When local governments compete, do their constituents win? Much empirical and theoretical work, inspired by the canonical Tiebout (1956) model, suggests that they do, with jurisdictional competition creating a quasi-market for public goods. In this paper, I consider a case in which special...

Interference between units may pose a threat to unbiased causal inference in randomized controlled experiments. Although the assumption of no interference is essential for causal inference, few options are available for testing this assumption. This paper presents the first reliable ex post...

Using geo-referenced terror events and ethnicity information, this article seeks to explore if and how elections contribute to violence in Iraq. Analyzing the December 2005 and March 2010 parliamentary elections and the January 2009 governorate elections, I assess whether partisan and/or ethnic...

Utilizing new data on criminal charges against candidates to India's Fourteenth and Fifteenth Lok Sabha elections, we study the conditions that resulted in approximately a quarter of those elected to each legislature facing or having previously faced criminal charges. We show that Indian...

This paper examines the role played by sitting presidents during United States midterm congressional elections between 1982 and 2006. I examine the effects of presidential campaign appearances on behalf of candidates for the House of Representatives. Conventional wisdom holds that such...

The paper proposes a mechanism explaining how elections may stabilize an autocratic regime even if they are evidently unfree and unfair. Instead of being meaningless rituals, non-democratic elections can help the autocrats in managing and communicating the public information about the regime's...

Pre-election “intention to vote” has come to substitute for “reported vote” or “validated vote” in many studies of turnout. The differences among them have been little studied. In this report, we examine all three jointly in a single U.S. dataset for what we believe is the first...

We estimate a model of strategic voting and quantify the impact it has on election outcomes. Because the model exhibits multiplicity of outcomes, we adopt a set estimator. Using Japanese general-election data, we find a large fraction [63.4%, 84.9%] of strategic voters, only a small fraction...