Working papers
Voting Against the Grain: Partisan Geography, Electoral Competition, and Voter Behavior
Partisans often face two dilemmas when deciding to vote for a potentially better-performing opposition candidate in clientelistic distributive systems. First, whether the opposition candidate, once elected, will provide them with promised public goods. Second, whether they can sanction the politician should she renege. I argue that partisans’ fears of exclusion and inability to punish shirking is much lower in electoral districts where parties’ supporters live side-by-side (partisan nonsegregated) and elections are competitive compared to other electoral settings. Accordingly, partisans are more likely to cross party lines in nonsegregated and competitive constituencies than in other settings. Using a conjoint experiment administered to voters sampled from a stratified sample of constituencies in Ghana, I show that voters in competitive, nonsegregated districts are the most willing to cross party lines. Additional data on voters’ perceptions of actual public goods distribution and political efficacy support the mechanism. My results demonstrate how partisan geography and electoral competitiveness jointly shape democratic accountability in clientelistic systems.
From Ambition to Action: Political Networking as a Pathway for Women Candidates (with Merete Bech Seeberg and Michael Wahman).
Interventions to enhance the supply of women electoral candidates often focus on internal barriers, assuming that women’s underrepresentation is primarily driven by low personal motivation, skills, or confidence. However, in many contexts, external barriers — such as exclusion from political networks—pose a more significant challenge. In such settings, programs that address only internal barriers may raise aspirations without translating into actual candidacies. To be effective, interventions must also tackle critical external obstacles. We test this argument through a novel intervention introducing women to influential male-dominated political networks in Zambia’s local elections. Our pre-registered report specifies our theory, the research design, and implementation of our field experiment ahead of Zambia’s 2026 elections. We compare the impacts of standard candidate training with an approach that integrates training and structured networking events. Outcomes are assessed through panel surveys measuring willingness to run and through observed efforts to get on the ballot.
The Seeds of State Capture: Merit and Patrimonialism in the Colonial Bureaucracy (with Sarah Brierley, Noah L. Nathan, and Tingxuan Zhu).
Bureaucracies vary in the extent to which hiring is meritocratic versus patrimonial and patronage-driven. This variation depends in part on the preferences and social proximity to local populations of political leaders vis-à-vis bureaucrats. Colonial and other forms of external and peripheral state-building typify cases where bureaucrat-led patrimonialism is likely to prevail due to political leaders’ low social proximity and relative ambivalence over hiring. Digitizing individual-level bureaucratic records across six decades of British rule in Ghana, we find significant ethnic bias in African hiring despite British claims of meritocracy. We suggest this resulted from initial African bureaucrats capturing hiring to favor their co-ethnics, with post-independence leaders inheriting bureaucracies that were already ethnically-imbalanced. Our results demonstrate the agency of local bureaucrats in state-building and highlight conditions under which bureaucrats’ preferences, rather than political principals’, shape state institutions. They also challenge conventional wisdom about why newly-independent African states became “neopatrimonial.”