Below is a list of my publications, working papers, and policy reports. For more, jump to my CV or Google Scholar profile.
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Peer-reviewed journal articles
- “Couples Therapy for a Divided America: Assessing the Effects of Reciprocal Group Reflection on Partisan Polarization” (with Hannah Baron, Danny Choi, Laura Gamboa, Jessica Gottlieb, Amanda Robinson, Steven Rosenzweig, Megan Turnbull, and Emily West). 2024. Forthcoming, Political Behavior
Overcoming America’s deep partisan polarization poses a unique challenge: Americans must be able to sharply disagree on who should govern while agreeing on more fundamental democratic principles. We study one model of depolarization—reciprocal group reflection—inspired by marital counseling and implemented by a non-governmental organization, Braver Angels. We randomly assigned undergraduates at four universities either to participate in a Braver Angels workshop or simply to complete three rounds of surveys. The workshops substantially reduced polarization according to explicit and implicit measures. They also increased participants’ willingness to donate to programs aimed at depolarizing political conversations. These effects are consistent across partisan groups, though some dissipate over time. Using qualitative data, and building on contact and deliberative theories, we argue that depolarization is especially effective when it includes both informational and emotional components, such that citizens who are moved to empathize with outgroup members become more likely to internalize new information about them.
- Read our policy report
- Read our pre-analysis plan
- “Mano Dura: An Experimental Evaluation of Military Policing in Cali, Colombia” (with Lucía Mendoza and Michael Weintraub). 2024. Forthcoming, American Journal of Political Science
Governments across the Global South rely on their militaries for domestic policing operations. We experimentally evaluate the social and political consequences of a military policing intervention in Cali, Colombia, one of the world’s most violent cities. The intervention, Plan Fortaleza, involved recurring, intensive military patrols randomized at the city block level. Our evaluation combines administrative crime and human rights data, surveys of more than 10,000 residents, a conjoint survey experiment, a “costly” behavioral measure, and qualitative interviews with 49 civil society leaders. Despite null or adverse effects on crime and human rights, we show that Plan Fortaleza improved citizens’ attitudes towards the military and increased their demand for military involvement in domestic law enforcement. It also strengthened citizens’ support for extrajudicial punishment and—alarmingly—for military coups in response to rising crime, potentially signaling a diminished commitment to democracy and the rule of law among the program’s intended beneficiaries.
- Read IPA’s summary of our results
- Read our pre-analysis plan
- Read media coverage in El Tiempo
- “Elites, the Aid Curse, and Chinese Development Finance: A Conjoint Survey Experiment on Elites’ Development Finance Preferences in 141 Low- and Middle-Income Countries” (with Samantha Custer and Philip Roessler). 2024. Forthcoming, American Journal of Political Science
Why do elites in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) favor some foreign aid projects and partners over others? Research on the “aid curse” and Chinese development finance suggests elites should prefer aid that can be easily captured, with few conditionalities, regulations, or transparency requirements. We administer a conjoint survey experiment across 141 LMICs to elicit the aid preferences of elites who are uniquely close to development policy debates. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we find that elites favor larger over smaller projects, grants over loans, and transportation infrastructure projects over initiatives focused on civil society or tax collection capacity. But contrary to the aid curse theory, elites also prefer projects with transparent terms and labor, corruption, and environmental regulations, and are at worst indifferent towards good governance conditionalities. These preferences hold even in corrupt and autocratic countries, and even among high-level government officials who might be expected to favor “no-strings-attached” aid regimes.
- Read our pre-analysis plan
- “An Events-Based Approach to Studying Democratic Erosion” (with Hannah Baron, Jessica Gottlieb, and Laura Paler). 2024. PS: Political Science & Politics 57(2): 208-215
This article introduces and demonstrates the utility of a new event dataset on democratic erosion around the world. Through case studies of Turkey and Brazil, we show that our Democratic Erosion Event Dataset (DEED) can help to resolve debates about the extent to which democracy is backsliding based on prominent cross-national indicators, focusing in particular on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) and Little and Meng (L&M) indices. V-Dem suggests that democracies are deteriorating worldwide; L&M argue that this may be an artifact of subjectivity and coder bias and that more “objective” indicators reveal little to no global democratic backsliding in recent years. Using DEED, we show that—at least in these cases—objective indices may underestimate the extent of democratic erosion whereas subjective indices may overestimate it. Our analyses illustrate the ways in which DEED can complement existing indices by illuminating the nature and dynamics of democratic erosion as it occurs on the ground.
- Replicate our analysis
- “UN Peacekeeping and Democratization in Conflict-Affected Countries” (with Jessica Di Salvatore and Hannah Smidt). 2023. American Political Science Review 117(4): 1308-1326
Does UN peacekeeping promote democracy in countries wracked by civil war? Existing studies are limited and reach contradictory conclusions. We develop a theory to explain how peacekeepers can help overcome key obstacles to democratization in conflict-affected countries, then test our theory by combining three original datasets on UN mandates, personnel, and activities covering all UN missions in Africa since the end of the Cold War. Using fixed effects and instrumental variables estimators, we show that UN missions with democracy promotion mandates are strongly positively correlated with the quality of democracy in host countries, but that the magnitude of the relationship is larger for civilian rather than uniformed personnel; stronger when peacekeepers engage rather than bypass host governments when implementing reforms; driven in particular by UN election administration and oversight; and more robust during periods of peace than during periods of civil war.
- Replicate our analysis
- “Little Evidence That Military Policing Reduces Crime or Improves Human Security” (with Michael Weintraub). 2023. Nature Human Behaviour 7(6): 861-873
Governments in low- and middle-income countries routinely deploy their armed forces for domestic policing operations. Advocates of these policies claim they reduce crime, while detractors argue they undermine human rights. Here we experimentally evaluate a military policing intervention in Cali, Colombia. The intervention involved recurring, intensive military patrols targeting crime hot spots, randomly assigned at the city block level. Using administrative crime and human rights data, surveys of more than 10,000 residents, and firsthand observations from civilian monitors, we find little to no credible evidence that military policing reduced crime or improved perceptions of safety during the intervention. If anything, we find that military policing probably exacerbated crime after the intervention was complete. We also find evidence of increased human rights abuses in our survey data (though not in the administrative data or in the firsthand observations of civilian monitors), largely committed by police officers rather than soldiers. We argue the benefits of military policing are probably small and not worth the costs.
- Read media coverage in El Tiempo
- Read IPA’s summary of our results
- Read Santiago Tobón’s commentary on our study
- Read our policy report
- Read our pre-analysis plan
- Replicate our analysis
- “Interventions to Counter Misinformation: Lessons from the Global North and Applications to the Global South” (with Pablo Argote, Jessica Gottlieb, Brendan Nyhan, Laura Paler, and Charlene Stainfield). 2023. Current Opinion in Psychology 54: 101732
We synthesize evidence from 176 experimental estimates of 11 interventions intended to combat misinformation in the Global North and Global South, which we classify as informational, educational, socio-psychological, or institutional. Among these, we find the most consistent positive evidence for two informational interventions in both Global North and Global South contexts: inoculation/prebunking and debunking. In a complementary survey of 138 misinformation scholars and practitioners, we find that experts tend to be most optimistic about interventions that have been least widely studied or that have been shown to be mostly ineffective. We provide a searchable database of misinformation RCTs and suggest avenues for future research to close the gap between expert opinion and academic research.
- Read our policy report
- “Preventing Rebel Resurgence after Civil War: A Field Experiment in Security and Justice Provision in Rural Colombia” (with Manuel Moscoso, Andrés Vargas, and Michael Weintraub). 2022. American Political Science Review 116(4): 1258-1277
How can states prevent armed groups from exploiting local governance gaps to (re)establish territorial control during transitions to national peace? We report results from an experimental evaluation of Colombia’s ComunPaz program, a scalable, inexpensive intervention that sought to replace rebel governance by harnessing complementarities between state and communal authorities and by improving security and justice provision in areas once dominated by FARC, the country’s largest rebel group. We find that ComunPaz enhanced the quality of local dispute resolution, increased citizens’ trust in (some) state institutions, and strengthened coordination between state and communal authorities. It also appears to have reduced citizens’ trust in, and reliance on, armed groups. The program did not, however, increase reliance on either state or communal authorities to resolve disputes, nor did it increase citizens’ trust in communal institutions. We discuss the implications of our findings for peacebuilding and statebuilding in countries transitioning from civil war.
- Read our pre-analysis plan
- Read our policy brief
- Replicate our analysis
- “Civil War and Citizens’ Demand for the State: An Empirical Test of Hobbesian Theory.” 2022. British Journal of Political Science 52(4): 1748–1768
How does violence during civil war shape citizens’ demand for state-provided security, especially in settings where non-state actors compete with the state for citizens’ loyalties? This article draws on Hobbesian theory to argue that in post-conflict countries, citizens who were more severely victimized by wartime violence should substitute away from localized authorities and towards centralized ones, especially the state. The author tests the theory by combining two original surveys with existing media and non-governmental organization data on wartime violence in Liberia. The study shows that citizens who were more severely affected by violence during the Liberian civil war are more likely to demand state-provided security, both in absolute terms and relative to non-state alternatives. More sporadic collective violence in the post-conflict period does not reverse this substitution effect. Also consistent with Hobbesian theory, citizens who were more severely victimized are more fearful of threats to peace almost a decade later.
- Replicate my analysis
- “The Promise and Pitfalls of Conflict Prediction: Evidence from Colombia and Indonesia” (with Samuel Bazzi, Christopher Blattman, Oeindrila Dube, Matthew Gudgeon, and Richard Peck). 2022. Review of Economics & Statistics 104(4): 764-779
How feasible is violence early-warning prediction? Colombia and Indonesia have unusually fine-grained data. We assemble two decades of local violent events alongside hundreds of annual risk factors. We attempt to predict violence one year ahead with a range of machine learning techniques. Our models reliably identify persistent, high-violence hot spots. Violence is not simply autoregressive, as detailed histories of disaggregated violence perform best, but socioeconomic data substitute well for these histories. Even with unusually rich data, however, our models poorly predict new outbreaks or escalations of violence. These “best case” scenarios with annual data fall short of workable early-warning systems.
- Replicate our analysis
- “Public Trust, Policing, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from an Electoral Authoritarian Regime” (with Travis Curtice, David Dow, and Guy Grossman). 2022. Social Science & Medicine 305: 115045
We examine how trust shapes compliance with public health restrictions during the COVID- 19 pandemic in Uganda. We use an endorsement experiment embedded in a mobile phone survey to show that messages from government officials generate more support for public health restrictions than messages from religious authorities, traditional leaders, or international NGOs. We further show that compliance with these restrictions is strongly positively correlated with trust in government, but only weakly correlated with trust in local authorities or other citizens. We use measures of trust from both before and during the pandemic to rule out the possibility that trust is a function of the pandemic itself. The relationship between trust and compliance is especially strong for the Ministry of Health and—more surprisingly—the police. We conclude that trust is crucial for encouraging compliance but note that it may be difficult to sustain, particularly in settings where governments and police forces have reputations for repression.
- Read our pre-analysis plan
- Replicate our analysis
- “When Do UN Peacekeeping Operations Implement Their Mandates?” (with Jessica Di Salvatore and Hannah Smidt). 2022. American Journal of Political Science 66(3): 664-680
Under what conditions do UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) implement the tasks in their mandates? Contemporary PKOs are expected to fulfill increasingly fragmented mandates in active conflict zones. We argue that these two trends—increasingly fragmented mandates, increasingly implemented amidst violence—exacerbate delegation and coordination problems that hinder PKOs from pursuing mandated tasks, potentially undermining their legitimacy in the eyes of the Security Council, troop-contributing countries, and host governments. Combining new data sets on PKO activities and mandates in Africa (1998–2016) and using instrumental variables and two-way fixed effects models, we find that mandate fragmentation is negatively correlated with mandate implementation, especially for peacebuilding tasks. Ongoing violence is also negatively correlated with implementation of peacebuilding tasks, but not with security tasks. We show that this is likely due to the offsetting effects of violence perpetrated by governments and rebels, as PKOs are better equipped to respond to the latter.
- Replicate our analysis
- “Policing Ethnicity: Lab-in-the-Field Evidence on Discrimination, Cooperation and Ethnic Balancing in the Liberian National Police” (with Kyle Beardsley, Michael Gilligan, and Sabrina Karim). 2022. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 17(2): 141-181
Ethnic balancing in the security sector increasingly accompanies power sharing agreements after civil war, but new challenges arise as these institutions must sustain cooperation amidst increasing ethnic heterogeneity. Inclusive involvement in security sector institutions may reduce discrimination against minority groups. But pressure to assimilate may also foment “loyalty conflict” among minority group members, exacerbating discrimination. We test these competing logics using surveys and lab-in-the-field experiments with teams of Liberian National Police officers. Consistent with a logic of loyalty conflict, we find that teams with minority police officers are more rather than less discriminatory against minority civilians. This effect is not driven by heterogeneity, but rather by the presence of minority police officers per se. We also find that teams that include minority police officers are no more or less cooperative than those that do not, and that heterogeneous teams are no more or less cooperative than homogeneous ones. We argue that these effects are likely a result of professionalization processes that encourage conformity and loyalty to an existing police subculture.
- Replicate our analysis
- “Foreign Aid and Soft Power: Great Power Competition in Africa in the Early 21st Century” (with Robert Marty and Philip Roessler). 2022. British Journal of Political Science 52(3): 1355-1376
Is foreign aid an effective instrument of soft power? Does it generate affinity for donor countries and the values they espouse? This article answers these questions in the context of Chinese aid to Africa and the competing aid regime of the United States. The study combines data on thirty-eight African countries from Afrobarometer, AidData, and the Aid Information Management Systems of African finance and planning ministries. The authors use spatial difference-in-differences to isolate the causal effects of Chinese and US aid. The study finds that Chinese aid to Africa does not increase (and may in fact reduce) beneficiaries’ support for China. By contrast, US aid appears to increase support for the United States and to strengthen recipients’ commitment to liberal democratic values, such as the belief in the importance of elections. Chinese aid does not appear to weaken this commitment, and may strengthen it. The study also finds that Chinese aid increases support for the UK, France and other former colonial powers. These findings advance our understanding of the conditions under which competing aid regimes generate soft power and facilitate the transmission of political principles and ideals.
- Replicate our analysis
- “Community Policing Does Not Build Citizen Trust in Police or Reduce Crime in the Global South” (with Graeme Blair, Fotini Christia, and Jeremy Weinstein et al.). 2021. Science 374(6571): eabd3446
Is it possible to reduce crime without exacerbating adversarial relationships between police and citizens? Community policing is a celebrated reform with that aim, which is now adopted on six continents. However, the evidence base is limited, studying reform components in isolation in a limited set of countries, and remaining largely silent on citizen-police trust. We designed six field experiments with Global South police agencies to study locally designed models of community policing using coordinated measures of crime and the attitudes and behaviors of citizens and police. In a preregistered meta-analysis, we found that these interventions led to mixed implementation, largely failed to improve citizen-police relations, and did not reduce crime. Societies may need to implement structural changes first for incremental police reforms such as community policing to succeed.
- Read our pre-analysis plan
- Read our policy brief
- Read a commentary in Science by Santiago Tobón
- “UN Peacekeeping and the Rule of Law.” 2021. American Political Science Review 115(1): 51-68
The UN is intimately involved in efforts to restore the rule of law in conflict and postconflict settings. Yet despite the importance of the rule of law for peace, good governance, and economic growth, evidence on the impact of these efforts is scant. I develop a theory to explain when UN rule-of-law reform is likely to succeed, then test the theory using original datasets capturing the number of civilian personnel deployed to each UN mission in Africa, the number of personnel assigned specifically to rule-of-law-related tasks, and the extent and nature of actual rule-of-law-related activities in the field. The correlation between UN presence and the rule of law is weak while conflict is ongoing, but robustly positive during periods of peace. The relationship is stronger for civilian than uniformed personnel, and is strongest when UN missions engage host states in the process of reform.
- Replicate my analysis
- “Foreign Aid and State Legitimacy: Evidence on Chinese and US Aid to Africa from Surveys, Survey Experiments, and Behavioral Games” (with Philip Roessler). 2021. World Politics 73(2):315-357
What are the effects of foreign aid on the perceived legitimacy of recipient states? Different donors adhere to different rules, principles, and operating procedures. The authors theorize that variation in these aid regimes may generate variation in the effects of aid on state legitimacy. To test their theory, they compare aid from the United States to aid from China, its most prominent geopolitical rival. Their research design combines within-country analysis of original surveys, survey experiments, and behavioral games in Liberia with cross-country analysis of existing administrative and Afrobarometer data from six African countries. They exploit multiple proxies for state legitimacy, but focus in particular on tax compliance and morale. Contrary to expectations, the authors find little evidence to suggest that exposure to aid diminishes the legitimacy of African states. If anything, the opposite appears to be true. Their results are consistent across multiple settings, multiple levels of analysis, and multiple measurement and identification strategies, and are unlikely to be artifacts of sample selection, statistical power, or the strength or weakness of particular experimental treatments. The authors conclude that the effects of aid on state legitimacy at the microlevel are largely benign.
- Replicate our analysis
- Read our pre-analysis plan
- Read our summary on the AidData blog
- “Policing and the Legacies of State Predation: Evidence from a Survey and Field Experiment in Liberia” (with Benjamin Morse). 2021. Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(10): 1709-1737
How does violence during civil war shape citizens’ willingness to trust and rely on state security providers in the post-conflict period? Can post-conflict security sector reform restore perceptions of state security forces among victims of wartime state predation? Using a survey and field experiment in Liberia, we show that rebel-perpetrated violence is strongly positively correlated with trust and reliance on the police after conflict is over, while state-perpetrated violence is not. Victims of wartime state predation are, however, more likely to update their priors about the police in response to positive interactions with newly reformed police officers. We also show that abuses committed by police officers in the post-conflict period are negatively correlated with citizens’ perceptions of the police, potentially counteracting the positive effects of security sector reform. We corroborate our quantitative findings with detailed qualitative observations of interactions between civilians and police officers in the field.
- Replicate our analysis
- Visit our project website
- “Engineering Informal Institutions: Long-Run Impacts of Alternative Dispute Resolution on Violence and Property Rights in Liberia” (with Christopher Blattman and Alexandra Hartman). 2021. Journal of Politics 83(1): 381-389
Informal institutions govern property rights and disputes when formal systems are weak. Effective informal institutions should help people reach and maintain bargains, minimizing violence. Can outside organizations engineer persistent institutional change? Will this strengthen property rights and investment? We experimentally evaluate a United Nations and civil society mass education campaign to promote alternative dispute resolution practices and norms in rural Liberia, where violent land disputes are common. Prior work showed a drop in violence and unresolved disputes within one year. We return after three years to test for sustained impacts and mechanisms. Treated communities report large, persistent drops in violent disputes and a slight shift toward nonviolent norms. Treated residents also report larger farms, although overall effects on property rights and investment are mixed. Politically connected residents report more secure property rights, while those with fewer connections feel less secure. Sustained institutional engineering is feasible, but politics shapes distributional outcomes.
- Replicate our analysis
- Listen to a summary on VoxDev
- Visit our project website
- “Is Theory Useful for Conflict Prediction? A Response to Beger, Morgan, and Ward” (with Nicholas Sambanis). 2021. Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(7-8): 1427-1453
Beger, Morgan, and Ward (BM&W) call into question the results of our article on forecasting civil wars. They claim that our theoretically-informed model of conflict escalation under-performs more mechanical, inductive alternatives. This claim is false. BM&W’s critiques are misguided or inconsequential, and their conclusions hinge on a minor technical question regarding receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves: should the curves be smoothed, or should empirical curves be used? BM&W assert that empirical curves should be used and all of their conclusions depend on this subjective modeling choice. We extend our original analysis to show that our theoretically-informed model performs as well as or better than more atheoretical alternatives across a range of performance metrics and robustness specifications. As in our original article, we conclude by encouraging conflict forecasters to treat the value added of theory not as an assumption, but rather as a hypothesis to test.
- Replicate our analysis
- “Building Credibility and Cooperation in Low-Trust Settings: Persuasion and Source Accountability in Liberia During the 2014–2015 Ebola Crisis” (with Benjamin Morse and Lily Tsai). 2020. Comparative Political Studies 54(10-11): 1582-1618
How can governments in low-trust settings overcome their credibility deficit when promoting public welfare? To answer this question, we evaluate the effectiveness of the Liberian government’s door-to-door canvassing campaign during the 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic, which aimed to persuade residents to voluntarily comply with policies for containing the disease. Combining data from an original representative survey of Monrovia during the crisis with variation in the campaign’s reach and using multiple identification strategies, we find that the informational campaign was remarkably effective at increasing adherence to safety precautions, support for contentious control policies, and general trust in government. To uncover the pathways through which the campaign proved so effective, we conducted over 80 in-depth qualitative interviews in 40 randomly sampled communities. This investigation suggests that local intermediaries were effective because their embeddedness in communities subjected them to monitoring and sanctioning, thereby assuring their fellow residents that they were accountable and thus credible.
- Read our policy report
- Visit our project website
- Read a summary in Forbes
- Listen to my summary on Top of Mind
- “Forecasting Civil Wars: Theory and Structure in an Age of ‘Big Data’ and Machine Learning” (with Nicholas Sambanis). 2020. Journal of Conflict Resolution 64(10): 1885-1915
Does theory contribute to forecasting accuracy? We use event data to show that a parsimonious model grounded in prominent theories of conflict escalation can forecast civil war onset with high accuracy and over shorter temporal windows than has generally been possible. Our forecasting model draws on “procedural” variables, building on insights from the contentious politics literature. We show that a procedural model outperforms more inductive, atheoretical alternatives and also outperforms models based on countries’ structural characteristics, which previously dominated models of civil war onset. We find that process can substitute for structure over short forecasting windows. We also find a more direct connection between theory and forecasting than is sometimes assumed, though we suggest that future researchers treat the value-added of theory for prediction not as an assumption but rather as a hypothesis to test.
- Replicate our analysis
- Read our pre-analysis plan
- “Foreign Aid and State-Society Relations: Theory, Evidence, and New Directions for Research” (with Matthew Winters). 2020. Studies in Comparative International Development 55(2): 123–142
A prominent body of scholarship views revenue extraction by the state as a catalyst for the creation of representative institutions. States in the developing world, however, extract less revenue from their citizens than states in wealthy countries. One reason for this discrepancy is the presence of foreign aid. This special issue explores both theoretically and empirically how foreign aid flows affect citizens’ perceptions of and interactions with the state, and what this might imply for the development of state capacity and state-society linkages. Until recently, the conventional wisdom held that foreign aid would undermine these linkages, eroding state legitimacy and impeding the development of state capacity. The contributions in this special issue find limited evidence for such adverse effects. Citizen awareness of aid does not directly undermine state legitimacy or decrease citizen engagement with the state. Aid may, however, reduce state investment in institutions, producing inferior institutional outcomes that challenge citizen confidence and therefore indirectly hinder the growth of state-society linkages. If aid is weakening state-society relations, it is largely because of its effects on state institutions rather than its effects on citizen attitudes or behaviors. The contributions to the special issue use a variety of methods to generate these findings, including single-country surveys, informational experiments, donation games, in-depth interviews, and cross-country analyses. Together they address multiple ongoing debates in the literature on aid and state-society relations, while also pointing to promising avenues for future research.
- “Establishing the Rule of Law in Weak and War-torn States: Evidence from a Field Experiment with the Liberian National Police” (with Sabrina Karim and Benjamin Morse). 2019. American Political Science Review 113(3):641-657
How to restore citizens’ trust and cooperation with the police in the wake of civil war? We report results from an experimental evaluation of the Liberian National Police’s (LNP) “Confidence Patrols” program, which deployed teams of newly retrained, better-equipped police officers on recurring patrols to rural communities across three Liberian counties over a period of 14 months. We find that the program increased knowledge of the police and Liberian law, enhanced security of property rights, and reduced the incidence of some types of crime, notably simple assault and domestic violence. The program did not, however, improve trust in the police, courts, or government more generally. We also observe higher rates of crime reporting in treatment communities, concentrated almost entirely among those who were disadvantaged under prevailing customary mechanisms of dispute resolution. We consider implications of these findings for post-conflict policing in Liberia and weak and war-torn states more generally.
- Replicate our analysis
- Read our pre-analysis plan
- Read our policy report
- Visit our project website
- “International Intervention and the Rule of Law after Civil War: Evidence from Liberia.” 2019. International Organization 73(2): 365-398
What are the effects of international intervention on the rule of law after civil war? Rule of law requires not only that state authorities abide by legal limits on their power, but also that citizens rely on state laws and institutions to adjudicate disputes. Using an original survey and list experiment in Liberia, I show that exposure to the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) increased citizens’ reliance on state over nonstate authorities to resolve the most serious incidents of crime and violence, and increased nonstate authorities’ reliance on legal over illegal mechanisms of dispute resolution. I use multiple identification strategies to support a causal interpretation of these results, including an instrumental variables strategy that leverages plausibly exogenous variation in the distribution of UNMIL personnel induced by the killing of seven peacekeepers in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire. My results are still detectable two years later, even in communities that report no further exposure to peacekeepers. I also find that exposure to UNMIL did not mitigate and may in fact have exacerbated citizens’ perceptions of state corruption and bias in the short term, but that these apparently adverse effects dissipated over time. I conclude by discussing implications of these complex but overall beneficial effects.
- Replicate my analysis
- Read my summary on The Washington Post‘s Monkey Cage blog
- “Teaching Trump: Why Comparative Politics Makes Students More Optimistic About US Democracy” (with Hannah Baron and Shelby Grossman). 2019. PS: Political Science & Politics 52(2): 347-352
How does learning about democratic erosion in other countries shape opinions about the state of democracy in the United States today? We describe lessons learned from a collaborative course on democratic erosion taught at nearly two dozen universities during the 2017–18 academic year. We use survey data, student-written blog posts, exit questionnaires, and interviews with students who did and did not take the course to explore the effects of studying democratic erosion from a comparative perspective. Do comparisons foster optimism about the relative resilience of American democracy or pessimism about its vulnerability to the same risk factors that have damaged other democracies around the world? Somewhat to our surprise, we find that the course increased optimism about US democracy, instilling greater confidence in the relative strength and longevity of American democratic norms and institutions. We also find, however, that the course did not increase civic engagement and, if anything, appears to have exacerbated skepticism toward activities such as protest. Students who took the course became increasingly sensitive to the possibility that some forms of civic engagement reflect and intensify the same threats to democracy that the course emphasized—especially polarization.
- Read our summary at Inside Higher Ed
- “International Gender Balancing Reforms in Postconflict Countries: Lab-in-the-Field Evidence from the Liberian National Police” (with Kyle Beardsley, Michael Gilligan, and Sabrina Karim). 2018. International Studies Quarterly 62(3): 618-631
In the aftermath of civil conflict, war-torn states often require reform of their government institutions. Gender balancing, or the inclusion of more women in security-sector institutions, is an increasingly common reform incorporated into state-building processes. Our theoretical priors suggest that gender balancing may influence unit cohesion, operational effectiveness with respect to sexual and gender-based violence, and organizational gender norms. We study these propositions using laboratory experiments with police officers of the Liberian National Police (LNP). We randomly assigned the proportions of women and men in 102 groups of six LNP officers to observe their deliberative processes and group choices. In our experiment, adding more women increased unit cohesion, but we find no evidence to suggest that simply adding more women would increase group (or individual) sensitivity to sexual and gender-based violence. We also find that, despite an increase in participation and influence by women, male beliefs about women’s role in policing do not improve with the inclusion of women. As one of the first experimental studies to assess the effects of gender composition within the actual population of interest, our results shed light on how international interventions to address gender equality in postconflict countries affect important outcomes related to security.
- Replicate our analysis
- “Predicting Local Violence: Evidence from a Panel Survey in Liberia” (with Christopher Blattman and Alexandra Hartman). 2017. Journal of Peace Research 54:2: 298-312
Riots, murders, lynchings, and other forms of local violence are costly to security forces and society at large. Identifying risk factors and forecasting where local violence is most likely to occur should help allocate scarce peacekeeping and policing resources. Most forecasting exercises of this kind rely on structural or event data, but these have many limitations in the poorest and most war-torn states, where the need for prediction is arguably most urgent. We adopt an alternative approach, applying machine learning techniques to original panel survey data from Liberia to predict collective, interpersonal, and extrajudicial violence two years into the future. We first train our models to predict 2010 local violence using 2008 risk factors, then generate forecasts for 2012 before collecting new data. Our models achieve out-of-sample AUCs ranging from 0.65 to 0.74, depending on our specification of the dependent variable. The models also draw our attention to risk factors different from those typically emphasized in studies aimed at causal inference alone. For example, we find that while ethnic heterogeneity and polarization are reliable predictors of local violence, adverse economic shocks are not. Surprisingly, we also find that the risk of local violence is higher rather than lower in communities where minority and majority ethnic groups share power. These counter-intuitive results illustrate the usefulness of prediction for generating new stylized facts for future research to explain. Ours is one of just two attempts to forecast local violence using survey data, and we conclude by discussing how our approach can be replicated and extended as similar datasets proliferate.
- Replicate our analysis
- Read our policy report
- Read media coverage in Quartz, SciDev and SciDev (again)
- Visit our project website
- “Public Health and Public Trust: Survey Evidence from the Ebola Virus Disease Epidemic in Liberia” (with Benjamin Morse and Lily Tsai). 2017. Social Science & Medicine 127: 89-97
Trust in government has long been viewed as an important determinant of citizens’ compliance with public health policies, especially in times of crisis. Yet evidence on this relationship remains scarce, particularly in the developing world. We use results from a representative survey conducted during the 2014–15 Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) epidemic in Monrovia, Liberia to assess the relationship between trust in government and compliance with EVD control interventions. We find that respondents who expressed low trust in government were much less likely to take precautions against EVD in their homes, or to abide by government-mandated social distancing mechanisms designed to contain the spread of the virus. They were also much less likely to support potentially contentious control policies, such as “safe burial” of EVD-infected bodies. Contrary to stereotypes, we find no evidence that respondents who distrusted government were any more or less likely to understand EVD’s symptoms and transmission pathways. While only correlational, these results suggest that respondents who refused to comply may have done so not because they failed to understand how EVD is transmitted, but rather because they did not trust the capacity or integrity of government institutions to recommend precautions and implement policies to slow EVD’s spread. We also find that respondents who experienced hardships during the epidemic expressed less trust in government than those who did not, suggesting the possibility of a vicious cycle between distrust, non-compliance, hardships and further distrust. Finally, we find that respondents who trusted international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) were no more or less likely to support or comply with EVD control policies, suggesting that while INGOs can contribute in indispensable ways to crisis response, they cannot substitute for government institutions in the eyes of citizens. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for future public health crises.
- Read our policy report
- Visit our project website
- Listen to my summary on Top of Mind and The Academic Minute
- “On the Rights of Warlords: Legitimate Authority and Basic Protection in War-Torn Societies” (with Pablo Kalmanovitz). 2016. American Political Science Review 110(3): 428-440
This article examines the legitimacy of the use of force by armed nonstate actors resisting the imposition of state rule over territories they control. We focus on the rights of warlords: subnational strongmen who seek autonomy within geographically demarcated territories, but not secession or control of the state itself. We argue that behind the resistance to state-building lies a twofold question of legitimate authority: the authority of states to consolidate power within their own internationally recognized borders and the authority of warlords to resist that expansion, by force if necessary, when it threatens social order and the protection of basic rights. This article draws on just war theory to develop a set of conditions under which such resistance may be justified, explores the argument’s practical implications for state-building under the tutelage of third parties (e.g., the United Nations), and demonstrates its empirical relevance through an application to Afghanistan.
- Read our summary on The Washington Post‘s Monkey Cage blog
- “Patterns of Demand for Non-Ebola Health Services During and After the Ebola Outbreak: Panel Survey Evidence from Monrovia, Liberia” (with Karen Grepin, Benjamin Morse, and Lily Tsai). 2016. BMJ Global Health 1: e000007
The recent Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak was unprecedented in magnitude, duration and geographic scope. Hitherto there have been no population-based estimates of its impact on non-EVD health outcomes and health-seeking behaviour. We use data from a population-based panel survey conducted in the late-crisis period and two postcrisis periods to track trends in (1) the prevalence of adult and child illness, (2) subsequent usage of health services and (3) the determinants thereof. The prevalence of child and adult illness remained relatively steady across all periods. Usage of health services for children and adults increased by 77% and 104%, respectively, between the late-crisis period and the postcrisis periods. In the late-crisis period, (1) socioeconomic factors weakly predict usage, (2) distrust in government strongly predicts usage, (3) direct exposure to the EVD outbreak, as measured by witnessing dead bodies or knowing Ebola victims, negatively predicts trust and usage and (4) exposure to government-organised community outreach predicts higher trust and usage. These patterns do not obtain in the post-crisis period. Supply-side and socioeconomic factors are insufficient to account for lower healthseeking behaviour during the crisis. Rather, it appears that distrust and negative EVD-related experiences reduced demand during the outbreak. The absence of these patterns outside the crisis period suggests that the rebound after the crisis reflects recovery of demand. Policymakers should anticipate the importance of demand-side factors, including fear and trust, on usage of health services during health crises
- Read our policy report
- Visit our project website
- “How to Promote Order and Property Rights under Weak Rule of Law? An Experiment in Changing Dispute Resolution Behavior through Community Education” (with Christopher Blattman and Alexandra Hartman). 2014. American Political Science Review 108(1): 100-120
Dispute resolution institutions facilitate agreements and preserve the peace whenever property rights are imperfect. In weak states, strengthening formal institutions can take decades, and so state and aid interventions also try to shape informal practices and norms governing disputes. Their goal is to improve bargaining and commitment, thus limiting disputes and violence. Mass education campaigns that promote alternative dispute resolution (ADR) are common examples of these interventions. We studied the short-term impacts of one such campaign in Liberia, where property disputes are endemic. Residents of 86 of 246 towns randomly received training in ADR practices and norms; this training reached 15% of adults. One year later, treated towns had higher resolution of land disputes and lower violence. Impacts spilled over to untrained residents. We also saw unintended consequences: more extrajudicial punishment and (weakly) more nonviolent disagreements. Results imply that mass education can change high-stakes behaviors, and improving informal bargaining and enforcement behavior can promote order in weak states.
- Replicate our analysis
- Read our policy report
- Visit our project website
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Working papers
- “Can Community Policing Improve Police-Community Relations in Low-Income Countries? (with Guy Grossman and Anna Wilke). Under review
- “Can Partisanship Persuade Americans to Depolarize? Experimental Evidence from 5 Million Voters” (with Jessica Gottlieb, Marie Schenk, and Christopher Woods). Under review
- “Content that’s as Good as Contact? Vicarious Intergroup Contact and the Promise of Depolarization at Scale” (with Lee-Or Ankori-Karlinsky, Jessica Gottlieb, and Samantha Moore-Berg). Revise & resubmit, Political Science Research & Methods
- “Depolarization and Its Discontents: Experimental Evidence on Affective Polarization and Willingness to Confront Racism and Misinformation from Two Online Workshops” (with Jessica Gottlieb, Marie Schenk, and Christopher Woods). Under review
- “Depolarizing within the Comfort of Your Party: Experimental Evidence from Online Workshops” (with Jessica Gottlieb, Marie Schenk, and Christopher Woods). Revise & resubmit, Political Communication
- “Does It Matter if UN Peacekeeping Operations Implement Their Mandates?” (with Jessica Di Salvatore and Hannah Smidt). Under review
- “Public Works and Intimate Partner Violence: Experimental Evidence from Egypt and Tunisia” (with Eric Mvukiyehe). Under review
- “Why Do Citizens Support Ineffective Military Policing Policies? Evidence from Field and Survey Experiments in Colombia” (with Michael Weintraub and Jessica Zarkin). Under review
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Selected policy reports