This study investigates the demand side of vote buying by asking when voters participate in, tolerate, or punish targeted material exchanges for votes. The central question is whether voters view vote buying as substituting for local public goods provision in office or as a signal that candidates will deliver such goods.
Over the past three decades, competitive elections are linked to higher rates of forest loss. Forest protection is a long-term public good, while clearing provides short-term private benefits that can be delivered to targeted voters. In contested races, politicians appear to trade access to forested land—for small-scale farming or timber use—for electoral support, producing measurable increases in deforestation.
Disaster responses are political, but can citizens make useful decisions that help other people? This study uses an experimental economic game that simulates disaster choices to test whether people are willing and able to prevent disasters for others when options are complex and vary in risk. The authors report that players paid to help, invested in learning, and could identify which options were most useful across conditions, suggesting that people sometimes make costly, useful decisions on behalf of others.
This study probes how political identification and ideology shape everyday social behavior. Behavioral games—dictator, trust, and public goods—were used to measure altruism, trust, and willingness to contribute to mutual benefits while varying the perceived party identity of interaction partners.
This paper asks why ethnic voting varies across localities and proposes a theory that local ethnic geography increases ethnic voting where minority-group voters fear intimidation from majority-group neighbors. The authors test this mechanism using Afrobarometer survey data for Ghana, combined with geocoded survey locations and demographic data, and compare intimidation beliefs against an alternative mechanism based on local public goods provision.
Developing states that lack a monopoly on the use of force are often judged as failing the Weberian sovereign ideal. This study argues that such weakness need not imply anarchy: devolving important state functions to subnational actors can be a rational and effective strategy for providing public goods.
Traditional economic games such as the Dictator and Public Goods Games are widely used to measure ethnic bias, but these tools can fail to measure the biases they intend to capture. These games are vulnerable to self-presentational concerns and may not detect automatic associative or affective reactions.
This paper examines post-WWII population transfers in Poland.
This study reveals how industry-specific interests and internalized social norms influence support for international climate cooperation.
This study explores citizens' preferences for decision-making procedures on public goods.
This study compares how leaders build winning coalitions in small versus large groups.
This article tackles ethnic diversity's impact on governance by distinguishing between economic and cultural differences. It introduces Between-Group Inequality (BGI) as a novel measure capturing these economic disparities, contrasting it with established Ethnolinguistic Fractionalization (ELF). The analysis reveals that while ELF and Cultural Fractionalization (CF) capture different aspects of diversity than BGI, only BGI shows a consistently negative effect on public goods provision across 46 countries. Data & Methods: Examines three fractionalization measures using cross-national data from various sources. Key Findings: BGI correlates strongly negatively with public goods delivery; ELF and CF do not show this relationship. Why It Matters: Challenges conventional wisdom by demonstrating the unique impact of economic differences between ethnic groups on governance outcomes.