Messages matter: How voter education campaigns affect citizens’ willingness to vote for women. Forthcoming. Journal of Politics (with Merete Bech Seeberg and Michael Wahman)

|Data & Replication | Pre-Analysis Plan| Blog

Governments and organizations worldwide pour money into campaigns designed to increase female political representation, including voter education campaigns. But do such campaigns promote women in politics? We argue that where single-member district contests and clientelism incentivize voters to support viable candidates, information about discrimination against women can undercut support for women in elections. Instead, messages that stress women candidates’ viability are more effective. We work with one of the longest-running voter education campaigns, Malawi’s 50:50 campaign, to combine randomized exposure to campaign videos with a conjoint experiment and text analysis of respondents’ answers to open-ended questions. We find that exposure to a campaign message makes participants more willing to vote for a woman. But, in line with our argument, a campaign message that includes information about the progress of women in politics has a stronger positive effect than one that discloses information about discrimination against women candidates.

What do voters want from their legislators? Evidence from Ghana. 2024. African Affairs.

Legislators make trade-offs when allocating their time and resources to their multiple tasks of representation, legislation, executive oversight, and constituency service. Furthermore, they must decide how much effort to exert or the balance to strike when undertaking a specific function. Existing research provides limited insights into citizens’ preferences over these multifaceted officeholder decisions in sub-Saharan Africa. I offer novel insights on citizens’ preferences using a conjoint survey experiment of Ghanaians to address this knowledge gap. My findings are threefold. First, I find that citizens put more weight on constituency-related activities than parliamentary work. Second, in the constituency, citizens value political representation activities more than constituency services. Third, they weigh public-good-oriented constituency services higher than private ones. The research contributes to our understanding of citizen-legislator accountability relationship in sub-Saharan Africa.

Chiefs’ Endorsements and Voter Behavior. 2024. Comparative Political Science (with Sarah Brierley).

|Data & Replication | Pre-Analysis Plan| Policy Brief

Traditional leaders can influence electoral outcomes. We designed an experiment to investigate why public endorsements by chiefs affect voters – and which types of voters they influence. Chiefs have incentives to prefer politicians who will promote local development, and can use endorsements to sway elections accordingly. We argue that voters often interpret chiefs’ endorsements as a signal of candidate quality. To assess this argument, we exposed voters to real endorsements made by chiefs during Ghana’s 2020 presidential election. We show that endorsements impact the vote choice of undecided voters. Consistent with a signaling mechanism, respondents exposed to chiefs’ rationale for endorsing a candidate were no more likely to vote for the endorsed candidate than those who only heard chiefs’ approval of a candidate. Further, treated respondents hold higher evaluations of the endorsed candidate on multiple dimensions of candidate quality. Our results suggest that chiefs influence voters through a non-coercive mechanism, which has positive implications for accountability.

Pre-Analysis Plans: An Early Stocktaking. 2023. Perspective on Politics (with Daniel N. Posner).

|Data & Replication|World Bank Blog (Development Impact)| EGAP Q&A

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 93 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.

The Moderating Effect of Debates on Political Attitudes. 2020. American Journal of Political Science (with Sarah Brierley and Eric Kramon)

|Data & Replication | Pre-Analysis Plan| Policy Brief|Project page

In theory, candidate debates can influence voters by providing information about candidates’ quality and policy positions. However, there is limited evidence about whether and why debates influence voters in new democracies. We use a field experiment on parliamentary debates during Ghana’s 2016 elections to show that debates improve voters’ evaluations of candidates. Debates have the strongest effect on partisan voters, who become more favorable toward and more likely to vote for opponentparty candidates and less likely to vote for co-partisans. Experimental and unique observational data capturing participants’ second-by-second reactions to the debates show that policy information was the most important causal mechanism driving partisan moderation, especially among strong partisans. A follow-up survey shows that these effects persist in electorally competitive communities, while they dissipate in party strongholds. Policy-centered debates have the potential to reduce partisan polarization in new democracies, but the local political context conditions the persistence of these effects.

Do Fairer Elections Increase the Responsiveness of Politicians? 2019. American Political Science Review

|Winner of 2020 Heinz I. Eulau Award, APSR|Data & Replication|APSA Public Scholarship Feature

Leveraging novel experimental designs and 2,160 months of Constituency Development Fund (CDF) spending by legislators in Ghana, I examine whether and how fairer elections promote democratic responsiveness. The results show that incumbents elected from constituencies that were randomly assigned to intensive election-day monitoring during Ghana’s 2012 election spent 19 percentage points more of their CDFs during their terms in office compared to those elected from constituencies with fewer monitors. Legislators from all types of constituencies are equally present in parliament, suggesting that high levels of monitoring do not cause politicians to substitute constituency service for parliamentary work. Tests of causal mechanisms provide suggestive evidence that fairer elections motivate high performance through incumbents’ expectations of electoral sanction and not the selection of better candidates. The paper provides causal evidence of the impact of election integrity on democratic accountability.

Electoral Fraud or Violence: The Effect of Observers on Party Manipulation Strategies. 2017. British Journal of Political Science (with Joseph Asunka, Sarah Brierley, Miriam Golden, and Eric Kramon)

|Data & Replication | Pre-Analysis Plan| Policy Brief

This article reports on the effects of domestic election observers on electoral fraud and violence. Using an experimental research design and polling station data on fraud and violence during Ghana’s 2012 elections, it shows that observers reduced fraud and violence at the polling stations which they monitored. It is argued that local electoral competition shapes party activists’ response to observers. As expected, in single-party dominant areas, parties used their local political networks to relocate fraud to polling stations without an election observer, and, in contrast, party activists relocated violence to stations without observers in competitive areas – a response that requires less local organizational capacity. This highlights how local party organization and electoral incentives can shape the manipulative electoral strategies employed by parties in democratic elections.