In well-functioning democracies, the policymaking process should in principle respond to persistent economic inequality with corrective policies. This process is set in motion through majority demands for redistributive taxation and spending that elected representatives eventually supply through...

This paper provides experimental evidence on the electoral effect of a large education reform in a developing democracy. Despite significantly improving school quality, the policy reduced the incumbent party's presidential vote share by 3 percentage points (10%). This does not imply that voters...

We review a decade of literature on clientelism, a central topic in the study of developing democracies. We define clientelism as the discretionary distribution of public resources by politicians. We distinguish clientelism that occurs in the pre-electoral period (electoral clientelism) from...

To achieve a better future by 2040, most Filipinos express the need for simple and efficient government transactions, affordable government services, and the elimination of corruption. This paper expounds on that vision by explaining how effective public goods and services are hinged on a...

Public service reform often entails broad benefits for society and concentrated costs for interest groups. Do the electoral benefits outweigh the costs for politicians who implement reform? This paper examines the electoral effects of a randomized Liberian school reform which increased student...

This paper provides experimental evidence on the electoral effect of a large education reform in a developing democracy. Despite significantly improving school quality, the policy reduced the incumbent party's presidential vote share by 3 percentage points (10%). This does not imply that voters...

In well-functioning democracies, the policymaking process should in principle respond to persistent economic inequality with corrective policies. This process is set in motion through majority demands for redistributive taxation and spending that elected representatives eventually supply through...

This paper employs an instrumental variables approach to identify the effect of party ideology on policy outcomes. Exogenous variation in party representation is generated by the assassination of the leader of the populist Congress Party, which occurred mid-way through India's national elections...

This paper provides evidence for the effects of propaganda in inducing voters to support political parties espousing ideologies of ethno-religious nationalism. Prior to the 1991 Indian national elections, the leader of the Hindu-nationalist BJP party undertook a campaign across northern India to...

This paper describes the results of an impact evaluation of the National Solidarity Programme, a community-driven development programme in Afghanistan that created democratic village councils and funded small-scale development projects. Using a randomized controlled trial across 500 villages, we...