887121000034)
Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? We address this question by examining the consequences of the most deadly pandemic of the last millennium: the Black Death (1347-1351). Our claim is that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if they impose sufficient loss of life so as to augment the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor repressive regimes (such as serfdom) become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. We test our theory by tracing out the local consequences of the Black Death in German-speaking Central Europe. We find that areas hit hardest by the pandemic were more likely to: (1) adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns; (2) exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics; and (3) have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler's National Socialist Party in the Weimar Republic's fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections.
Buying Power: Electoral Strategy before the Secret Vote. 2020. American Political Science Review 114 (4): 1086-1102 (available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0003055420000568)
Research on clientelism emphasizes the use of brokers to mobilize voters. To utilize these agents efficiently, politicians must learn about brokers’ relative abilities and allocate scarce resources accordingly. Drawing upon a hand-coded dataset based on the archives of Gustavo Capanema, a powerful mid-20th-century congressman from Minas Gerais, Brazil, this paper offers the first direct evidence of such learning dynamics. The analysis concentrates on Brazil’s pre-secret ballot era, a time when measuring broker performance was particularly straightforward. Consistent with theories of political learning, the data demonstrate that resource flows to local machines were contingent on the deviation between actual and expected votes received in previous elections. Moreover, given politicians’ ability to discern mobilization capacity, payments to brokers were highly effective in bringing out the vote.
Vote Secrecy with Diverse Voters (co-authored w/ Danilo Medeiros). 2020. Comparative Political Studies 53 (3-4): 567-600 (available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019859040).
Why would incumbent politicians adopt the secret ballot when doing so weakens the advantages of incumbency? Why is the secret ballot considered a democratizing reform in some settings, whereas in others it is associated with democratic backsliding? We provide theory and empirics to address these questions. Our starting point is the observation that the secret ballot had two consequences. It reduced the capacity to monitor the vote, thereby dampening the efficacy of clientelism. Yet depending on literacy and electoral rules, it could also narrow political participation. Recognizing this, we endogenize politicians’ preferences over the secret ballot, concentrating on the role of their personal and constituency characteristics. Legislative roll call voting data from Brazil’s Second Republic (1945-1964) is used to test our framework. Consistent with expectations, the level of literacy of legislators’ supporters and the strength of their local ties strongly influenced the choice to adopt the secret ballot.
Lying About Corruption in Surveys: Evidence from a Joint Response Model (co-authored with Virginia Oliveros). 2020 International Journal of Public Opinion Research 32 (2): 384-395 (available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edz019).
As is the case with other undesirable behaviors, survey respondents tend to underreport corrupt behavior. Survey-based estimates utilizing direct questions about corruption are thus likely to underestimate the incidence of this phenomenon. Importantly, bias in reporting may be systematically related to personal characteristics. This paper studies how individual characteristics shape untruthful reporting in surveys about corruption. It does so by using a novel technique, the joint response model, which allows us to generate unbiased estimates of the extent of corruption among respondents as well as the proclivity towards untruthful reporting among bearers of the sensitive trait. We find that truthfulness under direct questioning differs by income, and to some degree by education, but not by gender and age.
Ballot Reform as Suffrage Restriction: Evidence from Brazil’s Second Republic. 2019. American Journal of Political Science 63 (4): 920-935 (available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12438).
Few innovations in democratic institutional design are considered as fundamental as the introduction of voting through the use of a uniform, official, and secret ballot. One account claims that the official ballot liberates dependent voters from the dictates of local elites, thereby enhancing democratic competition. Another argues that in contexts of widespread illiteracy its adoption may be tantamount to a suffrage restriction. This paper adjudicates between these views by drawing upon an original dataset of municipal-level voting returns from Brazil’s Second Republic (1945-1964). The unique staggered rollout of the official ballot during this period permits one to assess its impact with unprecedented accuracy. The article finds that the primary consequence of ballot reform was suffrage restriction. Rather than liberating poor and dependent voters, the official ballot made it exceedingly difficult for these individuals to vote. Moreover, parliamentary debates indicate that this was an anticipated and intended effect of the reform.
Police Violence and the Underreporting of Crime (co-authored with Virginia Oliveros). 2018. Economics & Politics 30 (1): 78-105.
This paper examines the relationship between police violence and the reporting of crime. Utilizing original data from a large-scale household survey conducted in Costa Rica from October 2013 to April 2014 (n=4200), we find that the observation of police violence significantly reduces citizens’ willingness to report crime. The implications of this finding are explored using a a game-theoretic model of crime, crime reporting, and police misconduct. The model reveals that although the prospect of police violence against criminals may generate a degree of deterrence for criminal behavior, permissiveness towards police violence also raises expectations about the likelihood of police abuse against law abiding citizens. Consistent with our empirics, this reduces citizens’ propensity to report crime, thereby fostering a climate of impunity for criminal activity.
Corruption as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica (co-authored with Ana Corbacho, Virginia Oliveros, and Mauricio Ruiz-Vega). 2016. American Journal of Political Science 60 (4): 1077-1092.
An influential literature argues that corruption behaves as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Its central claim is that the individual returns to corruption are a function of the perceived corruptibility of the other members of society. Empirically, this implies that if one were to exogenously increase beliefs about societal levels of corruption, willingness to engage in corruption should also increase. We evaluate this implication by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large-scale household survey recently conducted in the Gran Área Metropolitana of Costa Rica. Changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of Costa Ricans who have personally witnessed an act of corruption. Consistent with the self-fulfilling prophecy hypothesis, we find that internalizing the information from the display on average increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to bribe a police officer by approximately .05 to .10.
When to Protect? Using the Crosswise Model to Integrate Protected and Direct Responses in Surveys of Sensitive Behavior (co-authored with Virginia Oliveros, Ana Corbacho, and Mauricio Ruiz-Vega). 2016. Political Analysis 24 (2): 132-156.
Sensitive survey techniques (SSTs) are frequently used to study sensitive behaviors. However, existing strategies for employing SSTs lead to highly variable prevalence estimates and do not permit analysts to address the question of whether the use of an SST is actually necessary. The current article presents a survey questioning strategy and corresponding statistical framework that fills this gap. By jointly analyzing survey responses generated by an SST (the crosswise model) along with direct responses about the sensitive behavior, the article’s framework addresses the question of whether the use of an SST is required to study a given sensitive behavior, provides an efficient estimate of the prevalence of the sensitive behavior, and, in its extended form, efficiently estimates how individual characteristics relate to the likelihood of engaging in the behavior. The utility of the approach is demonstrated through an examination of gender differences in proclivities towards corruption in Costa Rica.
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis. 2014. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 9 (3): 269-300. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00013040)
An emerging literature emphasizes the importance of vote brokers for electoral politics in the developing world. Yet in spite of the great interest in the topic, attempts to assess the impact of vote brokerage on election returns are exceedingly rare. This paper provides the first explicit assessment of the electoral returns to politicians from purchasing the allegiances of brokers. It does so by drawing upon a unique dataset documenting the allocation of off-the-books payments to vote brokers during a gubernatorial reelection campaign in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. The study finds that in the typical municipality buying off local brokers was associated with a 4 to 6 percentage point increase in the vote share obtained by the governor. All told, the findings suggest that vote brokerage is a resilient form of political linkage that can shape vote choice even in contexts of vote secrecy and intermediate levels of economic development.
Yesterday's Heroes, Today's Villains: Ideology, Corruption, and Democratic Performance. 2014. Journal of Theoretical Politics 26 (2): 249-282.
This paper develops a game-theoretic model for assessing the relationship between ideological divisions in a society and prospects for good governance. Synthesizing the insights of the literature on political career concerns with those from the literature on issue framing, the model emphasizes that ideological balance---rough equality in the ideological component of utility the median voter derives from government and opposition---is the key to good governance. Polities which are ideologically balanced are ruled by elites who attempt to impress their merit upon the electorate through the provision of public goods. Ideologically imbalanced polities are ruled by elites who use public resources for their own consumption and who court voters through socially unproductive issue framing. The cases of pre-revolutionary Cuba, post-apartheid South Africa, and post-Pinochet Chile are used to illustrate the crucial importance of ideological balance for good governance.
The Endurance and Eclipse of the Controlled Vote: A Formal Model of Vote Brokerage under the Secret Ballot (co-authored with Luis F. Medina) 2013. Economics and Politics 25 (3): 453-480.
Throughout much of mankind's experience with elections, vote brokers---local elites who direct the voting decisions of a subset of the electorate---have been able to make or break political careers. In various polities, brokers have thrived in spite of the secret ballot, a surprising outcome given that vote secrecy would ostensibly allow citizens to pocket the inducements offered by such individuals and vote their consciences anyway. To address this puzzle, we develop a framework for understanding the persistence and demise of vote brokerage under the secret ballot. In our model, a broker contracts with voters using an outcome contingent contract: some fixed benefit is promised to all voters sharing one of several observable profiles should the broker's candidate win the election. Using this framework, we demonstrate that the existence of brokerage depends on the size of the electorate contained within the jurisdiction controlled by the broker, with large jurisdiction sizes tending to drive brokerage out of existence. Moreover, we detail the manner in which the strategies employed by brokers depend upon their economic power, the size of social groups, and ideological polarization. Empirical evidence from Minas Gerais, Brazil is used to evaluate the performance of the model.
Governance Indicators and the Level of Analysis Problem: Empirical Findings from South America. 2013. British Journal of Political Science 43 (3): 505-540.
Studies of the link between state capacity and development often utilize national-level governance indicators to explain a host of nuanced development outcomes. As capacity in some bureaucratic agencies invariably matters much more for said outcomes than capacity in others, this work in essence proxies for capacity within the set of relevant agencies by using a measure of `mean' capacity across all agencies in a polity. The current paper argues that this practice is highly problematic for two reasons: 1) within-country, cross-agency diversity in capacity often overwhelms the variation encountered across public sectors considered in their entireties; 2) national-level reputations for capacity are not particularly informative about differences in capacity in functionally equivalent agencies in different countries. The paper empirically establishes both points by drawing upon data collected by the author in a large scale survey of public employees conducted in Bolivia, Brazil and Chile.
Understanding Off-the-Books Politics: Conducting Inference on the Determinants of Sensitive Behavior with Randomized Response Surveys. 2010. Political Analysis 18: 349-380.
This study presents a survey-based method for conducting inference into the determinants of sensitive political behavior. The approach combines two well established literatures in statistical methods in the social sciences: the randomized response (RR) methodology utilized to reduce evasive answer bias and the generalized propensity score (GPS) methodology utilized to draw inferences about causal effects in observational studies. The approach permits one to estimate the causal impact of a multi-valued predictor variable of interest on a given sensitive behavior in the face of unknown interaction effects between the predictor and confounders as well as non-linearities in the relationship between the confounders and the sensitive behavior. Simulation results point to the superior performance of the RR relative to direct survey questioning using this method for samples of moderate to large size. The utility of the approach is illustrated through an application to corruption in the public bureaucracy in three countries in South America.
Corruption and Political Decay: Evidence from Bolivia. 2009. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 4 (1): 1-34.
This paper studies the impact of corruption victimization on anti-government protest. It is argued that two features of corruption victimization are relevant for understanding its impact: its intensity level and the clarity of responsibility of the ruling government. Drawing upon survey data from the 2004 Bolivia Democracy Audit, the paper finds that low levels of exposure to corruption generally do not induce a greater inclination to participate in anti-government protest behavior than no exposure at all, whereas high levels of exposure do exert a positive and substantively large impact on protest. Moreover, the paper shows that the institutional affiliations of the perpetrators of corruption are crucially important in understanding how citizens react to their victimization. When perpetrators are linked to the ruling government through patronage networks (i.e., clarity of responsibility is high), victimization is much more likely to produce anti-government protest than when no such link is present.
Ballot Structure, Political Corruption, and the Performance of Proportional Representation. 2009. Journal of Theoretical Politics 21 (4): 1-33. Reprinted in Michael Johnston, ed. Public Sector Corruption (Sage, 2010).
What is the relationship between ballot structure (the manner in which citizens cast their votes) and corruption related to the financing of politics? The author develops a principal agent model which considers how differences in ballot structure may facilitate or impede attempts by parties to utilize the public administration as a source of electoral resources. Electoral systems which concentrate political career control in the hands of party leaders, such as closed-list proportional representation (CLPR) facilitate the use of the bureaucracy in this manner, whereas electoral systems that undermine party leader control, such as preferential-list proportional representation (PLPR), make it more difficult. The difference in the two systems rests with the degree of leverage enjoyed by party leaders vis-à-vis politically-oriented bureaucrats. The capacity for favoritism under CLPR permits party leaders to reward militants who have engaged in risky behavior for the party; PLPR undercuts similar attempts to reward risky behavior.
Varieties of Capitalism and Institutional Complementarities in the Macroeconomy: An Empirical Assessment.” (co-authored with Peter Hall) 2009. British Journal of Political Science 39: 449-482. Reprinted in Bob Hanké, ed. Debating Varieties of Capitalism: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Using an original cross-national dataset, this paper examines the core contentions of the 'varieties of capitalism' perspective on comparative capitalism. We construct indices to assess whether patterns of coordination in the OECD economies conform to the predictions of the theory and compare the correspondence of institutions across sub-spheres of the political economy. We test the contention that institutional complementarities can occur across these sub-spheres by estimating the impact of complementarities in labor relations and corporate governance on rates of growth. To assess the durability of varieties of capitalism, we report the extent of institutional change in the 1980s and 1990s. The evidence suggests powerful interaction effects across institutions in the sub-spheres of the political economy that must be considered if efforts to assess the economic impact of institutional reform in any one sphere are to be accurate.
Tempering the Taste for Vengeance: Information about Prisoners and Policy Choices in Chile (co-authored with Fernando G. Cafferata & Carlos Scartascini). Comparative Political Studies 56 (10): 1506-1536. (available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221141836)
Punitive anti-crime policies in the Americas have contributed to steadily increasing rates of incarceration. Harsh penalties are often demanded by citizens, making them attractive to politicians. Yet the contextual determinants of participation in crime are rarely understood by the public. In this article, we employ a survey experiment conducted in Chile in order to examine how the provision of information about the prison population shapes tastes for punitive anti-crime policies. Respondents in the treatment group received information about the low educational attainment of prisoners. This information led to substantial changes in policy preferences. Tasked with allocating resources to anti-crime policies using a fixed budget, treated respondents assigned between 20% to 50% more to socially oriented anti-crime policies (relative to punitive policies) than respondents in the control group, and they reduced their support for "iron fist'' policing. Our findings suggest that providing information to citizens might change the policy equilibrium in the Americas.
A Heavy Hand or a Helping Hand? Information and Citizen Preferences for Anti-Crime Policy (co-authored with Carlos Scartascini). 2022. Journal of Public Policy 42(2): 364-389 (available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0143814X21000246)
Anti-crime policy is often unresponsive to reductions in crime. To address why, we provide a model and empirical test of how citizens’ anti-crime policy preferences respond to information. Our model shows that preferences for anti-crime policy hinge on expectations about the crime rate: punitive policies are preferred in high crime contexts, whereas social policies are preferred in low crime contexts. We evaluate these expectations through an information experiment embedded in the 2017 Latin American Public Opinion Project survey conducted in Panama. As expected by our theory, a high crime message induced stronger preferences in favour of punitive policies. Unanticipated by our theory, but in line with cursory evidence and survey results, we find that a low crime message did not induce stronger preferences in favour of social policies. These findings are consistent with policy ratcheting: punitive policies increase during periods of high crime and remain in place during periods of low crime.
Pandemics and Political Development: The Electoral Legacy of the Black Death in Germany (co-authored w/ Jan Vogler). 2021. World Politics 73 (3): 393 - 440 (available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887121000034)
Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? We address this question by examining the consequences of the most deadly pandemic of the last millennium: the Black Death (1347-1351). Our claim is that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if they impose sufficient loss of life so as to augment the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor repressive regimes (such as serfdom) become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. We test our theory by tracing out the local consequences of the Black Death in German-speaking Central Europe. We find that areas hit hardest by the pandemic were more likely to: (1) adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns; (2) exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics; and (3) have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler's National Socialist Party in the Weimar Republic's fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections.
Buying Power: Electoral Strategy before the Secret Vote. 2020. American Political Science Review 114 (4): 1086-1102 (available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0003055420000568)
Research on clientelism emphasizes the use of brokers to mobilize voters. To utilize these agents efficiently, politicians must learn about brokers’ relative abilities and allocate scarce resources accordingly. Drawing upon a hand-coded dataset based on the archives of Gustavo Capanema, a powerful mid-20th-century congressman from Minas Gerais, Brazil, this paper offers the first direct evidence of such learning dynamics. The analysis concentrates on Brazil’s pre-secret ballot era, a time when measuring broker performance was particularly straightforward. Consistent with theories of political learning, the data demonstrate that resource flows to local machines were contingent on the deviation between actual and expected votes received in previous elections. Moreover, given politicians’ ability to discern mobilization capacity, payments to brokers were highly effective in bringing out the vote.
Vote Secrecy with Diverse Voters (co-authored w/ Danilo Medeiros). 2020. Comparative Political Studies 53 (3-4): 567-600 (available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019859040).
Why would incumbent politicians adopt the secret ballot when doing so weakens the advantages of incumbency? Why is the secret ballot considered a democratizing reform in some settings, whereas in others it is associated with democratic backsliding? We provide theory and empirics to address these questions. Our starting point is the observation that the secret ballot had two consequences. It reduced the capacity to monitor the vote, thereby dampening the efficacy of clientelism. Yet depending on literacy and electoral rules, it could also narrow political participation. Recognizing this, we endogenize politicians’ preferences over the secret ballot, concentrating on the role of their personal and constituency characteristics. Legislative roll call voting data from Brazil’s Second Republic (1945-1964) is used to test our framework. Consistent with expectations, the level of literacy of legislators’ supporters and the strength of their local ties strongly influenced the choice to adopt the secret ballot.
Lying About Corruption in Surveys: Evidence from a Joint Response Model (co-authored with Virginia Oliveros). 2020 International Journal of Public Opinion Research 32 (2): 384-395 (available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edz019).
As is the case with other undesirable behaviors, survey respondents tend to underreport corrupt behavior. Survey-based estimates utilizing direct questions about corruption are thus likely to underestimate the incidence of this phenomenon. Importantly, bias in reporting may be systematically related to personal characteristics. This paper studies how individual characteristics shape untruthful reporting in surveys about corruption. It does so by using a novel technique, the joint response model, which allows us to generate unbiased estimates of the extent of corruption among respondents as well as the proclivity towards untruthful reporting among bearers of the sensitive trait. We find that truthfulness under direct questioning differs by income, and to some degree by education, but not by gender and age.
Ballot Reform as Suffrage Restriction: Evidence from Brazil’s Second Republic. 2019. American Journal of Political Science 63 (4): 920-935 (available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12438).
Few innovations in democratic institutional design are considered as fundamental as the introduction of voting through the use of a uniform, official, and secret ballot. One account claims that the official ballot liberates dependent voters from the dictates of local elites, thereby enhancing democratic competition. Another argues that in contexts of widespread illiteracy its adoption may be tantamount to a suffrage restriction. This paper adjudicates between these views by drawing upon an original dataset of municipal-level voting returns from Brazil’s Second Republic (1945-1964). The unique staggered rollout of the official ballot during this period permits one to assess its impact with unprecedented accuracy. The article finds that the primary consequence of ballot reform was suffrage restriction. Rather than liberating poor and dependent voters, the official ballot made it exceedingly difficult for these individuals to vote. Moreover, parliamentary debates indicate that this was an anticipated and intended effect of the reform.
Police Violence and the Underreporting of Crime (co-authored with Virginia Oliveros). 2018. Economics & Politics 30 (1): 78-105.
This paper examines the relationship between police violence and the reporting of crime. Utilizing original data from a large-scale household survey conducted in Costa Rica from October 2013 to April 2014 (n=4200), we find that the observation of police violence significantly reduces citizens’ willingness to report crime. The implications of this finding are explored using a a game-theoretic model of crime, crime reporting, and police misconduct. The model reveals that although the prospect of police violence against criminals may generate a degree of deterrence for criminal behavior, permissiveness towards police violence also raises expectations about the likelihood of police abuse against law abiding citizens. Consistent with our empirics, this reduces citizens’ propensity to report crime, thereby fostering a climate of impunity for criminal activity.
Corruption as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica (co-authored with Ana Corbacho, Virginia Oliveros, and Mauricio Ruiz-Vega). 2016. American Journal of Political Science 60 (4): 1077-1092.
An influential literature argues that corruption behaves as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Its central claim is that the individual returns to corruption are a function of the perceived corruptibility of the other members of society. Empirically, this implies that if one were to exogenously increase beliefs about societal levels of corruption, willingness to engage in corruption should also increase. We evaluate this implication by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large-scale household survey recently conducted in the Gran Área Metropolitana of Costa Rica. Changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of Costa Ricans who have personally witnessed an act of corruption. Consistent with the self-fulfilling prophecy hypothesis, we find that internalizing the information from the display on average increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to bribe a police officer by approximately .05 to .10.
When to Protect? Using the Crosswise Model to Integrate Protected and Direct Responses in Surveys of Sensitive Behavior (co-authored with Virginia Oliveros, Ana Corbacho, and Mauricio Ruiz-Vega). 2016. Political Analysis 24 (2): 132-156.
Sensitive survey techniques (SSTs) are frequently used to study sensitive behaviors. However, existing strategies for employing SSTs lead to highly variable prevalence estimates and do not permit analysts to address the question of whether the use of an SST is actually necessary. The current article presents a survey questioning strategy and corresponding statistical framework that fills this gap. By jointly analyzing survey responses generated by an SST (the crosswise model) along with direct responses about the sensitive behavior, the article’s framework addresses the question of whether the use of an SST is required to study a given sensitive behavior, provides an efficient estimate of the prevalence of the sensitive behavior, and, in its extended form, efficiently estimates how individual characteristics relate to the likelihood of engaging in the behavior. The utility of the approach is demonstrated through an examination of gender differences in proclivities towards corruption in Costa Rica.
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis. 2014. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 9 (3): 269-300. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00013040)
An emerging literature emphasizes the importance of vote brokers for electoral politics in the developing world. Yet in spite of the great interest in the topic, attempts to assess the impact of vote brokerage on election returns are exceedingly rare. This paper provides the first explicit assessment of the electoral returns to politicians from purchasing the allegiances of brokers. It does so by drawing upon a unique dataset documenting the allocation of off-the-books payments to vote brokers during a gubernatorial reelection campaign in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. The study finds that in the typical municipality buying off local brokers was associated with a 4 to 6 percentage point increase in the vote share obtained by the governor. All told, the findings suggest that vote brokerage is a resilient form of political linkage that can shape vote choice even in contexts of vote secrecy and intermediate levels of economic development.
Yesterday's Heroes, Today's Villains: Ideology, Corruption, and Democratic Performance. 2014. Journal of Theoretical Politics 26 (2): 249-282.
This paper develops a game-theoretic model for assessing the relationship between ideological divisions in a society and prospects for good governance. Synthesizing the insights of the literature on political career concerns with those from the literature on issue framing, the model emphasizes that ideological balance---rough equality in the ideological component of utility the median voter derives from government and opposition---is the key to good governance. Polities which are ideologically balanced are ruled by elites who attempt to impress their merit upon the electorate through the provision of public goods. Ideologically imbalanced polities are ruled by elites who use public resources for their own consumption and who court voters through socially unproductive issue framing. The cases of pre-revolutionary Cuba, post-apartheid South Africa, and post-Pinochet Chile are used to illustrate the crucial importance of ideological balance for good governance.
The Endurance and Eclipse of the Controlled Vote: A Formal Model of Vote Brokerage under the Secret Ballot (co-authored with Luis F. Medina) 2013. Economics and Politics 25 (3): 453-480.
Throughout much of mankind's experience with elections, vote brokers---local elites who direct the voting decisions of a subset of the electorate---have been able to make or break political careers. In various polities, brokers have thrived in spite of the secret ballot, a surprising outcome given that vote secrecy would ostensibly allow citizens to pocket the inducements offered by such individuals and vote their consciences anyway. To address this puzzle, we develop a framework for understanding the persistence and demise of vote brokerage under the secret ballot. In our model, a broker contracts with voters using an outcome contingent contract: some fixed benefit is promised to all voters sharing one of several observable profiles should the broker's candidate win the election. Using this framework, we demonstrate that the existence of brokerage depends on the size of the electorate contained within the jurisdiction controlled by the broker, with large jurisdiction sizes tending to drive brokerage out of existence. Moreover, we detail the manner in which the strategies employed by brokers depend upon their economic power, the size of social groups, and ideological polarization. Empirical evidence from Minas Gerais, Brazil is used to evaluate the performance of the model.
Governance Indicators and the Level of Analysis Problem: Empirical Findings from South America. 2013. British Journal of Political Science 43 (3): 505-540.
Studies of the link between state capacity and development often utilize national-level governance indicators to explain a host of nuanced development outcomes. As capacity in some bureaucratic agencies invariably matters much more for said outcomes than capacity in others, this work in essence proxies for capacity within the set of relevant agencies by using a measure of `mean' capacity across all agencies in a polity. The current paper argues that this practice is highly problematic for two reasons: 1) within-country, cross-agency diversity in capacity often overwhelms the variation encountered across public sectors considered in their entireties; 2) national-level reputations for capacity are not particularly informative about differences in capacity in functionally equivalent agencies in different countries. The paper empirically establishes both points by drawing upon data collected by the author in a large scale survey of public employees conducted in Bolivia, Brazil and Chile.
Understanding Off-the-Books Politics: Conducting Inference on the Determinants of Sensitive Behavior with Randomized Response Surveys. 2010. Political Analysis 18: 349-380.
This study presents a survey-based method for conducting inference into the determinants of sensitive political behavior. The approach combines two well established literatures in statistical methods in the social sciences: the randomized response (RR) methodology utilized to reduce evasive answer bias and the generalized propensity score (GPS) methodology utilized to draw inferences about causal effects in observational studies. The approach permits one to estimate the causal impact of a multi-valued predictor variable of interest on a given sensitive behavior in the face of unknown interaction effects between the predictor and confounders as well as non-linearities in the relationship between the confounders and the sensitive behavior. Simulation results point to the superior performance of the RR relative to direct survey questioning using this method for samples of moderate to large size. The utility of the approach is illustrated through an application to corruption in the public bureaucracy in three countries in South America.
Corruption and Political Decay: Evidence from Bolivia. 2009. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 4 (1): 1-34.
This paper studies the impact of corruption victimization on anti-government protest. It is argued that two features of corruption victimization are relevant for understanding its impact: its intensity level and the clarity of responsibility of the ruling government. Drawing upon survey data from the 2004 Bolivia Democracy Audit, the paper finds that low levels of exposure to corruption generally do not induce a greater inclination to participate in anti-government protest behavior than no exposure at all, whereas high levels of exposure do exert a positive and substantively large impact on protest. Moreover, the paper shows that the institutional affiliations of the perpetrators of corruption are crucially important in understanding how citizens react to their victimization. When perpetrators are linked to the ruling government through patronage networks (i.e., clarity of responsibility is high), victimization is much more likely to produce anti-government protest than when no such link is present.
Ballot Structure, Political Corruption, and the Performance of Proportional Representation. 2009. Journal of Theoretical Politics 21 (4): 1-33. Reprinted in Michael Johnston, ed. Public Sector Corruption (Sage, 2010).
What is the relationship between ballot structure (the manner in which citizens cast their votes) and corruption related to the financing of politics? The author develops a principal agent model which considers how differences in ballot structure may facilitate or impede attempts by parties to utilize the public administration as a source of electoral resources. Electoral systems which concentrate political career control in the hands of party leaders, such as closed-list proportional representation (CLPR) facilitate the use of the bureaucracy in this manner, whereas electoral systems that undermine party leader control, such as preferential-list proportional representation (PLPR), make it more difficult. The difference in the two systems rests with the degree of leverage enjoyed by party leaders vis-à-vis politically-oriented bureaucrats. The capacity for favoritism under CLPR permits party leaders to reward militants who have engaged in risky behavior for the party; PLPR undercuts similar attempts to reward risky behavior.
Varieties of Capitalism and Institutional Complementarities in the Macroeconomy: An Empirical Assessment.” (co-authored with Peter Hall) 2009. British Journal of Political Science 39: 449-482. Reprinted in Bob Hanké, ed. Debating Varieties of Capitalism: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Using an original cross-national dataset, this paper examines the core contentions of the 'varieties of capitalism' perspective on comparative capitalism. We construct indices to assess whether patterns of coordination in the OECD economies conform to the predictions of the theory and compare the correspondence of institutions across sub-spheres of the political economy. We test the contention that institutional complementarities can occur across these sub-spheres by estimating the impact of complementarities in labor relations and corporate governance on rates of growth. To assess the durability of varieties of capitalism, we report the extent of institutional change in the 1980s and 1990s. The evidence suggests powerful interaction effects across institutions in the sub-spheres of the political economy that must be considered if efforts to assess the economic impact of institutional reform in any one sphere are to be accurate.