American Journal of Political Science最新文献

Why do elites in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) favor some foreign aid projects and partners over others? Research on the “aid curse” and Chinese development finance suggests elites should prefer aid that can be easily captured, with few conditionalities, regulations, or transparency requirements. We administer a conjoint survey experiment across 141 LMICs to elicit the aid preferences of elites who are uniquely close to development policy debates. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we find that elites favor larger over smaller projects, grants over loans, and transportation infrastructure projects over initiatives focused on civil society or tax collection capacity. But contrary to the aid curse theory, elites also prefer projects with transparent terms and labor, corruption, and environmental regulations, and are at worst indifferent towards good governance conditionalities. These preferences hold even in corrupt and autocratic countries and even among high-level government officials who might be expected to favor “no-strings-attached” aid regimes.

Parallel to traditional immigration control policies, states send substantial amounts of foreign aid to address the root causes of migration. Using a randomized controlled trial (RCT), we evaluate a representative type of “root causes” aid (RCA) project in Africa, implemented by the UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM). We find the project reduced aspirations to migrate and slowed preparations for the journey. Multiple mediation analysis shows “instrumental place attachment”—or the ability to pursue important goals in one's place of residence compared to other destinations—is the main driver. However, effects wane 6 months after project end. That a small RCA project increased instrumental place attachment, albeit briefly, is significant given global inequalities. We explore this finding by conducting interviews with international organization (IO) and nongovernmental organization (NGO) practitioners to understand how development organizations affect instrumental place attachment, and with youth to understand how interventions (un)successfully moderate the choice to stay or migrate.

What drives legislators to emphasize local issues in a nationalized setting? Although the representation literature has highlighted why legislators present themselves as district- or nationally oriented in constituent-facing activities, research remains limited on this behavior within Congress. We leverage congressional speech to provide evidence on how electoral competitiveness, district demographics, and legislator characteristics influence representation during the committee stage, a critical step in policymaking. Using U.S. House hearing transcripts from 1999 to 2018, we examine what types of legislators are more likely to mention their constituents and the local communities in their districts. Results reveal that women legislators use significantly more locally oriented statements compared to their male counterparts. This difference between male and female legislators, which is concentrated among Democrats, is similarly observed on the House floor. Overall, these results provide new evidence that the link between gender and policy representation persists even in settings when constituents are not the only intended audience.

Existing research maintains that socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals are reluctant to seek information that might help mitigate risk. We challenge this convention by proposing that perceptions of risks associated with global economic shocks can incentivize some disadvantaged individuals to acquire knowledge about their distributional effects. Internal migrants, in particular, have strong incentives to respond to such risks by seeking information. We test our hypotheses using a randomized experiment in Vietnam exposing half of the participants to risks associated with a new trade agreement with the European Union. We track willingness to learn by observing whether respondents accessed an online video describing the economic impacts of the agreement. We find that treated migrants were 187% more likely to seek knowledge than the control group, but find null effects for residents from sending and receiving locations. Our findings help uncover the key role migrants can play in supporting globalization and shared prosperity.

We examine how the timing of local elections affects the success of minority candidates, who remain woefully underrepresented in public office. We build on research showing that concurrent elections narrow racial gaps in voter turnout and leverage changes in the timing of local elections in California. Our analysis shows that filling local offices in November of even years increases minority officeholding, at least for some groups. The results demonstrate how, when, and for whom election timing matters. Latinos gain most, potentially at the expense of White and, to a lesser degree, Black representation. An investigation of potential mechanisms suggests that these effects depend on group population size and the magnitude of the turnout changes. An increase in the number of co-ethnic candidates running also appears to contribute to the representational benefits of on-cycle elections. Finally, the effects are most pronounced during presidential elections, when turnout improvements are largest.

This article advances a novel argument about the policy output of international organizations (IOs) by highlighting the role of individual staffers. We approach them as purposive actors carrying heterogeneous ideological biases that materially shape their policy choices on the job. Pursuing this argument with an empirical focus on the International Monetary Fund (IMF), we collected individual-level information on the careers of 835 IMF “mission chiefs”—staffers with primary responsibility for a particular member state—and matched them to newly coded data on more than 15,000 IMF-mandated policy conditions over the 1980–2016 period. Leveraging the appointment of the same mission chief to different countries throughout their career, we find that individual staffers influence the number, scope, and content of IMF conditions according to their personal ideological biases. These results contribute to our understanding of the microfoundations behind IO output and have implications for the accountability and legitimacy of IOs.

States often fortify their borders against militant threats. How do these efforts shape civilian welfare and perceptions in borderland communities? I conceptualize border fortification as a legibility-building endeavor. By bolstering state reach in areas of weak historical penetration, fortification enhances the government's capacity for monitoring, administration, and control. Yet, expanding state authority also disrupts traditional cross-border markets. A trade-off between security and corruption emerges in consequence. I provide evidence for this theory in a difference-in-differences framework, combining administrative records on violence and representative data from a NATO-commissioned survey fielded across Afghanistan. Fortification facilitates government information-collection, improving security provision and fostering civilian reliance on state forces. Enhanced state capacity is countervailed by negative economic impacts. By disturbing the informal borderland economy, fortification fuels criminalization and local opposition. Civilians rely on illicit economic entrepreneurs to sustain traditional market access. Higher smuggling rents fuel official corruption and bribe-taking. The findings point to a key dilemma inherent in border fortification strategies.

School board candidates supported by local teachers' unions overwhelmingly win, and we examine the causes and consequences of the “teachers' union premium” in these elections. First, we show that union endorsement information increases voter support. Although the magnitude of this effect varies across ideological and partisan subgroups, an endorsement rarely hurts a candidate's prospects with the electorate. Second, we benchmark the size of the endorsement premium to other well-known determinants of vote choice in local elections. Perhaps surprisingly, we show the effect can be as large as the impact of shared partisanship, and substantially larger than the boost from endorsements provided by other stakeholders. Finally, examining real-world endorsement decisions, we find that union support for incumbents hinges on self-interested pecuniary considerations and is unaffected by performance in improving student academic outcomes. The divergence between what endorsements mean and how voters interpret them has troubling normative democratic implications.

We introduce a typology of election administration harms and apply it to empirically study the consequences of ballot design. Our typology distinguishes between individual, electoral, and systemic harms. Together, it clarifies why ballot design can be a particular vulnerability in election administration. Using both ballot-level and precinct-level data, we revisit Florida's 2018 United States Senate race, in which Broward County's ballot design flouted federal guidelines and, according to critics, was pivotal to the outcome. We estimate that Broward's ballot design induced roughly 25,000 voters to undervote in a race determined by about 10,000 votes and that these excess undervotes were concentrated among low-information voters. Broward's ballot did not, however, affect the outcome of the election. Nonetheless, flawed ballot designs are still concerning in an age of voter distrust. Given the risk that flawed ballots can cause systemic harm, we offer a roadmap for procedural reforms to improve ballot design.

Opposition coalitions under electoral authoritarianism have been associated with greater likelihood of opposition victory and democratization. I argue, however, that coalitions also entail significant downside risks with implications for longer term prospects for democracy. Where coalitions produce strong electoral outcomes but fail to force turnovers, regimes are left with both the incentive and capacity to repress and reconsolidate power. I show cross-nationally that opposition coalitions are associated with stronger opposition performance overall, but that when oppositions fail to take power, exceptionally strong performance is associated with greater autocratization in the subsequent years, including increased repression and poorer electoral quality in future contests. Probing the case of Cambodia, I demonstrate how the very features that make opposition coalitions a useful tool in strengthening performance also invite new threats from regimes. I argue that this makes coalition formation a particularly risky proposition.