This study examines “misinformation about misinformation” — the phenomenon of politicians falsely labeling reports as fake news or deepfakes to deflect blame after a scandal. The resulting benefit to politicians is called the "liar's dividend." Two distinct strategies are analyzed:
Conventional wisdom in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) predicts a male advantage at the polls driven by sexism. A large-scale conjoint experiment overturns that expectation: voters in six Arab countries are more likely to support female candidates and rate them as more capable, even in stereotypically male domains.
This article examines how worldviews impact the settlement of civil wars. It argues that accountability mechanisms are crucial for achieving lasting peace.
New research reveals that observational studies may incorrectly attribute oil resources to autocratic survival.
Comparison focuses on Peruvian municipalities where the previous incumbent was ousted through a recall referendum versus municipalities where a recall referendum failed by a small margin. The goal is to estimate how political accountability mechanisms affect who runs for office when those mechanisms are vulnerable to political capture.
This research explores an unexpected relationship: higher educational attainment is linked to increased levels of political corruption in certain contexts.
Civil wars often attract intervention from outside states.
This study develops a novel theory of electoral accountability. Candidates strategically decide whether to commit to constituency service or advertise their platform through costly campaigns. We find that campaign costs increase voter welfare when partisan imbalance is low, but have the opposite effect under these conditions. Under high partisan imbalance, higher campaign spending paradoxically leads to greater expected levels of constituency service commitment from candidates. This suggests that expensive electoral campaigns can actually improve representation quality in polarized political environments by encouraging more substantive service promises. The findings challenge conventional wisdom about campaign finance regulation and provide new insights into the complex relationship between campaign expenditures and democratic accountability mechanisms.
The Voting Rights Act's preclearance provision significantly influenced legislative support for civil rights legislation during the study period.
International criminal courts are frequently given mandates but lack the authority or resources to enforce them. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) achieved compliance not through coercion but by assembling an accountability network that amplified its influence across the region.
Decentralization reforms in Colombia aimed to increase local responsiveness but produced mixed results. This study analyzes survey data from citizens across the country to assess perceptions of department-level government accountability following administrative and fiscal decentralization efforts.
Precise international metrics can push governments to reallocate resources to improve scores on those metrics. This study examines a secondary consequence of global performance indicators (GPIs): when a GPI targets a specific public good, governments facing finite resources may boost that targeted good at the expense of related goods.