Selected Working Papers
Making Policies Matter: Voter Responses to Campaign Promises (with P. Keefer, J. Labonne, and F. Trebbi). Revise and Resubmit. The Economic Journal.
Do campaign promises matter? We combine a structural model and a large-scale field experiment disseminating candidate policy platforms in Philippine mayoral elections to show how voters respond to campaign promises. Voters who randomly received information about current campaign promises are more likely to vote for candidates closer to their own preferences and those also informed about past promises reward incumbents who fulfilled them. The structural model shows that campaigns operate through both learning and psychological mechanisms, and that vote buying, while important, is not the sole driver of voter behavior.
Gender, Social Recognition, and Political Influence (with C. Tolentino). Revise and Resubmit. American Political Science Review.
What determines women's political influence? While the literature on political engagement focuses on individual traits, attitudes, and participation, we argue that how these factors translate to political influence is fundamentally a social process that requires recognition from the broader community, with important implications for understanding women's political engagement. Using new data on networks of political influence in Philippine villages, we show that even after controlling for socioeconomic status or political participation, women are still markedly less likely to be recognized as influential. Furthermore, we show that the commonly understood factors that correspond to political influence apply primarily to men, and that the determinants of influence are more complex for women: embeddedness in the community and participation in community activities are more important than connections or wealth.
Q&A with the VSE
Politician Social Networks and the Choice of Electoral Strategies
In many consolidating democracies, politicians rely on individually-targeted payoffs, such as vote buying and patronage, or on policies targeted to narrow groups, such as pork barrel politics. Although each of these strategies has been well-studied, relatively little is known about how politicians choose between them. This paper uses a survey of local politicians in the Philippines to demonstrate that the characteristics of politician networks are important correlates of this choice. In particular, vertical connections among politicians (among governors, mayors, and congressmen, e.g.) facilitate individually targeted policies because the overlapping constituencies encourage collusion to target the same individual voters. By contrast, horizontal connections among politicians (mayors of different towns, e.g.) promote cooperation and information sharing, making group-targeted strategies such as pork barrel funding more attractive. This suggests that even in political environments without a tradition of programmatic parties, political institutions that foster horizontal ties among politicians may contribute to improved development outcomes by encouraging group-targeted electoral strategies at the expense of individually-targeted patronage and vote buying.