Large arrivals Aof refugees raise concerns about potential tensions with host communities, particularly if refugees are viewed as an out-group competing for limited material resources and crowding out public services. To address this concern, calls have increased to allocate humanitarian aid in...

Governments, militaries, and aid organizations all rely on economic interventions to shape civilian attitudes toward combatants during wartime. We have, however, little individual-level evidence that these "hearts and minds'' programs actually influence combatant support. We address this problem...

Efforts to increase citizen engagement in local governance, particularly in low socio-economic contexts, are frequently ineffective because citizens believe their voices and actions will not be respected by relevant authorities. We conduct two studies with over 2,200 citizens in rural Tanzania...

Can prolonged contact improve local residents' relations with internally displaced persons (IDPs) in fragile and violent settings? Despite record numbers of IDPs globally, there are few experimental tests of the causal effects of intergroup contact in conflict settings, and none with migrant...

A large literature suggests that the presence of refugees is associated with greater risk of conflict. We argue that the potentially positive effects of hosting refugees on local conditions have been over-looked. Using global data from 1990 to 2018 on locations of refugee communities and civil...

Do informational interventions shape electoral choices and thereby promote political accountability? The chapters in Part II of this book provided answers to this question in particular contexts. The studies individually provide rich insights not only into the impact of interventions that were...

Women politicians face barriers that can undermine their performance relative to men. Using original micro-data from Uganda, we test for gender gaps in performance across different job duties in subnational legislatures. We hypothesize, and find, that performance gender gaps are greatest in job...

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives' performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns...