Search

This project uses survey experiments to examine: a) how legal and administrative incorporation impact the preferences and attitudes of minorities; and b) how minority voters trade off identity and competence in evaluating candidates for office.

The past few years have witnessed a large increase in out-migration from Central America, purportedly due to a mixture of violence, food insecurity, political unrest, desire for family reunification and lack of economic opportunity. Advocacy groups, nongovernmental organizations and news reports have gathered evidence on these push factors, but there remains a dearth of systematic studies into the relative importance of various drivers of migration and the interplay between them. Likewise, there is almost no academic research on the social and economic impact of U.S. deportations on the deported when they arrive in their home countries or on families and communities of migrants at risk of deportation. El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras suffer from high levels of gang violence, corruption, and the presence of transnational criminal organization that use them as transit points in trafficking drugs from South America to the U.S. Areas in the region struggle to cope with the impact on agriculture of rainfall variations related to climate change and associated increases in food insecurity. Search for economic opportunity - the World Bank estimates a poverty rate of 66 percent in Honduras, 60 percent in Guatemala and 29 percent in El Salvador - also contributes to migration. Lack of subnational data has limited the ability of researchers to disentangle the relative importance of multiple drivers of migration from these countries, hampering both understanding and effective policy response. Many of those who reach the United States end up as undocumented migrants or have unsuccessful asylum cases. Failed asylum cases and expanded ICE raids in recent years are resulting in large numbers of deportees, some of whom have spent decades in the U.S. The United States deports tens of thousands of individuals to Central America each year, but little is known about systematic effects of these deportations on deportees or the affected communities in the U.S. A recent agreement between the U.S. and Guatemala has resulted in the arrival of migrants from all over the world at the airport in Guatemala, where the government has a lot of difficulties on how to integrate deportees into society.

The ResiliencyCambodia program implemented under the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)/Cambodia’s Local Organizations—Movement Towards Self-Reliance (LO-MTSR) is designed to increase the organizational resiliency of Cambodian civil society organizations (CSOs) across the health; education; food security; agriculture; and democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) sectors. Organizations will increase their capacity to expand their networks and tap into new markets and revenue streams, thereby decreasing their reliance on aid from foreign donors. The LO-MTSR Impact Evaluation (IE) seeks to assess the outcomes and impacts of interventions that occurred as part of the ResiliencyCambodia program, primarily the implementation of an innovative ResiliencyCambodia Framework, which uses adaptive strategies, more effective narratives, alternative organizational and funding models, stronger mechanisms of transparency and accountability, and wider networks across the public, private, and non-profit sector to increase organizational resiliency. Interventions include trainings, toolkits, networking events, and financial resources. The IE utilizes a randomized control trial (RCT) designed to estimate the impact of an intervention by comparing outcomes for treated units with outcomes for a “counterfactual” group that was randomly selected to not receive the treatment. The IE is designed as a tiered intervention with two treatment cohorts, one receiving a low-intensity (LI) treatment and the other receiving a high-intensity (HI) treatment. A third group serves as a control. Treatments include attending training sessions in social media use, training in financial diversification, and a stipend to pay for leadership development. The IE will test three research hypotheses that follow from the evaluation objectives and LO-MTSR theory of change at the organizational level. Specific hypotheses in this IE include: Organizations participating in the ResiliencyCambodia program will: ● Increase organizational, administrative, and financial capacity. ● Decrease the organization’s reliance on funding from USAID and other interventional donors, the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC), and large international donors at odds with USAID’s Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS) objectives. ● Increase the size of the organization’s CSO network within and across sectors.

The Solid Waste Accountability Platform (SWAP) takes a collaborative approach to strengthening the Solid Waste Management (SWM) system in Cambodia. Led by Triangle Environmental Health Initiative (TE) in partnership with the DevLab@Duke University, The Asia Foundation (TAF), Cambodian Education and Waste Management Organization (COMPED) and Waste Voice (WV). SWAP will run for three years, October 2019 - September 2022, and will work with private waste collection firms, local stakeholders, and residents to test interventions designed to increase accountability and responsiveness in municipal solid waste collection and management in three urban centers of Cambodia: Siem Reap, Stueng Saen and Kampong Cham

This registration is for a project looking at how organizations in Cambodia, Serbia, and Uganda react to government repression. It uses a conjoint survey experiment to study this question of interest.

See original pre-registration: https://osf.io/u87me/?view_only=f7e6ed533895429ebc1238c21bf1724a (link is anonymized)

Supplemental Material for Citizen Cooperation with the Police: Evidence from Contemporary Guatemala by Elaine K. Denny, David A. Dow, Wayne Pitts, and Erik Wibbels in Comparative Political Studies

Supplemental material, rains-supplement for Combining satellite and survey data to study Indian slums: evidence on the range of conditions and implications for urban policy by Emily Rains, Anirudh Krishna and Erik Wibbels in Environment & Urbanization

The literature on clientelism has extensively covered the direct exchange of private goods for political support between voters and politicians. Yet, patronage does not end with the distribution of food, medicine or public employment. In poor informal settlements, access to a sanitation system or clean drinking water is often mediated by local politicians.Therefore, the interaction between slum politics and the provision of Local Public Goods (LPG) is quite relevant and requires further study. This dissertation explains the variation in infrastructure and public services in shantytowns as a function of social capital. Well-connected communities --with stronger ties among its members-- solve collective action problems, improving slum dwellers' quality of life. The linking mechanism between social capital and LPG is electoral coordination (bloc-voting). Neighbors agree for a common electoral strategy at the slum-level, which translates into an effective mechanism to demand for improvements in their locality (``good-type partisan homogeneity'').Alternatively, isolation among slum dwellers deteriorate their access to and quality of LPG. Under the absence of social capital, when slum-level electoral behavior appears to be homogenous, it is likely signaling political clientelism and not community-led coordination. Ultimately the ``bad-type partisan homogeneity'' represents the inability of slum dwellers to enforce electoral accountability and sanction unresponsive governments. I test my hypotheses with survey data from Udaipur (India) and eight provinces in Argentina.

I argue that the justice cascade--the recent trend toward holding leaders accountable for massive human rights violations--produces both positive and negative effects by influencing the post-tenure fates of leaders. On the negative side, the justice cascade exacerbates conflict. By undermining the possibility of a safe exile for culpable leaders, the pursuit of international justice incentivizes such leaders to cling to power and gamble for resurrection during conflicts when they would otherwise flee abroad. On the positive side, the justice cascade deters atrocities. Precisely because leaders know that committing gross human rights violations will decrease their exit options if they need to flee abroad, international justice effectively increases the cost of atrocities. Taken together, these predictions form the justice dilemma: ex ante deterrence and ex post gambling for resurrection are two sides of the same coin.To test my argument, I exploit remarkable variation over time in the threat international justice poses to leaders. Specifically, I examine the arrest of former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet in the United Kingdom in 1998--the first time a leader was arrested in a foreign state for international crimes--as the watershed moment in the push for international accountability for culpable leaders. Before 1998, leaders lived in an impunity era where the expected probability of international punishment for atrocities was virtually zero. Starting in 1998, the world shifted toward an accountability era in which a slew of culpable leaders have been arrested and transferred to international courts, causing other leaders to update their beliefs on the likelihood of facing international justice.Three main empirical results provide compelling support for the theory. I show that the decision of leaders to flee into exile is conditional on their expectations of post-tenure international punishment. Whereas culpable leaders are no more or less likely to flee abroad than nonculpable leaders before 1998, culpable leaders are about six times less likely to go into exile than nonculpable leaders after 1998. Rather than flee abroad, culpable leaders now have incentives to fight until the bitter end. Indeed, while there is no evidence of a relationship between leader culpability and conflict duration before 1998, I demonstrate that civil conflicts last significantly longer when culpable leaders are in power during the post-1998 period. This dark side of justice, however, creates a benefit: deterrence. Since leaders want to keep the exile option open in the event they need it, leaders are about five times less likely to commit mass atrocities after 1998 than they were previously.

This dissertation addresses the effect of informality on three key dimensions: social policypreferences, partisan attachments, and citizen-politician linkages. Many Latin Americanlabor markets have large informal sectors where workers are not covered by formal laborarrangements and earn meager wages, as well as truncated social security systems thattarget benefits to the well-off at the expense of the poor.I first analyze how economic informality conditions voters preferences regarding the redistributive role of the state (Chapter 3). I examine the effect of labor informality on individual preferences over contribution-based programs (such as social security and public health insurance) and means-tested programs (such as CCTs). The analysis of micro-level data for both Latin America and Mexico suggests that, counterintuitively, voters in the informal sector are no more likely to support increased spending in social security and welfare institutions. On the contrary, labor market outsiders tend to favor only social programs with no eligibility requirements.In the second part of the project, I study patterns of party identication among citizensin the informal sector (Chapter 4). I argue that the low utility derived from social policiesand the obstacles to class identity formation contribute to depress partisan attachments.The findings indicate that economic informality weakens ideological attachments betweenvoters and political parties. Results also show that outsiders trust less in political parties.Finally, I analyze how economic informality conditions linkages between citizens andpoliticians (Chapter 5). I theorize that given the characteristics of the members in theinformal sector, political parties will have incentives to approach them usingclientelistic offers and vote-buying strategies. I find that voters in the informal sector are particularly sensitive to some types of clientelistic offers. Furthermore, labor market outsiders seem to be more likely to switch their vote toward candidates offering private benefits.