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Pre-analysis plans (PAPs) have been championed as a solution to the problem of research credibility, but without any evidence that PAPs actually bolster the credibility of research. We analyze a representative sample of 195 PAPs registered on the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) and American Economic Association (AEA) registration platforms to assess whether PAPs registered in the early days of pre-registration (2011–2016) were sufficiently clear, precise, and comprehensive to achieve their objective of preventing “fishing” and reducing the scope for post-hoc adjustment of research hypotheses. We also analyze a subset of ninety-three PAPs from projects that resulted in publicly available papers to ascertain how faithfully they adhere to their pre-registered specifications and hypotheses. We find significant variation in the extent to which PAPs registered during this period accomplished the goals they were designed to achieve. We discuss these findings in light of both the costs and benefits of pre-registration, showing how our results speak to the various arguments that have been made in support of and against PAPs. We also highlight the norms and institutions that will need to be strengthened to augment the power of PAPs to improve research credibility and to create incentives for researchers to invest in both producing and policing them.

Economics games such as the Dictator and Public Goods Games have been widely used to measure ethnic bias in political science and economics. Yet these tools may fail to measure bias as intended because they are vulnerable to self-presentational concerns and/or fail to capture bias rooted in more automatic associative and affective reactions. We examine a set of misattribution-based approaches, adapted from social psychology, that may sidestep these concerns. Participants in Nairobi, Kenya completed a series of common economics games alongside versions of these misattribution tasks adapted for this setting, each designed to detect bias toward noncoethnics relative to coethnics. Several of the misattribution tasks show clear evidence of (expected) bias, arguably reflecting differences in positive/negative affect and heightened threat perception toward noncoethnics. The Dictator and Public Goods Games, by contrast, are unable to detect any bias in behavior toward noncoethnics versus coethnics. We conclude that researchers of ethnic and other biases may benefit from including misattribution-based procedures in their tool kits to widen the set of biases to which their investigations are sensitive.

Author(s): Berge, LIO; Bjorvatn, K; Galle, S; Miguel, E; Posner, DN; Tungodden, B; Zhang, K | Abstract: Ethnicity has been shown to shape political, social, and economic behavior in Africa, but the underlying mechanisms remain contested. We utilize lab experiments to isolate one mechanism - an individual's bias in favor of coethnics and against non-coethnics - that has been central in both theory and in the conventional wisdom about the impact of ethnicity. We employ an unusually rich research design involving a large sample of 1300 participants from Nairobi, Kenya; the collection of multiple rounds of experimental data with varying proximity to national elections; within-lab priming conditions; both standard and novel experimental measures of coethnic bias; and an implicit association test (IAT). We find very little evidence of an ethnic bias in the behavioral games, which runs against the common presumption of extensive coethnic bias among ordinary Africans and suggests that mechanisms other than a coethnic bias in preferences must account for the associations we see in the region between ethnicity and political, social, and economic outcomes.

Elections affect the division of resources in society and are occasions for political elites to make appeals rooted in voters' self-interest. Hence, elections may erode altruistic norms and cause people to behave more selfishly. We test this intuition using Dictator Games in a lab-in-the-field experiment involving a sample of more than 1000 individuals in Kenya and Tanzania. We adopt two approaches. First, we experimentally prime participants to think about the upcoming or most recent elections and find that this priming treatment reduces how much money participants are willing to give to other players. Second, we compare results obtained across lab rounds in Kenya taking place right before the country's 2013 national elections and eight months prior, and find that selfishness is greater in the lab round more proximate to the election. Our results suggest that elections may affect social behavior in important—and previously unrecognized—ways.

Scholars assert that pre-analysis plans (PAPs) generate boring, lab-report style papers and thus hamper publication. We test this claim by comparing the publication rates of experimental NBER working papers with and without PAPs. We find that articles with PAPs are slightly less likely to be published. However, conditional on being published, PAP-generated papers are significantly more likely to land in top-five journals. Also, PAP-based journal articles generate more citations. Our findings suggest that the alleged trade-off between career concerns and the scientific credibility that comes from registering and adhering to a PAP is less stark than is sometimes alleged.

We leverage innovative spatial modeling techniques and data on the precise geo-locations of more than 32,000 Constituency Development Fund (CDF) projects in Kenya to test whether Members of Parliament (MPs) reward their supporters. We find only weak evidence that MPs channel projects disproportionately to areas inhabited by their political allies, once we control for other factors that affect where projects are placed, such as population density, poverty rates, ethnic demographics, and distance to paved roads. Notwithstanding this result, we find evidence for cross-constituency variation in political targeting, driven in large part by the spatial segregation of the MP’s supporters and opponents. Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom about the centrality of clientelistic transfers in Africa and underscore how local conditions generate particular incentives and opportunities for the strategic allocation of political goods. We also highlight the benefits and challenges of analyzing allocations at the project level rather than aggregated to the administrative unit.

Under what conditions does religion become a salient social identity? By measuring religious attachment among the people living astride the Burkina Faso–Côte d’Ivoire border in West Africa, an arbitrary boundary that exposes otherwise similar individuals to different political contexts, this article makes a case for the importance of the political environment in affecting the weight that people attach to their religious identities. After ruling out explanations rooted in the proportion of different religious denominations, the degree of secularization and the supply of religious institutions on either side of the border, as well as differences in the degree of religious pluralism at the national level, it highlights the greater exposure of Ivorian respondents to the politicization of religion during Côte d’Ivoire’s recent civil conflict. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the power – and challenges – of exploiting Africa’s arbitrary borders as a source of causal leverage.

Face-to-face interviews constitute a social interaction between interviewer and respondent, and in the African context, social interactions are strongly shaped by ethnicity. Yet research using African survey data typically fails to account for the effect of shared ethnicity on survey responses. We find that respondents give systematically different answers to coethnic and noncoethnic interviewers across surveys in 14 African countries, but with significant variation in the degree of bias across question types and types of noncoethnic dyads, with the largest effects occurring where both the respondent and interviewer are members of ethnic groups with a history of political competition and conflict, and where the respondent or interviewer shares an ethnicity with the head of state. Our findings have practical implications for consumers of African survey data and underscore the context dependence of the social interaction that constitutes the survey experience.

Elections affect the division of resources in society and are occasions for political elites to make appeals rooted in voters’ self-interest. Hence, elections may erode altruistic norms and cause people to behave more selfishly. We test this intuition using Dictator Games in a lab-in-the-field experiment involving a sample of more than 1,000 individuals in Kenya and Tanzania. We adopt two approaches. First, we experimentally prime participants to think about the upcoming or most recent elections and find that this priming treatment reduces how much money participants are willing to give to other players. Second, we compare results obtained across lab rounds in Kenya taking place right before the country’s 2013 national elections and one eight months prior and find that selfishness is greater in the lab round more proximate to the election. Our results suggest that elections may affect social behavior in important—and previously unrecognized—ways.

Papers in the burgeoning empirical literature on distributive politics often focus their analysis on the pattern of distribution of a single patronage good—for example, cash transfers, roads, education spending, electrification, or targeted grants. Yet because governments can favor constituencies through the targeting of multiple public and private goods, drawing general conclusions about distributive politics by investigating just one (or even a few) good(s) can be misleading. We demonstrate the severity of this problem by investigating a particular manifestation of distributive politics—ethnic favoritism—in a particular setting—Africa—and show that the conclusions one draws about who benefits from government allocation decisions can vary markedly depending on the outcome one happens to study. Our findings suggest the need for caution in making general claims about who benefits from distributive politics and raise questions about extant theoretical conclusions that are based on empirical work that focuses on a single distributive outcome. The findings also provide a foundation for a new research agenda aimed at identifying the reasons why political leaders choose to favor their supporters with some public and private goods rather than others.

Building on Posner (Posner, Daniel N. 2005. Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press), this article describes a framework for organizing the information about a community’s social cleavage structure so as to identify the incentives that individuals face to adopt particular social identities. The framework is parsimonious but powerful: it generates predictions about the social cleavages that will emerge as salient in politics, the lobbying we can expect to see regarding the social categories with which community members should identify, and the attempts that will be made to assimilate or engage in “identity entrepreneurship” to fashion entirely new social identities. The framework also clarifies why partition is unlikely to be a remedy for intractable ethnic conflicts.

Widespread electoral participation is a foundational element of a healthy democracy and an important mechanism by which voters exercise governance oversight. Existing work attributes low voter turnout in developing countries either to poor voter knowledge or to disillusionment with flawed electoral institutions. Yet turnout often remains low and sometimes declines as democracy matures, despite voters gaining basic knowledge about, and trust in, electoral processes. This problem is particularly acute in young urban communities. This study considers a driver of participation not previously explored in developing countries — the motivation to vote stemming from the intrinsic value of the act itself. In this paper we present preliminary evidence from survey data, focus groups, and a large-scale pilot experiment in South Africa that, taken together, suggest that a lack of motivation may be an important constraint on the political participation of young urban voters. We examine the relative efficacy of informational messages about how, when, and where to vote; motivational messages about why voting is important; and a combination of both, on voter registration and turnout. We hope to expand this work into a field experiment targeting 6,000 youth in urban Gauteng, South Africa. In concert with South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), Activate!, a network of youth leaders, and JPAL-Africa, the broader study will produce actionable evidence to improve outreach, bolster participation, and improve governance in South Africa and similar developing countries.

In this article, which is adapted from the seventh annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World, Ivan Krastev addresses three main questions: 1) Why are authoritarian regimes surviving in the age of democratization? 2) Why did political science fail to anticipate the resilience of these regimes? and 3) Why it is so difficult to resist contemporary authoritarianism?

This paper draws on data from over 35,000 respondents in twenty-two public opinion surveys in ten countries and finds strong evidence that ethnic identities in Africa are strengthened by exposure to political competition. In particular, for every month closer their country is to a competitive presidential election, survey respondents are 1.8 percentage points more likely to identify in ethnic terms. Using an innovative multinomial logit empirical methodology, we find that these shifts are accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the salience of occupational and class identities. Our findings lend support to situational theories of social identification and are consistent with the view that ethnic identities matter in Africa for instrumental reasons: because they are useful in the competition for political power.

Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2016, 11: 1–58 Ethnic Favoritism in Education in Kenya Eric Kramon 1 and Daniel N. Posner 2∗ 1 Department of Political Science, George Washington University, 2115 G St. NW, Washington, DC 20052, USA; ekramon@gwu.edu 2 Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles, 4289 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472, USA; dposner@polisci.ucla.edu ABSTRACT We test the claim that African leaders favor members of their own ethnic groups by studying ethnic favoritism in the education sector in Kenya. We use data on the educational attainment of more than fifty thousand Kenyans dating back to the colonial era, as well as information about the ethnic identities of Kenyan presidents, cabinet members, and high- level education bureaucrats since the 1960s. Consistent with previous work, we find that having a coethnic as president during one’s school-age years is associated with an increase in the schooling that children acquire. In contrast to recent studies, we find that multiparty political competition has no impact on the degree of ethnic favoritism in the educa- tion sector. We also go beyond prior work in three ways. First, we show that coethnics of the minister of education also acquire more schooling than children from other ethnic groups — evidence that ministerial appointments come with The authors thank members of the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) and seminar participants at Dartmouth, Georgetown, MIT, NBER, Oxford, Penn, Princeton, Rochester, Stanford, Virginia, Columbia, Hebrew University, the Supplementary Material available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00015005_supp MS submitted on 8 January 2015; final version received 15 September 2015 ISSN 1554-0626; DOI 10.1561/100.00015005 © 2016 E. Kramon and D. N. Posner

This article explores a hitherto overlooked consequence of regime change in Africa. It shows how the shift from one-party to multiparty rule in the region altered the kinds of ethnic cleavages that structure political competition and conflict. The article demonstrates how the different strategic logics of political competition in one-party and multiparty settings create incentives for political actors to emphasize different kinds of ethnic identities: local-level identities (usually revolving around tribe or clan) in one-party elections and broader scale identities (usually revolving around region, language, or religion) in multiparty elections. The argument is illustrated with evidence from the 1991 and 1992 regime transitions in Zambia and Kenya.

On 16 May 2006, after months of intense and divisive national debate, the Senate of Nigeria rejected a bill which would have changed that country’s constitution to permit President Olusegun Obasanjo a third term in office. By asserting the supremacy of the constitution (with its two-term limit) over the desires of President Obasanjo’s supporters that the popular leader be permitted to run for a third term, the Senate’s vote marked a watershed in Nigeria’s political history. As important as the outcome was the way in which the conflict was resolved— by the votes of duly elected legislators rather than through force or the threat of same. Given that Nigeria’s First and Second Republics (1963– 66 and 1979–83) were overthrown by military coups, the settlement of this political struggle via the Senate chamber rather than the gun barrel represents a major shift in the way that decisions over executive tenure in Nigeria have been made. 1 Both the outcome of Obasanjo’s third-term campaign and the process through which it was reached signal a growing trend in sub-Saharan Africa: The formal rules of the game are beginning to matter in ways that they previously have not. Scholarly and popular writers alike have traditionally depicted Africa as a place where formal institutional rules are largely irrelevant. Although every African country has a constitution as well as a body of laws and administrative procedures that place formal limits on executive power, the long-held consensus among observers has been that these rules play little role in actually constraining leaders’ behavior. This view is reflected in the “personal rule” or “Big Man” paradigm that has dominated the study of African Daniel N. Posner is associate professor of political science at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) and author of Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (2005). Daniel J. Young is a doctoral candidate in political science at UCLA and is finishing a dissertation on political parties in Africa based on fieldwork in Malawi.

Ethnic divisions have been shown to adversely affect economic performance and political stability, especially in Africa, but the underlying reasons remain contested, with multiple mechanisms potentially playing a role. We utilize lab experiments to isolate the role of one such mechanism — ethnic preferences — which have been central in both theory and in the conventional wisdom about the impact of ethnic differences. We employ an unusually rich research design, collecting multiple rounds of experimental data with a large sample of 1,300 subjects in Nairobi; employing within-lab priming conditions; and utilizing both standard and novel experimental measures, including implicit association tests. The econometric approach was pre-specified in a registered pre-analysis plan. Most of our tests yield no evidence of coethnic bias. The results run strongly against the common presumption of extensive ethnic bias among ordinary Kenyans, and suggest that other mechanisms may be more important in explaining the negative association between ethnic diversity and economic and political outcomes.

Africa’s arbitrary country borders have been seized upon as sources of “natural experiments”: having randomly assigned people to different country treatments, differences in outcomes on either side of the border can then be attributed to the institutions, demographics, or policies put in place in each country. While methodologically attractive, the use of African borders as sources of natural experiments presents several potential pitfalls. We describe these pitfalls—some common to all studies that employ jurisdictional boundaries, some unique to African borders—and offer guidelines for overcoming them. We conclude that African cross-border studies can provide research advantages similar to well-executed comparative case studies, but that they frequently offer weaker inferential leverage than is claimed.

Tables 2.1 and 2.2 summarize the changes over time in the population shares of tribes that did and did not have their own Native Authorities. Table 2.1 records the changes in these population shares between 1930/33, shortly after Indirect Rule began, and 1962, the year before it ended. Table 2.2 records changes in tribal population shares between 1930/33 and 1990, when, for the first time, data on self-reported tribal identifications became available. Both tables report only aggregate figures for tribes with and without Native Authorities. Tables A.1 and A.2 break down the figures for the individual tribes in each category for the 1930/33–1962 and 1930/33–1990 periods, respectively. As Tables A.1 and A.2 make clear, individual tribes within each category vary in the changes that took place in their shares of the national population during each period. Although the population share of all tribes that had their own Native Authorities increased by 6.7 percent between 1930/33 and 1962, the degree of change experienced by individual tribes in this category ranged from +140 percent for the Luchazi to −83 percent for the Chikunda (see Table A.1). Similarly, while the population share of tribes that did not have their own Native Authorities fell during the same period by a weighted average of 28.5 percent, individual tribes in this category varied in their population growth or decline from +304 percent for the Kwandi to −95 percent for the Lushange.

This paper explores the conditions under which cultural cleavages become politically salient. It does so by taking advantage of the natural experiment afforded by the division of the Chewa and Tumbuka peoples by the border between Zambia and Malawi. I document that, while the objective cultural differences between Chewas and Tumbukas on both sides of the border are identical, the political salience of the division between these communities is altogether different. I argue that this difference stems from the different sizes of the Chewa and Tumbuka communities in each country relative to each country's national political arena. In Malawi, Chewas and Tumbukas are each large groups vis-à-vis the country as a whole and, thus, serve as viable bases for political coalition-building. In Zambia, Chewas and Tumbukas are small relative to the country as a whole and, thus, not useful to mobilize as bases of political support. The analysis suggests that the political salience of a cultural cleavage depends not on the nature of the cleavage itself (since it is identical in both countries) but on the sizes of the groups it defines and whether or not they will be useful vehicles for political competition.

Evan Lieberman's Boundaries of Contagion: How Ethnic Politics Have Shaped Government Responses to Aids proceeds from a simple question of great importance to millions of people: “Why have some governments responded to AIDS more quickly and more broadly than others?” In answering this question, Lieberman employs a range of methods and engages a range of scholarly literatures dealing with health policy, comparative public policy, and ethnic politics. Because the book addresses “big” issues and bridges conventional divides in political science, we have invited a number of colleagues working broadly in comparative politics to comment on it.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

With the rise of analytical or positive approaches to the study of politics over the last three decades, the collective action problem has emerged as one of the central concepts in political science. The concept's widespread acceptance as a descriptive and diagnostic tool, however, cannot obscure the fact that its predictions do not always hold. Co-operation sometimes does take place in contexts where, according to the theory, actors should have little incentive to engage in it.

In a context where resources are assumed to be distributed along ethnic lines, and where the fairness of the current pattern of distribution is judged by the correspondence between the share of resources that each group controls and the share of the population it can claim as members, accurate information about the ethnic composition of the country's population can be highly inflammatory (Hirschman 1987; Diamond 1988; Wright 1994; Horowitz 1985). As Horowitz puts it: “Numbers are an indicator of whose country it is” (1985: 194). For this reason, questions about respondents' ethnic backgrounds are simply not asked in the national censuses of most developing nations. In a striking departure from this norm (and for reasons I do not fully understand), the 1990 Republic of Zambia Census of Population and Housing collected data on the tribal backgrounds of census respondents. Although this information was not included in any of the descriptive tables published by the Zambia Central Statistical Office (ZCSO) – “respondent's Zambian tribe” was the only variable omitted from the otherwise comprehensive cross-tabulations – it remained in the raw data, which I was able to obtain from the ZCSO. This data set, which contains the self-reported tribal affiliations of 7,383,097 individuals, provided me with an indispensable (and unparalleled) source of information for the analyses that I undertake in this book.

On 4 August 2010, Kenyans voted to adopt a new constitution, culminating a process that began as part of a resolution to the violent conflict that followed the December 2007 elections. By reducing executive power, devolving authority, and guaranteeing rights to women, minorities, and marginalized communities, the constitution has the potential to transform Kenyan politics. Political and logistical obstacles will, however, pose a challenge to implementation. Yet that the constitution has been adopted amidst a broader trend toward the institutionalization of political power in Africa—a context in which formal constitutional rules are increasingly consequential—provides cause for cautious optimism.

A large and growing literature links high levels of ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision. Yet although the empirical connection between ethnic heterogeneity and the underprovision of public goods is widely accepted, there is little consensus on the specific mechanisms through which this relationship operates. We identify three families of mechanisms that link diversity to public goods provision—what we term “preferences,” “technology,” and “strategy selection” mechanisms—and run a series of experimental games that permit us to compare the explanatory power of distinct mechanisms within each of these three families. Results from games conducted with a random sample of 300 subjects from a slum neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, suggest that successful public goods provision in homogenous ethnic communities can be attributed to a strategy selection mechanism: in similar settings, co-ethnics play cooperative equilibria, whereas non-co-ethnics do not. In addition, we find evidence for a technology mechanism: co-ethnics are more closely linked on social networks and thus plausibly better able to support cooperation through the threat of social sanction. We find no evidence for prominent preference mechanisms that emphasize the commonality of tastes within ethnic groups or a greater degree of altruism toward co-ethnics, and only weak evidence for technology mechanisms that focus on the impact of shared ethnicity on the productivity of teams.

A large and growing literature links high levels of ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision. Yet while the empirical connection between ethnic heterogeneity and the underprovision of public goods is widely accepted, there is little consensus on the specific mechanisms through which this relationship operates. To gain analytic leverage on the question of why ethnicity matters, we identify three families of mechanisms - what we term preference, technology, and strategy mechanisms. Our empirical strategy is to identify and run a series of experimental games that permit us to examine these mechanisms in isolation and then to compare the importance of ethnicity in each. Results from experimental games conducted with a random sample of 300 subjects in Kampala's slums reveal that successful collective action among homogenous ethnic communities in urban Uganda is attributable to the existence of norms and institutions that facilitate the sanctioning of non-contributors. We find no evidence for a commonality of tastes within ethnic groups, for greater degrees of altruism toward co-ethnics, or for an impact of shared ethnicity on the productivity of teams.

In most studies of the impact of ethnic diversity on economic growth, diversity is hypothesized to affect growth through its effect on macroeconomic policies. This article shows that most measures of ethnic diversity (including the commonly used ELF measure) are inappropriate for testing this hypothesis. This is because they are constructed from enumerations of ethnic groups that include all of the ethnographically distinct groups in a country irrespective of whether or not they engage in the political competition whose effects on macroeconomic policy making are being tested. I present a new index of ethnic fractionalization based on an accounting of politically relevant ethnic groups in 42 African countries. I employ this measure (called PREG, for Politically Relevant Ethnic Groups) to replicate Easterly and Levine's influential article on Africa's "growth tragedy." I find that PREG does a Much better job of accounting for the policy-mediated effects of ethnic diversity on economic growth in Africa than does ELF.