Politician Family Networks and Electoral Outcomes: Evidence from the Philippines (with J. Labonne and P. Querubin)

American Economic Review (2017)

We demonstrate the electoral importance of politician family networks and provide evidence of the mechanisms behind the relationship. We use a 20 million person dataset, allowing us to reconstruct intermarriage networks for over 15,000 villages in 709 municipalities in the Philippines. We show that politicians are disproportionately drawn from more central families and that, controlling for candidate fixed effects, candidates receive a higher vote share in villages where their families are more central. We present evidence that centrality confers organizational and logistical advantages that facilitate clientelistic transactions such as vote buying and do not operate through popularity, name recognition or through the choice of policies more aligned with their constituents' preferences.

Bibtex Citation
Online Technical Appendix
Family Name Matching Tools and Code (Beta Version)

Social Fragmentation, Electoral Competition and Public Goods Provision (with J. Labonne and P. Querubin)

American Political Science Review (2020).

In this paper we show that social fragmentation can trigger increased electoral competition and improved provision of public goods. We test these effects using large-scale data on family networks from over 20 million individuals in 15,000 villages of the Philippines. We take advantage of naming conventions to assess intermarriage links between families and use community detection network algorithms to identify the relevant clans in all of those villages. We show that there is more public goods provision and political competition in villages with more fragmented social networks, a result that is robust to controlling for a large number of village characteristics and to alternative estimation techniques. Using original survey data collected in 284 villages after the 2013 local elections, we also show that fragmented villages are associated with a broader distribution of political influence.

Bibtex Citation
Winner, Best Conference Paper, Political Networks Section, American Political Science Association

Buying Informed Voters: New Effects of Information on Voters and Candidates (with P. Keefer and J. Labonne)

The Economic Journal (2021).

A theoretical model and two experiments in the Philippines show that information about the mere existence of government programs influences both voter and candidate behavior. Theory predicts that incumbents shirk when voters are unaware of programs. Consistent with this, in the survey experiment, information indicating the availability of municipal development funds significantly reduces support for incumbent mayors. The field experiment distributed similar information to voters prior to municipal elections, with the full knowledge of candidates. Incumbent mayors increased vote buying in treatment areas to counteract the decrease in voter support. Effects were strongest in villages with fewer incumbent-provided public goods.

Bibtex Citation
Pre-Analysis Plan: American Economic Association (AEA) Registry
Pre-Analysis Plan: J-PAL Hypothesis Registry

Social Networks and the Targeting of Vote Buying

Comparative Political Studies (2019).

Social networks have been shown to facilitate political cooperation and information transmission in established democracies. These same social networks, however, make it easier for politicians in consolidating democracies to engage in illegal electoral strategies. In particular, voter social networks can be used to identify and monitor voters for vote buying. Using a survey of 864 households in the Philippines, this paper demonstrates that individuals with more friend and family ties are disproportionately targeted for vote buying. In addition, this paper exploits differences in the perception of vote secrecy to provide evidence consistent with the monitoring mechanism of networks, on the rationale that monitoring voters is only necessary when the vote is perceived to be secret.

Bibtex Citation

Foreign Aid and Undeserved Credit Claiming (with C. Schneider)

American Journal of Political Science (2017).

Politicians in developing countries misuse foreign aid to get reelected by fiscally manipulating foreign aid resources or domestic budgets. Our paper suggests another mechanism that does not require politicians to have any control over foreign aid in order to make use of it for electoral purposes: credit-claiming. We analyze the conditions under which local politicians can undeservedly take credit for the receipt of foreign aid and thereby boost their chances of reelection. We theorize that politicians can employ a variety of techniques to claim credit for development aid even when they have little or no influence on its actual allocation. Using a subnational World Bank development program in the Philippines, we demonstrate that credit-claiming is an important strategy to exploit foreign aid inflows and that the political effects of aid can persist even when projects are designed to minimize the diversion or misuse of funds.

Bibtex Citation
"Credit Claiming and the Politics of Relief Efforts" The Monkey Cage, The Washington Post (22 November 2013).

Political Parties, Clientelism, and Bureaucratic Reform (with P. Keefer)

Comparative Political Studies (2015)

The challenge of public administration reform is well-known: politicians often have little interest in the efficient implementation of government policy. Using new data from 439 World Bank public sector reform loans in 109 countries, we demonstrate that such reforms are significantly less likely to succeed in the presence of non-programmatic political parties. Earlier research uses evidence from a small group of countries to conclude that clientelist politicians resist reforms that restrict their patronage powers. We support this conclusion with new evidence from many countries, allowing us to rule out alternative explanations, including the effect of electoral and political institutions. We also examine reforms that have not been the subject of prior research: those that make public sector financial management more transparent. Here, we identify a second mechanism through which non-programmatic parties undermine public sector reform: clientelist politicians have weaker incentives to exercise oversight of policy implementation by the executive branch.

Bibtex Citation
"Reform and the Power of Party Platforms," Ideas Matter, Inter-American Development Bank Research Department (4 March 2016).

Social Ties and the Political Participation of Firms (with B. Graham)

The Review of International Organizations (2021).

It is well established that connections to government officials confer important benefits to firms. However, past work has ignored the crucial role that ties to other firms in the same industry (peer ties) also play in facilitating firms' political participation. We develop new theory that contrasts the effects of these two distinct types of social ties. We argue that peer ties facilitate collective action, most often with respect to broad policy issues that affect many firms. In contrast, we expect that direct ties to government officials (government ties) are primarily used to pursue narrow, particularistic benefits. Using a new survey of foreign-owned firms operating in the Philippines, we find that peer ties facilitate firms' political participation at the national level, where issues are more likely to affect large numbers of firms. Government ties are also valuable, though primarily at the local level, where issues are generally narrower in scope.