Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Political economy'

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2012.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-197).
This thesis examines three topics. The first chapter, entitled "Persistent Effects of Peru's Mining Mita" utilizes regression discontinuity to examine the long-run impacts of the mita, an extensive forced mining labor system in effect in Peru and Bolivia between 1573 and 1812. Results indicate that a mita effect lowers household consumption by around 25% and increases the prevalence of stunted growth in children by around six percentage points in subjected districts today. Using data from the Spanish Empire and Peruvian Republic to trace channels of institutional persistence, I show that the mita's influence has persisted through its impacts on land tenure and public goods provision. Mita districts historically had fewer large landowners and lower educational attainment. Today, they are less integrated into road networks, and their residents are substantially more likely to be subsistence farmers. The second chapter, entitled "Trafficking Networks and the Mexican Drug War" examines how drug traffickers' economic objectives influence the direct and spillover effects of Mexican policy towards the drug trade. Drug trade-related violence has escalated dramatically in Mexico during the past five years, claiming over 40,000 lives. By exploiting variation from close mayoral elections and a network model of drug trafficking, the study develops three sets of results. First, regression discontinuity estimates show that drug trade-related violence in a municipality increases substantially after the close election of a mayor from the conservative National Action Party (PAN), which has spearheaded the war on drug trafficking. This violence consists primarily of individuals involved in the drug trade killing each other. The empirical evidence suggests that the violence reflects rival traffickers' attempts to wrest control of territories after crackdowns initiated by PAN mayors have challenged the incumbent criminals. Second, the study predicts the diversion of drug traffic following close PAN victories by estimating a model of equilibrium routes for trafficking drugs across the Mexican road network to the U.S. When drug traffic is diverted to other municipalities, drug trade-related violence in these municipalities increases. Moreover, female labor force participation and informal sector wages fall, corroborating qualitative evidence that traffickers extort informal sector producers. Finally, the study uses the trafficking model and estimated spillover effects to examine the allocation of law enforcement resources. Overall, the results demonstrate how traffickers' economic objectives and constraints imposed by the routes network affect the policy outcomes of the Mexican Drug War. The third chapter, entitled "Insurgency and Long-Run Development: Lessons from the Mexican Revolution" exploits within-state variation in drought severity to identify how insurgency during the Mexican Revolution, a major early 20th century armed conflict, impacted subsequent government policies and long-run economic development. Using a novel municipal-level dataset on revolutionary insurgency, the study documents that municipalities experiencing severe drought just prior to the Revolution were substantially more likely to have insurgent activity than municipalities where drought was less severe. Many insurgents demanded land reform, and following the Revolution, Mexico redistributed over half of its surface area in the form of ejidos: farms comprised of individual and communal plots that were granted to a group of petitioners. Rights to ejido plots were non-transferable, renting plots was prohibited, and many decisions about the use of ejido lands had to be countersigned by politicians. Instrumental variables estimates show that municipalities with revolutionary insurgency had 22 percentage points more of their surface area redistributed as ejidos. Today, insurgent municipalities are 20 percentage points more agricultural and 6 percentage points less industrial. Incomes in insurgent municipalities are lower and alternations between political parties for the mayorship have been substantially less common. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that land reform, while successful at placating insurgent regions, stymied long-run economic development.
by Melissa Dell.
Ph.D.

L’objectif de cette thèse est d’explorer plusieurs phénomènes liés à la migration en prenant en considération différents aspects de la réalité économique contemporaine : l’importance du secteur non-échangeable, l’asymétrie entre les flux migratoires et les flux des investissements, ainsi que les problèmes persistants entre différentes communautés ethniques. Dans le premier chapitre introductif, nous explorons la littérature sur la politique économique de l’immigration et nous étudions les différentes voies par lesquelles les immigrés peuvent affecter le bien-être des résidents domestiques. Dans la deuxième partie, nous développons un cadre théorique afin d’analyser les effets de l’immigration sur le bien-être individuel dans une petite économie ouverte avec le secteur non-échangeable. Nos résultats expliquent pourquoi les résidents domestiques sont généralement opposés à l’immigration peu qualifiée et favorisent l’influx des immigrés hautement qualifiés. Dans le chapitre trois, nous faisons une extension du modèle élaboré dans le chapitre deux, en prenant en compte les flux internationaux du capital. D’abord nous cherchons à décrire le lien entre la migration peu et hautement qualifiée et les investissements directs à l’étranger. Puis, nous analysons le changement dans les attitudes envers l’immigration suite à l’introduction de la mobilité internationale du capital. Dans le quatrième chapitre, nous démontrons comment la diversité ethnique peut affecter les intentions d’émigrer. Nous traitons le cas de la Lettonie où les minorités ethniques constituent 40% de la population. Nous pouvons constater que les individus appartenant aux minorités ethniques sont plus probables d’émigrer et que cette probabilité augmente avec le revenu. Les individus appartenant à la majorité ethnique, au contraire, sont plus probables d’émigrer si leurs revenus sont plus bas
The objective of this thesis is to contribute to a better understanding of migration-related economic issues in the world today. We concentrate both on immigration and emigration and at various stages of our work address all three parties involved in migration process : people hosting immigrants, people left behind and the migrants themselves. We account for several important features of today’s rapidly globalising life : the importance of the non-traded sector, asymmetry between capital and labour flows, and persisting problems between ethnic communities. The first chapter in an overview of the political economy of immigration literature and addresses the multiple ways in which immigrants may affect natives’ welfare. In particular, we discuss the role of economic and non-economic arguments in shaping immigration attitudes and summarise main labour market and welfare-state effects of immigration. Chapter two develops open economy with a non-traded sector. Our finding provide additional understanding of why native population is generally opposed to low-skilled immigrants and favouring high-skilled foreign workers. The third chapter extends the model developed in chapter two to accommodate internationally mobile capital. First, we investigate whether immigration of high-skilled and low-skilled labour leads to positive or negative FDI. Then, we find out how would immigration attitudes change if a country allows international capital movements. Chapter four investigates how ethnic diversity at home may influence emigration intentions of an individual. We explore the case of Latvia where ethnic minorities constitute 40% of the population. We find that ethnic minorities are more likely to emigrate and are positively self-selected on the basis of income, while the opposite is true for ethnic majority population

The three chapters in this dissertation examine aspects of the relationships between transparency, government accountability, and the quality of public services. In the first chapter, I ask how ethnic diversity, or lack thereof, among polling station officials affects voting outcomes. I exploit a natural experiment occurring in the 2014 parliamentary elections in India, where the government mandated the random assignment of state employees to the teams that managed polling stations on election day. I find that the presence of officers of minority identities within teams led to significant shifts in vote share toward the political parties associated with these groups. Results suggest that the magnitude of these effects is large enough to be relevant to election outcomes. Using large-scale survey experiments, I provide evidence of own-group favoritism in polling personnel and identify the process of voter identity verification as an important channel through which voting outcomes are impacted. The second chapter examines whether electronic procurement (e-procurement), which increases access to information and reduces personal interactions with potentially corrupt officials, improves procurement outcomes in India and Indonesia. We find no evidence of reduced prices but do find that e-procurement leads to quality improvements in both countries. Regions with e-procurement are also more likely to have winners come from outside the region. On net, the results suggest that e-procurement facilitates entry from higher quality contractors. The third chapter studies the effects of the enactment across U.S. states of open meetings laws which ostensibly increase the public availability of information on legislator behavior. As recent work shows that increased remoteness of capital cities in U.S. states is strongly associated with reduced accountability and worse government performance, I also investigate how the impacts of open meetings vary with state capital isolation. I find that open meetings increase spending on public goods and heighten confidence in state government on average. Heterogeneous impacts on incumbent vote share suggest that at both low and high levels of initial accountability, open meetings provide citizens with additional information that influences voting decisions.
Public Policy

This thesis consists of an introduction and three stand-alone essays. In the introduction I discuss the commonalities between the three essays. Essay I charts the the main political cleavages among 59 Swedish unions and business organizations. The main conclusion is that there appear to exist two economic sources of political cleavage: The traded versus the nontraded divide and the labor versus capital divide. Essay II suggests a political rationale for why strikes have been more common in those OECD countries where the legislature is elected in single member districts (e.g. France, Great Britain) than where it was elected by proportional representation (e.g. Sweden, Netherlands). In Essay III I present a theoretical model of political support for different types of labor market regulations. From it I recover two implications: Support for industrial relations legislation that enables unions to bid up wages should be inversely related to the economy's openness, while support for employment protection legislation should be positively related to the size of the unionized sector. Empirical evidence from a cross-section of 70 countries match my theoretical priors.

This dissertation consists of three essays each of which considers a political economy problem. In the first essay, we study a local government who can engage in both grabbing hand and helping hand activities with respect to the firms under its jurisdiction. We find that there are two dynamic paths for this economy. It can either stagnate or take off, i.e., grow without bound. The path actually taken depends on three variables: If the initial capital stock, tax share of the local government, or the cost of covering up corruption is sufficiently high, the economy takes off. Otherwise it stagnates.
In the second essay, we model a situation where the government tries to help a distressed industry, but it needs to know the firms' adjustment costs to set its level of support. We show that lobbying can help the firms credibly reveal their adjustment costs, when the support takes the form of a subsidy or a tariff. Furthermore, the more firms there are in the industry, the smaller is the amount of lobbying necessary to convey information, and the higher is the social welfare. When lobbying is effort intensive rather than expenditure intensive, subsidies for high adjustment cost industries go up, and subsidies for low adjustment cost industries go down with the number of firms in the industry.
The third essay considers a game between an elite with political power and the rest of the population. Foreseeing that transition to majority rule will lead to redistribution, the elite engages in activities that decrease the efficiency of the public sector to discourage redistribution. We find that initial inequality in the economy increases corruption and decreases redistribution. The model's predictions are consistent with the empirical evidence that inequality and corruption are correlated, and that corrupt governments are smaller.

The first chapter shows that the ideological dimension is the key determinant of the decision to vote. We do so with a unique data base that analyses the elections in 16 OECD multi-party system countries for a period of time that spans from the 1979 to the 1995. This data set contains information on the ideological position taken by each party competing in an election and the self-declared ideological position of the citizens on the same ideological continuum. We estimate that the likelihood of voting is higher when there is a close distance between a voter’s bliss point and the preference of the nearest party. We also find that ideological location of the second nearest party matters for the decision to vote. Moreover, our results exclude that the ideology of political parties other than the first two nearest to the preferences of the voters are significant for the decision to vote. The second chapter focuses on why turnout varies across elections and across districts. A simple micro-founded measure of policy based party competition is developed and calculated for every district at every election in 15 European countries over the period 1947-1998. Our results suggest that a large proportion of the within-district inter-election variance in turnout levels can be attributed to differences in the intensity of district-level of political competition. The third chapter extends the research on happiness and spatial theory of voting by exploring whether the ideological vote affects the level of subjective well-being in the society. I rely my analysis on data on the subjective life satisfaction of a large sample of individual over 50 elections in 15 OECD countries. The results of the analysis lend firm support to the dominant role of ideological vote in the well-being of the individuals. Specifically, I demonstrate that subjective life satisfaction is negatively affected by the presence of strategic voting. The results also suggest that the level of well-being is lower when the citizen votes strategically for a political party that has not won the electoral competition. Moreover, when I account for the political affiliation, the right-wing voters are more susceptible to ideological consideration than the left wing one. My results are robust to different measures of strategic voting.

This dissertation consists of three essays on political economy. The first essay studies the various ways in which political activism affects policy making, drawing upon evidence from the Tea Party movement in the United States in 2009 and 2010. The second essay develops a policy-centered framework for understanding voting behavior in proportional-representation systems, and tests its predictions using survey data collected around the 2002 Dutch general elections. The third essay focuses on a specific aspect of the implementation of policy, the consequences regulatory supervision may have on firm performance, and assesses the net effect of this kind of supervision on firms' operating costs in the setting of the commercial-banking sector in the United States in the period 2001-2007.
Economics

This thesis consists of three stand-alone chapters studying theoretical models concerning a range of issues that take place within the context of political delegation: tax enforcement, political selection, electoral campaigning. First chapter studies the problem of a small electorate of workers who cannot influence tax rates but can influence their local politicians to interfere with tax enforcement. It develops a two-candidate Downsian voting model where voters are productivity-heterogenous workers who supply labour to a local firm that can engage in costly tax evasion while facing an exogenously given payroll tax collected at the firm level. Two purely office motivated local politicians compete in a winner-takes-all election by offering fine reductions to take place if the firm gets caught evading. Two results stand out. First, equilibrium tax evasion is (weakly) increasing in the productivity of the median voter as a result of the latter demanding a weaker enforcement regime through more aggressive fine reductions. Second, if politicians were able to propose and commit on tax rates as well, then the enforcement process would be interference-free and the tax level would coincide with the median voter's optimal level. These two results underline the fact that from voters' perspective, influencing enforcement policy is an imperfect substitute for influencing tax policy in achieving an optimal redistribution scheme due to tax evasion being costly. In other words, a lax enforcement pattern in a given polity can be indicative of a political demand arising as an attempt to attain a redistributive second-best when influencing tax policy is not a possibility. Second chapter turns attention to the role and incentives of media in the context of ex ante political selection, i.e. at the electoral participation level. It constructs a signalling model with pure adverse selection where a candidate whose quality is private information decides on whether to challenge an incumbent whose quality is common knowledge given an electorate composed of voters who are solely interested in electing the best politician. Electoral participation is costly and before the election, a benevolent media outlet which is assumed to be acting in the best interest of voters decides on whether to undertake a costly investigation that may or may not reveal challenger's quality and transmit this information to voters. The focus of the chapter is on studying the selection and incentive effects of changes in media's information technology. The setting creates a strategic interaction between challenger entry and media activity, which gives rise to two main results. First, an improvement in media's information technology, whether due to cost reductions or gains in investigative strength always (weakly) improves ex ante selection by increasing minimum challenger quality in equilibrium. Second, while lower information costs always (weakly) make the media more active, an higher media strength may reduce its journalistic activity, especially if it is already strong. The intuition behind this asymmetry is simple. While both types of improvements increase media's expected net benefits from journalism, a boost to its investigative strength also makes the media more threatening for inferior challengers at a given level of journalistic activity. Combining this with the first result implies that the media can afford being more passive without undermining selection if it is sufficiently strong to begin with. In short, a strong media might lead to a relatively passive media, even though the media is "working as intended". Third chapter is about electoral campaigns. More precisely, it is a theoretical investigation into one possible audience-related cause for diverging campaign structures of different candidates competing for the same office: state of political knowledge in an electorate. Electorate is assumed to consist of a continuum of voters heterogenous along two dimensions: policy preferences and political knowledge. The latter is assumed to partition the set of voters into ignorant and informed segments, with the former consisting of voters who are unable to condition their voting decisions on the policy dimension. Political competition takes place within a probabilistic voting setting with two candidates, but instead of costless policy proposals as in a standard probabilistic voting model, it revolves around campaigning. Electoral campaigning is modelled as a limited resource allocation problem between two activities: policy campaigning and valence campaigning. The former permits candidates to relocate from their initial policy positions (reputations or legacies), which are assumed to be at the opposing segments of the policy space (i.e. left and right). The latter allows them to generate universal support via a partisanship effect and can be interpreted as an investment into non-policy campaign content such as impressionistic advertising, recruitment of writers capable of producing emotionally appealing speeches, etc. The chapter has two central results. First, a candidate's resource allocation to valence campaigning increases with the fraction of ignorant voters, ideological (non-policy) heterogeneity of informed voters and proximity of candidate's initial position to the bliss point of the informed pseudo-swing voter. The last one results from decreasing relative marginal returns for politicians from converging to pseudo- swing voter's ideal position. Second, even if candidates are otherwise symmetric, a monotonic association between policy preferences and political knowledge can induce divergence into campaign structures. For instance, if ignorance and policy preferences are positively correlated (e.g. less educated preferring more public good) then the left candidate would conduct a campaign with a heavier valence focus and vice versa. Underlying this result is again the decreasing relative marginal returns argument: a candidate whose initial position is already close to that of the informed pseudo-swing voter would benefit more from a valence oriented campaign. An implication of this is that a party that is known having a relatively more ignorant voter base can end up conducting a much more policy focused campaign compared to a party that is largely associated with politically aware voters.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2011.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 177-187).
The chapters in this thesis tackle different questions, but share the attempt to open the "black box" of the relationship between institutions and economic outcomes. In the first chapter, I examine mass media's role in countering special interest group influence by studying county-level support for US Senate candidates from 1980 to 2002. I use the concentration of campaign contributions from Political Action Committees to proxy capture of politicians by special interests, and compare the reaction to increases in concentration by voters covered by two types of media markets - in-state and out-of-state media markets. Unlike in-state media markets, out-of-state markets focus on neighboring states' politics and elections. Consistent with the idea that citizens punish political capture exposed in the media, I find that an increase in concentration of special interest contributions reduces candidate's vote shares in in-state counties relative to the out-of-state counties, where the candidate receives less coverage. The second chapter (with Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson) examines the effect of population growth on violent conflict. Exploiting the international epidemiological transition starting in the 1940s, we construct an instrument for changes in population (Acemoglu and Johnson, 2007) and find that countries with higher (exogenous) increases in population experimented larger increases in social conflict. Using a simple theoretical framework, we interpret these findings as evidence that a larger population generates greater competition for resources and makes violence more likely if institutions cannot handle the higher level of disputes. The third dissertation chapter asks the following question: if property rights in land are so beneficial, why are they not adopted more widely? I propose a theory based on the idea that limited property rights over peasants' plots may be supported by elite landowners to achieve two goals. First, limited property rights reduce peasants' income from their own plots, generating a cheap labour force. Second, they force peasants to remain in the rural sector to protect their property, even if job opportunities appear in the urban sector. The theory identifies conditions under which weak property rights institutions emerge, and provides a specific mechanism for the endogenous persistence of inefficient rural institutions.
by Leopoldo Fergusson.
Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2017.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "Joint with Abhijit Banerjee, Amy Finkelstein, Rema Hanna, Benjamin Olken, and Sudarno Sumarto"--Page 115, Chapter 3.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 151-156).
This thesis consists of three chapters. The first two chapters explore how different organizational forms, and in particular different hiring and firing practices, affect bureaucracies. In the first chapter, I study how the introduction of merit systems reducing politicians' control over police officers' hiring and firing affected police performance in the 1970s. I exploit population-based mandates for police department merit systems in a regression discontinuity design. Merit systems improved performance: in the first ten years after the reform, the property crime rate was lower and the violent crime clearance rate was higher in departments operating under a merit system than in departments operating under a spoils system. I explore three possible channels: resources, police officers' characteristics and police officers' incentive structure. Employment and expenditures were not affected and there is limited evidence of selection changing pre-1940. Instead, I provide indirect evidence that changes in the incentive structure faced by police officers were likely important. In the second chapter, I study how the introduction of civil service boards in charge of meritocratic hiring affected the demographic composition and the performance of police officers, fire fighters and other municipal employees 1900-1940. Identification exploits the staggered timing of the reform in large municipalities using a differences-in-differences design. I find that civil service boards decreased the probability that police officers were first or second generation immigrants but mixed evidence on how the demographic characteristics of other workers were affected. Finally, I find that no effect on police performance. The third chapter, joint with with Abhijit Banerjee, Amy Finkelstein, Rema Hanna, Benjamin Olken, and Sudarno Sumarto, analyzes a large-scale experiment in Indonesia. In particular, we study how a national governmental health insurance program characterized by flexible coverage responds to subsidies and assisted registration through a website. Lowering prices and reducing hassle costs increase enrollment but households often let their coverage lapse. Subsidies attract healthier households in the short run, but over time the average value of claims equalizes because of differential claim dynamics. Overall, we find that, when dynamic adjustments to coverage are possible, subsidies do not improve the financial sustainability of health insurance programs.
by Arianna Ornaghi.
Ph. D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2016.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 159-161).
This thesis consists of three essays on economics focusing on the determinants of regime change and economic growth. I put the focus primarily on political, institutional, and historical factors. I started working on these topics after studying the importance of regime change and institutions in the modern economics literature. The first essay analyzes how media can be a powerful tool to promote regime change in tightly controlled political systems. I analyze the impact of Radio Liberty, an American radio with an anti-communist slant, on the 1991 Russian elections, which were the first elections in the country, to study the role of Western media on the demise of the Soviet Union. I use a novel empirical strategy exploiting ionospheric variation with the aim of obtaining a measure of Radio Liberty availability in each Russian electoral district. The results show a significant effect of these broadcasts in favor of Yeltsin, documenting that media can play an important role in political processes of regime change. In the second essay, I analyze the persistent effects of the territorial division in Spain between the Christian kingdoms in the north and Islamic Iberia in the center and south of the country during the Middle Ages. I analyze this question empirically using a spatial donut discontinuity design which compares Christian and Muslim territories exploiting the dynamics of the reconquest process undertaken by the Christians which resulted in the Muslim defeat. I find important differences in current municipal economic development with substantial positive effects in Christian municipalities. The third essay analyzes the importance of protests for regime change. I provide empirical evidence that protests have a significant and non-linear impact on the likelihood that a country successfully democratizes. I show that it is for intermediate values of protests that the likelihood of democratization is higher. I present a dynamic model to explain the empirical evidence. The main implication is that protests could play an important role for regime change as long as they are not too high because in the latter case there will be a backlash which will block regime change.
by Javier Garcia-Arenas.
Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2011.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references.
This dissertation consists of three essays. The first chapter is an empirical investigation of social change, looking at the Prohibition Era in the U.S. It explores how the implementation of policies affects the evolution of beliefs about their effects, giving rise to a feedback between preferences and policy choices. Using city-level data on law enforcement and crime, it estimates a structural model where crime outcomes are the result of Prohibition enforcement, and lead to changes in public opinion about Alcohol-related policies. Enforcement depends on moral views and beliefs, but only beliefs are shaped by the outcomes of past policies. The model can account for the variation in public opinion changes, and for the heterogeneous responses of enforcement and violence across cities. Its estimates are used to perform a series of counterfactual exercises. The second chapter is a theoretical investigation of entrenchment and encroachment of rulers. It studies the strategic interaction between competition and ratchet effect incentives in a coalition-formation game of incomplete information. Rulers require the support of a subset of politically powerful groups to remain in power. These have private information about their cost of providing political support. A ruler can attempt to exploit the competitive nature of the coalition formation game to induce revelation. Its ability to do so determines the extent of entrenchment and encroachment. By restricting attention to Markov Perfect Bayesian equilibria, the model shows that limited learning is possible, and that learning dynamics are shaped by an informational commitment problem arising when rulers are "too optimistic". In joint work with James Robinson, the final chapter is a comparative empirical study of the impact of Frontier availability on long-run development across the Americas. It calls into question the notion of American exceptionalism due to its Westward Frontier, first proposed by Frederick J. Turner. Almost every country in the Americas had a substantial Frontier, but its allocation varied due to differences in the quality of political institutions around the mid-19* century, making the effect of the Frontier conditional on political institutions at the time of Frontier expansion. The empirical evidence is consistent with this "conditional Turner thesis".
by Camilo Garcia-Jimeno.
Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2010.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references.
Essay 1: The Effect of Political Alignment on Transfers to Portuguese Municipalities. In this paper, I use financial data of Portuguese municipalities (1992-2005) to investigate if political alignment between the central government and a local government brings financial benefit to local governments. I use a regression discontinuity design, in order to distinguish between generally partisan transfers (larger transfers to municipalities where the party in power has larger vote share), and the effect of political alignment per se, between the national government and the municipal chamber president. The benefit of pure alignment is substantial. Estimates imply that municipalities aligned with the central government receive 19% more targetable transfers than do municipalities where the party in power nearly won the local elections. I test an electoral motivation for this bias in transfers: extra transfers prove to increase the vote share of PSD incumbents, but not the vote share of PS incumbents; however, municipal incumbency does not lead to better results in national elections. Essay 2: Local Government Fiscal Policies: Left-wing vs. Right-wing Portuguese Municipalities. In this paper, I use financial data from Portuguese municipalities (from 2003 to 2007) to investigate if the ideology of the local government incumbent influences local fiscal policies. Regression discontinuity design is employed to ensure proper identification of the ideology effect on fiscal policies. Left-wing control of municipal presidency showed a significant effect on the likelihood of adopting a municipal corporate tax. Left-wing municipalities also proved more likely to invest in social infrastructure. On the other hand, right-wing municipalities were shown to be more likely to grant subsidies to families, as well as to offer more generous compensation to their municipal workers. Finally, left-wing municipalities were less likely to resort to high levels of debt than their right-wing counterparts. Essay 3: Political Alignment and Federal Transfers to the US States. In this paper, I use financial data regarding transfers from the US federal government to US States (1982-2001) to investigate if political alignment, defined as a state governor and the US President belonging to the same political party, influences the level of federal transfers received by a state. Regression discontinuity design is used to ensure proper identification of the alignment effect. Total federal transfers to aligned states are significantly larger, with the most trustworthy estimates in the neighborhood of 3%. Most of this advantage comes from significantly larger defense transfers to aligned states (the most credible estimates indicate a 13% advantage). Finally, other types of federal transfers are not significantly affected by political alignment, namely entitlements, salaries and, perhaps surprisingly, project grants.
by Marco Migueis.
Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2018.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 179-184).
This thesis consists of three chapters on political economy. Each chapter explores the effects of a change to the equilibrium of a given market. In the first chapter, Jon Weigel and I study a randomized controlled trial in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on corruption at tolls. We randomly vary incentives for drivers to comply with rules instead of engaging in corruption. These incentives affect the "supply" of corruption rather than the "demand" for corruption from bureaucrats. We find that sizable financial incentives produce a 7 to 10 percentage point increase in the probability that drivers get receipts, implying an elasticity of citizen supply of bribes ranging from 0.45 to -0.95. Social incentives have no effect. Similarly, providing information about other drivers' responses to treatment (to shift social norms) does not affect behavior. Drivers' appear remarkably inelastic in their supply of bribes. We argue this reflects the fact that bribe payment may increase the efficiency of transactions in the toll setting we examine and suggest that corruption may serve to "grease the wheels" in this context. In the second chapter, Christopher Blattman, Horacio Larreguy, Benjamin Marx, and I study a large-scale randomized controlled trial designed to combat vote-buying in the 2016 election in Uganda. We find that the campaign did not reduce the extent to which voters accepted cash and gifts in exchange for their votes. In addition, we designed the study to take advantage of our large sample (covering 1.2 million voters) to examine both direct treatment and spillover effects. The spillover effects on vote-buying are also zero, but the campaign had large direct and indirect effects on vote-shares for candidates. Heavily treated areas had increases in visits from non-incumbent candidates and non-incumbent candidates improved their vote shares substantially in these parishes. Consistent with these effects, we find evidence that the campaign diminished the effectiveness of vote-buying transactions by shifting local social norms against vote-selling and by convincing some voters to vote their conscience, regardless of any gifts received. In the third chapter, I examine the effect of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age in the United States from 21 to 18. This change enfranchised a large population of new voters, expanding the electorate by almost 9%. However, I find that the Amendment had little effect on overall political outcomes in the United States. Although it did increase total turnout in areas with more young voters, it did not affect the partisan composition of the electorate and correspondingly did not lead to changes in representation or policy. These results stand in contrast to other well-studied expansions of the franchise and provide an important caveat to those findings: when the preferences of new voters are insufficiently distinct from those of existing voters, politicians have little reason to change their established positions.
by Otis Russell Reid.
Citizen participation in corruption : evidence from roadway tolls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (with Jonathan Weigel) -- A market equilibrium approach to reduce the incidence of vote -buying : evidence from Uganda (with Christopher Blattman, Horacio Larreguy, and Benjamin Marx) -- A "minor" expansion : political outcomes.
Ph. D.

This thesis is divided into three parts. The first one evaluates the institution of compulsory vote, providing new estimates for the effects of the obligation to vote on individuals. The identification strategy relies on the Brazilian dual voting system - voluntary and compulsory - the exposure being determined by the date of birth. Using RD and IV approaches and data from a self-collected survey, we find that the compulsory legislation leads to a significant increase in voter turnout. These changes are followed by a sizable increase in the probability that individuals will express preference for a political party, but not by an increase in political knowledge among the population. Moreover, we find that the first compulsory voting experience permanently affects individuals\' preferences. The second part of the thesis empirically analyses episodes of sovereign debt default. Some of the salient features of the theoretical literature on sovereign debt, including its prediction that almost all defaults should arise in \"Bad Times\", are at odds with the data: over 38% of defaults actually occur in \"Good Times\", as measured by an HP filter. We explore the specific characteristics of each type of default and present econometric evidence that failures to repay foreign debt in good times can, usually, be rationalized by three components: (i) changes in the political environment, (ii) hikes in global interest rates and (iii) instances in which good HP times actually take place under quite poor economic conditions. We also present some suggestive indications that the duration of the episodes does not vary substantially with the type of default that precedes them, but with the environment in which they occur, drawing some important implications for the understanding of economies\' post-default market access. The third part of the thesis looks at the issue of campaign contributions in exchange for political favors (the so called \"pay-to-play\" scheme). I proposes a simple game to model the incentives of political parties and firms from public-revenue-intensive sectors, and test the implications of this model using data on campaign contributions and public contracts from Brazil. The data confirms the pay-to-play hypothesis.
Esta tese se divide em três partes. A primeira parte avalia a instituição do voto compulsório, proporcionando novas estimativas para os efeitos da obrigação de votar sobre os indivíduos. A estratégia de identificação se baseia no sistema dual em vigor no Brasil - voluntário e compulsório - sendo a exposição determinada pela data de nascimento. Usando as metodologias de RD e VI, e dados de uma pesquisa coletada especificamente para este estudo, concluímos que esta legislação leva a um aumento significante na participação política através do voto. Este aumento é acompanhado por uma elevação considerável na probabilidade de os cidadãos expressarem preferência por um partido político, mas não no seu nível de conhecimento sobre política. Além disto, concluímos que a primeira experiência de voto afeta permanentemente as preferências dos indivíduos. A segunda parte da tese analisa empiricamente episódios de calote da dívida soberana. Alguns dos aspectos fundamentais da literatura teórica sobre o assunto, incluindo a previsão de que quase todos os calotes deveriam ocorrer em \"Períodos Ruins\", não são confirmados pelos dados: mais de 38% dos calotes ocorrem em \"Períodos Bons\", sob a definição do filtro HP. Exploramos as características de cada tipo de calote e apresentamos evidência econométrica de que calotes na dívida externa em períodos bons em geral podem ser explicados por três componentes: (i) mudanças no ambiente político, (ii) aumentos nas taxas de juros internacionais e (iii) instâncias em que o filtro HP classifica um período como bom ainda que a real situação econômica seja bastante negativa. Por fim, apresentamos alguns resultados que sugerem que a duração do episódio de calote não depende substancialmente do tipo de calote em questão, mas sim do ambiente em que o calote ocorre. Tal resultado abre caminho para novas pesquisas sobre o acesso a mercados internacionais de crédito após calotes. A terceira parte da tese trata da questão de contribuições de campanha em troca de favores políticos (esquema conhecido como \"pay-to-play\"). Eu proponho um jogo simples para modelar os incentivos de partidos políticos e firmas de setores intensos em receitas públicas, e testo as implicações deste modelo usando dados de doações de campanhas e contratos públicos do Brasil. Os dados confirmam a hipótese de pay-to-play.

This thesis is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the issue that in a political environment wherein the development of a political career may encompass frequent transitions between offices, it is usually unclear how winning a given position may ultimately affect subsequent electoral performances and career formation. We exploit regression discontinuity designs in Brazilian elections to estimate the electoral advantage derived by incumbents of various positions both when running for reelection to the same held position, and when trying to win a different elective office. Then, we document that incumbency in legislative offices at state and federal levels is associated with a strong positive effect on the probability of winning the same position in the following election, whereas officeholders in diverse branches of local government do not appear to benefit electorally from their incumbency status and may even be harmed by it when they have relatively little political experience. Moreover, we find that state deputies also receive an incumbency advantage when running for the position of federal deputy, and that such a cross-office effect, along with all incumbency effects on winning the same position, is not due to selection into candidacy. Aside from the transition from state deputy to federal deputy, however, incumbents of any position tend to be less likely than their defeated counterparts to run for, and win, other positions. In the second part, we investigate whether incentive-compatible clientelistic transactions may be sustained through the observation of voters\' party-affiliation status by politicians. We argue that since affiliation consists of an instance of public demonstration of support for a given party, vote-buying attempts by parties may be made more effective by targeting voters that are (or in order for them to become) affiliated to them. Using electoral and demographic data on Brazilian municipalities, we find that voters affiliated to parties in the municipal coalition of the Workers\' Party are significantly more likely to start receiving benefits from the Bolsa Família program upon the incumbency of a party in that coalition. We also investigate political determinants of party affiliation and find that while partisan incumbency at the local level appears to affect affiliation only in restricted situations, the provision of payments from the Bolsa Família has a robust positive effect on affiliation. Lastly, the third part investigates the extent to which teachers with strong partisan stances are capable of influencing electoral outcomes through shaping their students\' voting behavior. We address this question by exploiting unique datasets on party-affiliated voters and on public high school teachers in the state of São Paulo, Brazil---through which we are able to identify teachers\' political affiliations. Along with such information, we also make use of very rich datasets on election results and voter characteristics to explore the relationship between the density of affiliated teachers in a given region and electoral outcomes observed for that region. To overcome endogeneity issues such as that of selection in the assignment of teachers to schools and of voters to polling places, for instance, we explore the varying intensity of the hypothesized effect according to electorate characteristics at the polling station level, a very specific site within the polling district to which voters and teachers are suggested not to be able to select themselves. Our results are suggestive of a positive and significant effect of the presence of affiliated teachers on the electoral performance of the corresponding party, especially in elections based on plurality voting systems. However, our evidence also indicates that such an effect is more relevant for (and possibly restricted to) teachers affiliated to the Workers\' Party, and that these teachers appear to be altering political
Esta tese se divide em três partes. A primeira parte lida com a questão de que, em um ambiente político em que o desenvolvimento de uma carreira política possa envolver frequentes transições entre cargos, não se tem claro como a ocupação de uma dada posição eletiva pode fundamentalmente influenciar o desempenho eleitoral subsequente e a formação de uma carreira pelos políticos. São exploradas regressões descontínuas baseadas em eleições brasileiras com o intuito de se estimar o impacto eleitoral de ser o mandatário experimentado por políticos tanto ao concorrerem à reeleição ao cargo que ocupam, quanto ao disputarem outro cargo eletivo. Documenta-se, então, que a incumbência de cargos legislativos aos níveis estadual e federal encontra-se associada a um expressivo efeito positivo sobre a probabilidade de vitória da disputa seguinte pelo mesmo cargo, ao passo que mandatários de governos locais não aparentam ser eleitoralmente beneficiados por tal status, podendo ainda ser prejudicados por tal condição no caso de exibirem pouca experiência política. Além disso, verifica-se que deputados estaduais também usufruem de uma vantagem eleitoral da incumbência ao disputarem o cargo de deputado federal, e rejeita-se que tal efeito, bem como os impactos sobre a probabilidade de ser reeleito a um mesmo cargo, seja devido à seleção em novas candidaturas. À exceção da transição do cargo de deputado estadual para o de deputado federal, no entanto, mandatários de qualquer cargo tendem a ser menos propensos do que seus homólogos derrotados a se candidatar e a vencer eleições para outros cargos. Na segunda parte, investigamos se transações clientelistas podem ser sustentadas através da observação, por parte de partidos políticos e candidatos, do status de filiação partidária dos eleitores. Argumenta-se que, sendo tal filiação um exemplo de demonstração pública de apoio a um partido, tentativas de compra de voto por partidos podem se tornar mais eficazes quando direcionadas a eleitores que sejam filiados, ou no intuito de que venham a sê-lo. Por meio do emprego de dados eleitorais e demográficos acerca de municípios brasileiros, observa-se que eleitores filiados a partidos das coligações municipais do Partido dos Trabalhadores são significativamente mais propensos (relativamente a eleitores em geral) a passar a receber benefícios do Programa Bolsa Família quando da eleição de tais partidos. Investigam-se também determinantes políticos da filiação partidária, e encontra-se que o simples fato de ser o mandatário de governos locais afeta os níveis de filiação ao partido correspondente apenas em situações específicas; por outro lado, a provisão de pagamentos do Bolsa Família apresenta um efeito positivo e robusto sobre a evolução dos índices de filiação. Por fim, a terceira parte investiga o potencial exibido por professores com elevada participação política de influenciar resultados eleitorais ao induzirem os votos de seus alunos. Explora-se tal questão através da utilização de dados sobre filiação partidária e sobre professores de ensino médio de escolas estaduais no estado de São Paulo, Brasil. Combinando-se informações sobre o status de filiação partidária de tais professores com dados sobre resultados eleitorais e características do eleitorado, investiga-se especificamente a relação entre a densidade de professores filiados e o desempenho eleitoral dos partidos em uma dada região. Problemas de endogeneidade, como os possivelmente decorrentes da alocação de professores a escolas, são evitados por meio da exploração de variação na intensidade do efeito proposto de acordo com características do eleitorado em um nível ao qual eleitores (e professores) não são capazes de se selecionar. Os resultados relacionados sugerem um efeito positivo e significante da presença de professores filiados sobre o desempenho eleitoral dos partidos, particularmente em eleições majoritárias. No entanto, a evidência apresentada indica que tal efeito é aparentemente restrito a professores filiados ao Partido dos Trabalhadores, e que tais professores são capazes de alterar as preferências políticas de alunos que compareceriam à votação independentemente de sua influência. .

The papers in this thesis study distortions and inefficiencies that impede the correct functioning of democratic systems. I specifically focus on two phenomena: organised crime and media bias. The first paper presents an analysis of the consequences of the collusion between criminal organisations and politicians on the allocation of public resources and the collection of fiscal revenues. To measure the presence of criminal organisations it exploits newly collected data on public spending, local taxes and elected politicians at the local level. Differences-in-differences estimates reveal that infiltrated local governments not only spend more on average on construction and waste management and less on police enforcement, but also collect fewer fiscal revenues. In addition, I uncover key elements of local elections associated with mafia-government collusion. In particular, Regression Discontinuity estimates show that infiltration is more likely to occur when right-wing parties win local elections. The second paper moves on to the study of media bias and persuasive communication. In democracies voters rely on media outlets to learn about politically salient issues. This raises an important question: how strongly can media affect public perceptions? This paper uses a natural experiment – the staggered introduction of the Digital TV signal in Italy – to measure the effect of media persuasion on the perceptions individuals hold. It focuses on crime perceptions and, combining channel-specific viewership and content data, this paper shows that the reduced exposure to channels characterized by high levels of crime reporting decreases individual concerns about crime. The effect is particularly strong for the elderly who are more exposed to television and less to other sources of information. Finally, it shows that such change in crime perceptions is likely to have relevant implication for voting behaviour. The third paper continues on the study of persuasive communication by investigating whether the amount and the type of news related to sovereign debt might have played a role in the triggering of the crisis by increasing the level of uncertainty among investors. In order to test these claims empirically, I collect a unique and new dataset on news from the main media outlets in a set of 5 European Countries from September 2007 to September 2014. I restrict my search to news related to sovereign debt and, in particular, to media stories related to political aspects of the debt. Time series and dynamic panel regressions reveal that, conditional on a full set of controls and falsification tests, the frequency of news is correlated to an increase in bond prices. Both time series and panel analysis reveal a certain extent of country heterogeneity in the effect. In particular, an increase in the number of news leads to an increase in bond yields of peripheral countries. Finally, this paper also shows how it is not just the amount of news that matters, but also their tone. More precisely, negative news in country i at time t − 1 increases significantly the sovereign bond yield of country i at time t. On the opposite positive news leads to a decrease in sovereign bond yields. In sum, the three chapters of this thesis aim to contribute to the academic study of organised crime and media bias. First, this thesis provides new conceptualisation in the study of these phenomena. Second, it exploits set of newly collected dataset which will eventually constitute a public good for all the researchers interested in the study of these topics. Finally, to overcome the difficult identification challenges that the above questions pose, this thesis contributes to the literature by proposing a set of rigorous ways to claim causality in the results.

The first chapter analizes conditional assistance programs. They generate conflicting relationships between international financial institutions (IFIs) and member countries. The experience of IFIs with conditionality in the 1990s led them to allow countries more latitude in the design of their reform programs. A reformist government does not need conditionality and it is useless if it does not want to reform. A government that faces opposition may use conditionality and the help of pro-reform lobbies as a lever to counteract anti-reform groups and succeed in implementing reforms. The second chapter analizes economies saddled with taxes and regulations. I consider an economy in which many taxes, subsidies, and other distortionary restrictions are in place simultaneously. If I start from an inefficient laissez-faire equilibrium because of some domestic distortion, a small trade tax or subsidy can yield a first-order welfare improvement, even if the instrument itself creates distortions of its own. This may result in "welfare paradoxes". The purpose of the chapter is to quantify the welfare effects of changes in tax rates in a small open economy. I conduct the simulation in the context of an intertemporal utility maximization framework. I apply numerical methods to the model developed by Karayalcin. I introduce changes in the tax rates and quantify both the impact on welfare, consumption and foreign assets, and the path to the new steady-state values. The third chapter studies the role of stock markets and adjustment costs in the international transmission of supply shocks. The analysis of the transmission of a positive supply shock that originates in one of the countries shows that on impact the shock leads to an inmediate stock market boom enjoying the technological advance, while the other country suffers from depress stock market prices as demand for its equity declines. A period of adjustment begins culminating in a steady state capital and output level that is identical to the one before the shock. The the capital stock of one country undergoes a non-monotonic adjustment. The model is tested with plausible values of the variables and the numeric results confirm the predictions of the theory.

Aquesta tesi combina dades històriques amb teoria de jocs per a intentar entendre millor la relació entre els partits polítics i l'opinió publica. En primer lloc, estudi les dinàmiques de les qüestions socials. Demostro que les qüestions socials (per exemple, aquelles relacionades amb els drets de les dones i les minories, o les qüestions racials) tendeixen a seguir patrons de comportament, tant en termes de partits com d'opinió pública. Després, basant-me en aquests patrons, proposo una nova forma de modelar el comportament dels partits i del que ciutadans. A través de tres articles teòrics, aprofundeixo en la interacció dinàmica entre partits polítics i opinió pública al voltant d'una qüestió política específica. Els meus resultats llancen llum sobre què incentiva els partits a donar suport polítiques oposades. També ajuden a entendre millor diversos fenòmens que s'han observat en la realitat, com ara el fet que els partits polítics semblen estar més polaritzats que els propis ciutadans.
Esta tesis combina datos históricos con teoría de juegos para intentar entender mejor la relación entre los partidos políticos y la opinión publica. En primer lugar, estudio las dinámicas de las cuestiones sociales. Demuestro que las cuestiones sociales (por ejemplo, aquellas relacionadas con los derechos de las mujeres y las minorías, o las cuestiones raciales) tienden a seguir patrones de comportamiento, tanto en términos de partidos como de opinión pública. Después, basándome en estos patrones, propongo una nueva forma de modelar el comportamiento de los partidos y de lo ciudadanos. A través de tres artículos teóricos, profundizo en la interacción dinámica entre partidos políticos y opinión pública alrededor de una cuestión política específica. Mis resultados arrojan luz sobre qué incentiva a los partidos a apoyar políticas opuestas. También ayudan a entender mejor diversos fenómenos que se han observado en la realidad, como por ejemplo el hecho de que los partidos políticos parecen estar más polarizados que los propios ciudadanos.
This thesis combines historical data with game theory to better understand the relationship between political parties and mass behaviour. First, I study the dynamics of social issues. I show that social issues (e.g, issues related to women's and minority rights, or racial issues) tend to follow behavioural patterns, both in terms of parties'and citizens' behaviour. Then, based on these patterns, I propose a new way of modelling parties' and citizens' behaviour. Through three theoretical papers, I deepen the dynamic interplay between political parties and the public opinion around a specific issue. My results shed light on what makes political parties be confronted with respect to an issue. They also help understanding some observed phenomena related to this interplay, like the sorting phenomenon or the question of why political parties seem to be more polarized than citizens.

This dissertation consists of three essays on political economy. The first essay studies the effect of competition on media bias in the context of U.S. newspapers in the period 1870-1910. We measure bias as the intensity with which different newspapers cover scandals. We collected data on 121 scandals and 157 newspapers. We also collected data on the partisanship, frequency of publication, and circulation of the newspapers in our sample, as well as of the newspapers circulating in the same cities as those in our sample. Results indicate that partisan newspapers cover scandals involving the opposition party's politicians more intensely and cover scandals involving their own party's politicians more lightly. We find evidence that competition decreases the degree of media bias. The point estimates suggest that compared to a newspaper in a monopoly position, a newspaper facing two competitors will on average exhibits less than 50% as much overall bias in coverage intensity. The second essay shows how voters make choices even in single-party authoritarian elections where the number of candidates equals the number of parliamentary seats. Cuban citizens signal approval of, candidates within the framework of the regime. Voters support candidates who have grassroots links and experience of local multi-candidate electoral contestation. Voters choose based not on clientelist incentives but on the limited political information available to them, namely, posted biographies and direct knowledge of local candidates, friends and neighbors, who run in their communities. Voters have chosen, however, without rejecting the Cuban Communist Party. The third essay studies the unintended effects of the 2003 electoral reform in Colombia. In a context with fragmented and clientelistic parties and an electoral system that incentivizes intra-party competition instead of party discipline, scholars such as Shugart and Carey (1995) recommend the adoption of electoral reforms. A reform such as this was implemented in Colombia. What was unexpected was that the reform would promote a significant increase in the number of candidates running in each district. The effect of this was a lowering of the minimum threshold of the vote share required to obtain a seat, thereby maintaining clientelism as a viable campaigning strategy.
Political Economy and Government

xii, 116 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
The following essays address the impact of special interest groups on economic decision making processes. The hypothesis of the first essay is that there exists a dynamic relationship between politicians and lobby groups. Politicians may choose to support "projects" proposed to them by lobbies because they yield clear economic benefits. However, governmental support may continue after these benefits have been exhausted, implying a cost to society and yielding rents to the lobbies. A theoretical framework is developed to model the incentives a government might have to behave in a manner consistent with the hypothesis. In this structure despite the fact that they support projects from which all economic rents have been extracted, politicians are rationally reelected. In the second chapter I examine how structural changes in the US steel industry affect the voting behavior of House Representatives on trade related bills. The hypothesis is that Representatives face opposing incentives after the PBGC bailed out the pension plans of major steel firms. Representatives have an incentive to vote less for protectionist policies, because the bailout makes the steel firms more competitive. But the Representatives also have an incentive to yield to the demands of affected steel workers, who favor more protection after the bailout. The data set underlying this study is a panel including votes on trade related bills over 9 years. The results obtained using fixed effects techniques support the hypothesis. In the third chapter, I develop a theoretical model of the dissolution of countries. I model a society with two different groups of citizens, who have different preferences over public goods, to analyze under which political regime the dissolution of these groups into separate countries is most likely. Differentiating between revolutions and civil wars allows me to look at the effects of both forms of political violence. I find that while the threat of a revolution can induce oligarchies to increase the franchise, the threat of a civil war can induce a. country to dissolve peacefully. The model predicts that peaceful dissolution is more likely in democracies, whereas oligarchies are more likely to risk civil war to stay united.
Committee in charge: Christopher Ellis, Co-Chairperson, Economics; Bruce Blonigen, Co-Chairperson, Economics; Glen Waddell, Member, Economics; Michael Dreiling, Outside Member, Sociology

L'économie politique est l'une des sous-disciplines de la littérature économique. Les économistes politiques étudient les effets des facteurs politiques sur les résultats économiques. Les institutions et l'influence de différentes structures institutionnelles sur les marchés sont parmi les principaux domaines de recherche de l'économie politique. Dans la littérature existante, le nombre d'analyses empiriques portant sur les déterminants des institutions est faible par rapport aux études qui se concentrent sur les effets des institutions sur les performances économiques. De plus, les analyses qui examinent l’impact de la culture, en particulier de la religion, sur les institutions sont rares. Sans aucun doute, la religion peut avoir des effets dramatiques sur les variables sociales et économiques. L’objectif de ce travail est donc d’examiner les effets de la religion et de la religiosité sur la corruption, le bonheur des individus et le comportement électoral. Nous contribuons à la littérature existante en fournissant de nouvelles preuves et en nous concentrant sur les pays non analysés dans les études précédentes. [...]
Political economy is one of the sub-diciplines of economics literature. Political economists investigate the effects of political factors on economic outcomes. Institutions and the influence of different institutional structures on markets are among the main research areas of political economy. In the existing literature, the number of empirical analyses which investigate the determinants of institutions is low in comparison to the studies that focus on the effects of institutions on economic performance. Moreover, the analyses which examine the impact of culture, specifically religion, on institutions are scarce. Without doubt, religion can have dramatic effects on social and economic variables. Hence, the aim of this work is to investigate the effects of religion and religiosity on corruption, individuals’ happiness and voting behaviour. We contribute to the existing literature by providing new evidence and by focusing on the countries which are not analysed in the previous studies. [...]

Cette thèse s’articule en trois essais qui contribuent à la littérature en économie politique des pays en voie de développement. Le premier chapitre étudie l’impact des distorsions dans la representation législative des provinces au sein du Congrès argentin dans la distribution des revenus fédéraux. Le chapitre 1 est coécrit avec Sebastián Galiani (University of Maryland) et Gustavo Torrens (University of Indiana). En utilisant trois types de variations exogènes dans la representation legislative des provinces on montre que des changements dans le nombre de sièges n’a aucun effet sur le montant de révenus fédéraux que chaque province reçoit. Le deuxième chapitre (co-écrit avec S. Galiani et G. Torrens) analyse la dynamique des réformes structurelles dans les pays en voie de développement, en présence d’organisations internationales pourvoyeuses de fonds. Nous développons un modèle dynamique où on montre que ces organisations modifient l’équilibre politique et peuvent induire des pays à sur-reformer et les exposer à un cycle de réformes et contre-réformes. Le troisième chapitre de cette thèse étudie l’impact des nouvelles technologies d’information sur le comportement politique des jeunes en Argentine. J’analyse l’impact d’un programme de distribution d’ordinateurs portables ciblé aux étudiants des écoles secondaires, qui ont voté pour la première fois après une baisse de l’age du droit de vote à 16 ans. Je trouve que l’accès au programme a un effet négatif dans leur taux de participation aux élections; des données complementaires montrent que l’utilisation qu’ils donnent aux ordinateurs est plutôt de divertissement, un fait qui conduit au désintérêt en politique
This thesis consists of three essays on the political economy of developing countries. Chapter 1 « Fiscal Federalism and Legislative Malapportionment: Causal Evidence from Independent but Related Natural Experiments » (cowritten with S. Galiani and G. Torrens) investigates the impact of distortions in districts' representation in the Argentine Congress on the distribution of federal tax resources. Exploiting exogenous variations in the provinces' legislative representation, we show that changes in the share of seats do not result in changes in the share of federal tax resources each district gets. Chapter 2, entitled « International Organizations and Structural Reforms » (co-written with S. Galiani and G. Torrens), we analyze the dynamics of structural reforms in developing countries in the presence of international organizations that fund reforms. We develop a dynamic model in which we show that these organizations alter the local political equilibrium and may incentivize countries to over-reform. This, in turns, leaves countries prone to suffer violent cycles of reform and counter-reform. In chapter 3, « Computers and Youth Political Participation », I study the impact of new information technologies on the political behavior of young people in Argentina. I analyze the effect of a laptop distribution program aimed at high school students who voted for the first time after voting age was lowered to 16. My analysis show that exposure to the program is associated with a decrease in turnout rates of teenagers, and I present evidence that suggests that this may be due to increased entertainment use of computers, which eventually leads to apathy in politics

While a vast literature has been collected pointing out the role of the human capital on economic growth, a few has been said, in Economics, on the mechanism through which education directly impacts on democracy. The present dissertation proposes a novel microfoundation of this nexus based on the paramount role of education as economic growth engine and determinant of political participation. The first two works introduce elements of political psychology in order to shed lights on individual cognitive process that might favor, overall, a culture of democracy. Education is then a cognitive tool that citizens/voters can use to decode the information content of political signals and to keep rulers in charge accountable. We formally show that the entire initial distribution of education matters for a successful democracy and that the median is pivotal in the political process. Motivated by that in the last work we propose a statistical analysis of the distribution of the Italian primary school service. Primary schools tend to distribute in a complex way according to geographical features of the territory, schooling aged population density, and possible interactions between the two. Despite the school system is financed at a State level, we outline the persistence of remarkable differences not directly attributable to historical divergences among different macro-area of the country but rather between montane areas and more dynamic regions deputed to explain economic and political divergences. Chapter 2: We propose a political agency model where rent-maximizer rulers are constrained by sophisticated principals/producers that use an awareness-management model `a la B´enabou and Tirole. Sophistication is explained by educational attainments and producers are endowed with different levels of education, that increase over time with human capital investments. We allow education to be both the engine of growth and a determinant of political participation; in equilibrium, more educated societies are more able to punish politicians that, in turn, invest more in productive public goods such as infrastructure, roads or legal rules for contracts enforcement. We prove the existence of multiple steady states featuring, respectively, a sophisticated society with congruent politicians in office, and a naive society ruled by dissonant politicians. Finally, we address inequality concerns and show how, for intermediate values, inequality opposingly hits citizens and ruler and only the latter is found to better off; conversely, citizens are averse to inequality, contributing to explain, via sophisticated accountability, why most people dislike living in a society which is too unequal. Chapter 3: The paper originally attempts to explain the rise of the new wave of populism in Europe and the persistence of the Latin American populism. Such phenomena rose an unresolved political puzzle according to which populist politicians has been widely supported by the electorate while ultimately hurt the economic interests of the majorities. We address this puzzle by looking at the electorate side and, specifically, at individual citizens that are endowed with different level of political sophistication. According to the Political Psychology literature, we approximate political sophistication in terms of individual education attainments whose distribution evolve over time with human capital investments. In each period, the distribution of political sophistication within a country generates different incentive structure for the incumbent that accordingly optimally decide whether to be a populist or a responsible type whereas between countries might determine completely different equilibria in the long run, one with populist politicians and one ruled by responsible ones. I argue that rent-maximizer politicians have the chance to behave in a populist fashion when a naive electorate fail in keeping rulers politically accountable. Despite citizens are politically committed to responsible economic policy, naive voters are basically unaware of the politicians intentions providing to the latter opportunities for the manipulation of the economy and the electoral outcome. Populist rulers carry out inefficient investment with the only intent to induce a mean-increasing spread in future distributions of human capital so as to increase electoral consensus based on a naive electorate and to maximize tax revenues based on a few of rich. Chapter 4: We characterize the statistical law according to which Italian primary school-size distributes. We find that the schoolsize can be approximated by a log-normal distribution, with a fat lower tail that collects a large number of very small schools. The upper tail of the school-size distribution decreases exponentially and the growth rates are distributed with a Laplace PDF. These distributions are similar to those observed for firms and are consistent with a Bose-Einstein preferential attachment process. The body of the distribution features a bimodal shape suggesting some source of heterogeneity in the school organization that we uncover by an indepth analysis of the relation between schools-size and citysize. We propose a novel cluster methodology and a new spatial interaction approach among schools which outline the variety of policies implemented in Italy. Different regional policies are also discussed shedding lights on the relation between policy and geographical features.

Defence date: 28 January 2019
Examining Board: Prof. Andrea Ichino, EUI, Supervisor; Prof. Andrea Mattozzi, EUI; Prof. Selim Güleşçi, Università Bocconi; Prof. Stefano Gagliarducci, Università di Roma Tor Vergata.
This thesis is a collection of independent empirical essays on gender and political economy. The first chapter investigates the effect of a pro-Islamist local government on female employment, using a unique dataset of civil servants in Turkish municipalities. Exploiting quasirandom variation in contested local elections and the time variation in the repeal of the headscarf ban, I establish two results. First, an Islamist mayor employs a lower share of females when religious women are denied jobs. Second, an Islamist mayor does not recruit females differently than a secular mayor, when institutions allow religious females to work. The proposed mechanism is the Islamist mayors’ preference for religious female employees, rather than intrinsic gender bias. The second chapter, co-authored with Marco Francesconi and Astrid Kunze, investigates labor demand effects of the extension of parental leave duration in Norway. We focus on whether and how firms adjust the gender composition of their workforce when the opportunity costs of certain types of workers rise. Using rich employer-employee data, we uncover that firms substitute potential mothers and fathers with older workers. Our results demonstrate potentially undesirable consequences of parental leave for women, even when some leave is provided for men. In the third chapter, co-authored with Fatih Serkant Adıg¨uzel and Aslı Cansunar, we consider the extent to which the geography of healthcare provision is effective in buying electoral votes. We construct a unique database of free primary healthcare clinics in Istanbul, Turkey. We estimate that a ten-minute decrease in walking time to the nearest clinic increases support for the incumbent party by 6 percentage points in local elections. While low-educated voters only care about visibility, highly-educated voters only value quality of healthcare. We argue that the spatial distribution of public service provision captures the information available to voters, which in turn, influences political outcomes.
--1 Headscarves and Female Employment --2 Parental Leave from the Firm’s Perspective (Chapter 2: co-authored Marco Francesconi and Astrid Kunze) --3 Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Proximity to Health Care and Electoral Outcomes (Chapter 3: co-authored Serkant Adıgüzel and Aslı Cansunar) --A Appendix

Defence date: 9 December 2019
Examining Board: Prof. Andrea Mattozzi, European University Institute (Supervisor); Prof. Andrea Ichino, European University Institute (Co-supervisor); Prof. James M. Snyder, Jr., Harvard University; Prof. Tommaso Nannicini, Università Bocconi
In the first chapter, I study whether the introduction of primary elections induces more or less political polarization. Before 1976, only representatives from Indiana had to pass through the primaries, whereas the reform introduced primaries for Indiana’s US senators too. Using a difference-in-differences, I show that primaries deliver less-polarized politicians and account for one-fifth of the pre-reform average ideological gap between parties. I interpret the results in the light of a conceptual framework in which primaries lower the cost of participating in candidate selection procedures, giving incentives to participate to moderate voters as well. The second chapter is coauthored with D. Iorio and A. Mattozzi. We use a newly collected dataset from 63 democracies, and we construct the tenure accumulated by the ruling party while in office. We merge these data with fiscal policy indicators. We find an expenditure elasticity of 0.061 and a deficit elasticity of 0.055 over the period 1972-2014. Our findings point into the direction of a honeymoon effect: the older is the coalition of parties, the more divisive tend to be the available policy choices, which require costly transfers in the form of public expenditure to keep coalition members together later on. In the third chapter, I exploit newly collected data on ties between local politicians in Italy from 1985 onwards, to study the relation between cross-party connections and future career prospects. Exploiting a difference-in-discontinuities design, I find that ruling coalition members connected with the runner-up are twice as likely to be promoted to the council in which the runner-up leads the opposition. The effect of connections with the leader of the rivals disappears when I consider appointments to boards of state-owned enterprises. These findings suggest that connected politicians act as political brokers and smooth the relationship between government and opposition.
1. Political Polarisation and Primary Elections 2. Good Old Spendthrift. The Fiscal Effects of Political Tenure 3. 'Keep Friends Close, But Enemies Closer': Connections and Political Careers

This thesis consists of three independent chapters. The first chapter examines the strategic choices of the targets and the intensity of violence by rebel groups. The chapter presents a theoretical framework that links a rebel group’s targeting decisions to income shocks. It highlights that this relationship depends on the structure of the rebels’ tax base. The hypotheses from the model are tested in the context of India’s Naxalite conflict. The second chapter estimates the impact of military recruitment on human capital accumulation in colonial Punjab. In this context, I find that higher military recruitment was associated with increased literacy at the district-religion level. The final chapter presents a model that describes the optimal design of civil-military institutions in a setting where some control of the military over domestic politics is deemed desirable.

As Africa's largest economy and its most populous country, over a decade of rapid economic growth in Nigeria contributed to the 'Africa Rising' narrative. However, like many African commodity exporters, this economic growth, billions of dollars in oil earnings and electoral democracy have not translated into a diversified and industrial economy. This study examines why the Nigerian economy remains so dependent on oil and is non-industrial, which I argue are economic and development outcomes of specific policy choices constrained by Nigeria's institutional configuration or the political settlement. In this endeavour, my central preoccupation is with the political processes of decision making which at any point in time favour one policy choice over the other in resource-rich and plural societies such as Nigeria, and the economic and development outcomes of these policy choices. I employ the political settlements analytical framework to unveil these political processes and the conditions they create in which certain policies are preferred over others. This entails an examination of the causal relationship within the three variables of 'constraints', 'policies' and 'economic and development outcomes'. I argue that understanding Nigeria's challenges of economic diversification requires an examination of its political settlement to identify horizontal (elite competition), vertical (societal agitations for resource redistribution) and external (oil shocks) constraints on a ruling coalition, and the specific economic policy responses each constraint generates. Essentially, my research explains how policy makers are constrained to pursue certain courses of action over others, and the outcomes of these policies on economic growth and the structural transformation of production, exports and government revenue. In the Nigerian context, the study also examines how sub-national and regional differentiation in the distribution of growth in states like Lagos and Kano affect future political processes and their policy outcomes. The thesis draws from multiple data sources, including economic data, semi-structured interviews with various stakeholders, documentary sources, and participant and non-participant observation.

This dissertation analyzes the effects of political and economic institutions on economic development and growth. The first essay develops an overlapping-generations political economy model to analyze the incentives of various social groups to finance human capital accumulation through public education expenditures. The contribution of this study to the literature is that it helps explain the observed differences in the economic growth performance of natural resource-abundant countries. The results suggest that the preferred tax rates of the manufacturers on one hand and the political coalition of manufacturers and landowners, on the other hand, are equal to the socially optimal tax rate. However, we show that owners of natural resources prefer an excessively high tax rate, which suppresses aggregate output to a suboptimal level. The second essay examines the relationship between the political influence of different social classes and public education spending in panel data estimation. The novel contribution of this paper to the literature is that I proxy the political power and influence of the natural resource owners, manufacturers, and landowners with macroeconomic indicators. The motivation behind this modeling choice is to substantiate the definition of the political power of social classes with economic fundamentals. I use different governance indicators in the estimations to find out how different institutions mediate the overall impact of the political influence of various social classes on public education spending. The results suggest that political stability and absence of violence and rule of law are the important governance indicators. The third essay develops a counter argument to Acemoglu et al. (2010) where the thesis is that French institutions and economic reforms fostered economic progress in those German regions invaded by the Napoleonic armies. By providing historical data on urbanization rates used as proxies for economic growth, I demonstrate that similar different rates of economic growth were observed in the regions of France in the post- Napoleonic period as well. The existence of different economic growth rates makes it hard to argue that the differences in economic performance in the German regions that were invaded by the French and those that were spared a similar fate follow from regional differences in economic institutions.

There are two inter-related themes of this thesis: Economic development and global governance. We develop a perspective of &ndash
what we call &ndash
&lsquo
Institutional International Political Economy&rsquo
(IIPE) in order to: i) assess the likelihood of developmental success on the part of the Third World countries in the twenty-first century, and ii) analyze the developmental and world-systemic implications of the so-called &lsquo
global governance model&rsquo
, which we conceptualize as an ultra-liberal capitalist project on the part of the &lsquo
commanding heights&rsquo
of the contemporary &lsquo
world-economy&rsquo
. Our IIPE-perspective relies on an &lsquo
institutionalist&rsquo
synthesis of the classic works of Karl Polanyi, Joseph Schumpeter and Fernand Braudel. In the light of this perspective, &lsquo
state-led development&rsquo
seems to be inconceivable in the face of &lsquo
governance&rsquo
, which is an attempt to disintegrate the &lsquo
institutional substance&rsquo
of the state-as-we-know-it into &lsquo
market-like processes&rsquo
. Nevertheless, &lsquo
governance&rsquo
is bound to become the victim of its own success insofar as it destroys the indispensable political institutions upon which capitalism has survived as a historical world-system in the past.

This thesis contributes to the body of research known as the new economic geography. According to this paradigm, increasing returns to scale at the firm level, monopolistic competition, and transportation costs interact in shaping the spatial distribution of economic activity. The introductory chapter lays out the motivation of this thesis and puts it into the perspective of the existing literature. Chapter 1 introduces a typical model of new economic geography: the nature of the agglomeration and dispersion forces it displays is recurrent in this body of research; the model also displays multiple equilibria. The welfare properties of these equilibria are also analysed. Chapter 2 completely characterizes the set of equilibria of a wide range of models that are the quintessence of the new economic geography paradigm. The model of chapter 2 is shown to share the qualitative features of these models. Chapter 3 integrates a simple version of the model chapter 2 within a political economy framework. The welfare analysis of chapter 2 provides the motivation for this theoretical exercise. Chapter 4 seeks to provide an answer to the important but thus far neglected question of what is the mechanism that actually determines the magnitude policies that seek to affect the equilibrium spatial allocation of industries. The geography model is integrated in a fully specified political economy process of policy selection. Chapter 4 extends the model of chapter 2 to deal with the issue of the 'fragmentation' of the production process when new economic geography forces are at play. Finally, the analysis of chapter 5 contributes to the growing literature on the labour market imperfections as a driving force for agglomeration. In particular it shows how the hold-up problem can be softened or worsened by the cluster of industries using workers with similar skills.

In the first chapter, I study how human populations adapt to ethnically diverse societies. Using new data on a natural experiment from Peru’s colonial history, the results show that ethnic diversity need not spell poor development outcomes -a history of within-group heterogeneity can turn ethnic diversity into an advantage for development. The second chapter explores the effects of political accountability on the selection of politicians when accountability mechanisms are prone to political capture. Using a comprehensive dataset on the characteristics of candidates running for mayor in Peru, the results show that having a recalled incumbent in the previous term causes a negative selection of candidates in terms of their education, experience in public office, and representativeness of native populations.
En el primer capítulo, se estudia cómo las poblaciones se adaptan a sociedades étnicamente diversas. Usando datos nuevos de un experimento natural en Perú, se muestra que la diversidad étnica no conlleva necesariamente peores resultados-haber pertenecido a un grupo étnico con individuos de especializaciones heterogéneas puede convertir la diversidad étnica en una ventaja para el desarrollo económico. El segundo capítulo explora el proceso de selecci ón de autoridades locales cuando existen elecciones revocatorias que se usan como instrumento político en lugar de como mecanismo de control. Usando datos sobre las características de candidatos a alcalde municipal en Perú, se muestra que los candidatos de municipios en los que previamente se ha revocado al alcalde tienen menos años de educación y de experiencia en cargos públicos y son menos representativos de la población nativa.

Esta tesis investiga la economía política de las transferencias intergubernamentales. Se centra en los factores políticos que determinan la asignación de fondos bajo control de gobiernos centrales a las diversas regiones. El primer capítulo, contribuye a este asunto a través de un nuevo análisis de los datos del panel y una medida comprensiva de necesidades de gastos para el caso de Rusia. El segundo capítulo, desarrolla nuevas herramientas metodológicas para analizar sistemas políticos del multi-partido. Estas herramientas permiten medir a votantes cambiantes en dos dimensiones ideológicas usando datos individuales de los estudios electorales. En el tercer capítulo se utilizan las medidas de votantes cambiantes para probar teorías de las políticas distributivas para el caso de España. Este capítulo demuestra que las variables políticas son significativas en la asignación de las subvenciones del estado, y la magnitud del efecto es comparable a la de variables económicas.
This thesis investigates the political economy view of intergovernmental grants. It centers on the political factors that determine allocation of funds under the control of central governments to different regions. The first chapter contributes to this topic by a novel analysis of panel data and a comprehensive measure of expenditure "needs" for the case of Russia. The second chapter develops new methodological tools for analyzing multi-party political systems. These tools allow to measure swing voters on two "ideological" dimensions using individual survey data. In the third chapter the measures of swing voters are used to test theories of distributive politics for the case of Spain. This chapter shows that political variables are significant in the allocation of state subventions, and the magnitude of the effect is comparable to that of economic variables.

The article 1 addresses the role of political parties and studies whether popularity shocks are crucial for electoral accountability beyond their effects on voter behavior. It specifically examines the impact of the revelation of information about a government's conduct on the types of candidates who stand for election. The empirical test focuses on the Brazilian city council elections in 2004 and 2008. The identification approach exploits the randomness of the timing of the release of audit reports on the use of federal funds by municipal governments. The study finds that when the audit reveals a high level of corruption (i.e., when it represents a negative popularity shock), the parties supporting the incumbent select more educated candidates. On the contrary, parties pick, on average, less educated candidates when the audit finds low levels of corruption (i.e., when it represents a positive popularity shock). These effects are stronger in municipalities that have easier access to local media. The evidence confirms that parties are strategic players that consider specific features of the electoral competition when making decisions and that their decisions are affected by shocks that influence the electoral race. The article 2 is devoted to examining aspects of the voter preference assumptions. Citizen assessment of government performance is a cornerstone of successful democratic functioning. However, accountability is a double-edged sword. When voters misunderstand the stakes, and provide the wrong incentives to elected officials, political accountability leads to an implementation of suboptimal welfare policies. This paper reveals that an electorate can demand clientelism. To address this question, I study the behavior of voters in a context of vote-buying in Brazilian politics known as the drought industry. The data cover the Brazilian democratic elections from 1998 to 2012, and as empirical strategies I implement both fixed-effects models with panel data and a regression discontinuity design with heterogeneous treatment effects. I find evidence that after a drought, voters increase the vote share of local incumbent parties that are politically aligned with the central government to ensure the inflow of partisan government aid relief. Such behavior reinforces the central government's incentives to bias policies in favor of politically aligned municipalities to influence elections. Consequently, the cycle of distortion of aid relief allocation is perpetuated. In connection with the findings indicating that the incidence of droughts and the Brazilian political economy are directly linked, the article 3 investigates the behavior of the local governments regarding the level of corruption. The analysis studies whether the allocation of aid relief policies increases the level of corruption in the context of natural disasters. More specifically, the study investigates the number of federal emergency declarations against droughts, as a proxy for aid relief, and the number of irregularities in the local governments' expenditures found by auditors in Brazilian cities during a full mayor's term. The study implements an instrumental variable approach exploiting the quasi-random nature of the cycle component of a municipality's aridity relative to its trend. The findings show that an additional recognition of the state of emergency leads to an increase in corruption per capita for an entire term of a mayor.

This dissertation studies the applications of reputation games in social media and finance as well as decision games in political economy. Chapter 1 develops a reputation game in which a biased but informed expert makes a statement to attract audiences. The biased expert has an ideological incentive to distort his information as well as having a reputation concern. The expert knows that his expertise may vary in different topics, while the audiences cannot identify such differences. The biased expert is more likely to announce his favorite message when he knows less about it. Moreover, the biased expert is less willing to lie when the audiences have better outside options, and such improvements in outside options may benefit both the expert and the audiences.

Chapter 2 studies a credit rating game with a credit rating agency(CRA), an issuer and an investor. The privately informed and biased CRA provides a rating on the issuer's project, and the investor decides to purchase the project or not according to the report. As long as the CRA obtains a contract, he will inflate the rating. When the default risk is high, the CRA tells the truth. Moreover, he is more likely to tell the truth when the issuer's private benefit is larger. When the default risk is low, the CRA sends a good rating. He is more likely to inflate the rating if the issuer has a higher private benefit.

Chapter 3 presents a model in secessions and nationalism, with a special emphasis on the role of civil war. In our model, a disagreement on secession between the central government and the minority group leads to disastrous military conflicts. As a result, the tremendous potential cost of the war distorts the political choice of the minority group, and helps the central government to exploit them both economically and politically. Several key ingredients, such as population, per capita income and perceived winning chance of the civil war, play an essential role in the decision making process of the minority group. I also conduct an empirical test of this model, which supports the major findings stated above.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University
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A frequent discussion in the Political Economy literature is that of the directionality in the relationship between economic and political variables. Are our society's ideas, political orientation, concepts of morality and values conditioned by our economic development or, on the contrary, are our ideas, values and worldview what determine our political and economic attitudes, and, thereby, our economic performance and political development? This thesis comprises two parallel projects that address these two different approaches. The first project studies the effect of having land or housing property rights on the decisions of households' members of whether or not to participate in civil society organizations; I develop this idea in a paper called "Civil Society and Land Property Rights: Evidence From Nicaragua". For doing this I use household level panel data for the years 1998, 2001 and 2005. I conclude that contrary to what happens in more developed countries, in developing societies a household receiving formal property rights reduces the incentives to participate in civil society. The second project is aimed at studying the relationship between religion and welfare states: given the different possibilities available in terms of data sources and methodologies, this project is integrated by two papers. In the first one. "Religion, Political Attitudes and Welfare States" I use data from the World Values Survey in order to study the effect of individual religiosity on attitudes towards the welfare state and, thus, its aggregate impact on welfare state policies. In the second paper of this project, "Political Elites, Religion and Welfare States in Latin America" I continue studying this relationship but instead of using data from ordinary citizens I focus on the study of legislators in Latin America. I combine quantitative and qualitative data and show that more religious legislators have less progressive attitudes towards the welfare state. Similarly. I find important differences across religions in the attitudes of their members towards the relationship of religion wits state, politics, society and the economy.
2031-01-01