The preference of African voters for co-ethnic candidates is well documented in studies of African political behavior. However, African voters also seem to value good government performance. When does ethnicity trump performance? We theorize that a citizen’s vote choice depends in part on the...

In a shocking victory in Ghana’s 2008 presidential election, the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) prevailed over the incumbent New Patriotic Party (NPP) by one-half of one percentage point, after trailing far behind the NPP according to most opinion polls. What were the attributes...

International development agencies invest heavily in institution building in fragile states, including expensive interventions to support democratic elections. Yet little evidence exists on whether elections enhance the domestic legitimacy of governments. Using the random assignment of an...

The Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma (RPD) is a metaphor for the difficulties of achieving cooperation in social life. We present results from an agent-based model (ABM) of the RPD in which agents interact in a “market,” equivalent to interactions within the standard RPD, within networks, where...

Participating in insurgency is physically risky. Why do people do so? Using new data on 3,799 payments to insurgent fighters by Al Qa'ida Iraq, we find that: (i) wages were extremely low relative to outside options, even compared to unskilled labor; (ii) the estimated risk premium is negative;...

Cheeseman and Peiffer (2022) field a survey experiment in Nigeria to test the effect of five different anti-corruption messages on participants' willingness to bribe public officials. They find that these messages generally fail to reduce bribes and could, in fact, increase bribes. They further...