Research Papers

Crises and disasters give voters an opportunity to observe the incumbent’s response and reward or punish them for successes and failures. Yet, even when voters perceive events similarly, they tend to attribute responsibility selectively, disproportionately crediting their party for positive developments and blaming opponents for negative developments. We examine selective attribution during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, reporting three key findings. First, selective attribution rapidly emerged during the first weeks of the pandemic, a time in which Democrats and Republicans were otherwise updating their perceptions and behavior in parallel. Second, selective attribution is caused by individual-level changes in perceptions of the pandemic. Third, existing research has been too quick to explain selective attribution in terms of partisan-motivated reasoning. We find stronger evidence for an explanation rooted in beliefs about presidential competence. This recasts selective attribution’s implications for democratic accountability.

Governments across the Global South have decentralized a degree of power to municipal authorities. Are local officials sufficiently knowledgeable about how to execute their expanded portfolio of responsibilities? Past studies have focused on whether citizens lack the requisite information to hold local officials accountable. We instead draw on extensive fieldwork and a novel survey of small-town politicians in India to show that local officials themselves have distressingly low levels of procedural knowledge on how to govern. We further show that procedural knowledge shapes the capabilities of officials to represent their constituents, and that asymmetries in knowledge carry adverse representative and distributive consequences. Finally, we show that winning office does not provide an institutionalized pathway to knowledge acquisition, highlighting the need for policy-based solutions. Our findings demonstrate the importance of assessing knowledge deficits among politicians, and not only citizens, to make local governance work.

In-Group Anger or Out-Group Ambivalence? How Voters Perceive Rule-Based Direct Transfers

Working Paper (Best Paper Award, Democracy & Autocracy Section, American Political Science Association)

Developing democracies increasingly have welfare programs that use objective rules to identify beneficiaries, and directly transfer benefits to intended recipients, cutting out party intermediaries. How do such transformative changes in the welfare state affect ethnic politics? I contend that this policy shift has the potential to attract new voters from ethnic out-groups, but runs the risk of alienating ethnic in-groups. To understand these electoral trade-offs, I leverage a natural experiment involving a large rule-based direct transfer program in India (a $2000 house), as well as survey experiments. Contrary to expectation, I find that in-group voters do not punish their party for substantially benefiting out-groups. Among out-groups, receipt of benefits is appreciated but does not weaken ethnic preferences. Cumulatively, transformative changes in the welfare state have nuanced effects on ethnic voting. These findings demonstrate the limits of a purely instrumental model of ethnic voting, which has wide purchase in developing democracies, and points to a more multidimensional model of ethnic attachment.

Urban citizens in low-income democracies rarely hold elected officials accountable for toxic air. To understand why, we fielded a large citizen survey in the highly polluted megacity of Delhi. We find no evidence of conventional explanations for accountability failures: residents are aware of pollution's adverse impacts, do not privilege development over curbing emissions, and are not fractured along class or ethnic lines on this issue. Instead, survey experiments reveal partisanship and sensitivity to the potential private costs of mitigation policies reduce accountability pressures. On the other hand, a randomized intervention (sharing indoor air quality information) that personalizes the costs of air pollution increases its electoral salience. We reveal key opportunities and constraints for mobilizing public opinion to reduce air pollution in developing democracies.

This article assesses the impact of a candidate’s caste on the probability of voting for a party. Candidate caste effects may be pronounced in multiethnic societies and patronage democracies. This is demonstrated for four political parties in Uttar Pradesh (India) across three state elections. Using data from fieldwork, a logistic regression is employed to test two hypotheses—voters are more likely to vote for a party if it fields a candidate from their caste; and less likely to vote for that party if other parties field co-caste candidates from that constituency. Results show that hypothesized effects are statistically significant across parties and elections. Citing corroborative evidence, it is suggested that caste parties employ candidate-centric strategies in some constituencies to widen their social base.