Voters commonly face a choice between competent candidates and those with policy preferences similar to their own. The paper explores how electoral rules, such as district magnitude, mediate this trade-off and affect the composition of representative bodies and policy outcomes. We show formally...

Direct democracy is designed to better align policy outcomes with citizen preferences. To test this proposition, we randomized whether 250 villages across Afghanistan selected projects by secret-ballot referenda or by consultation meetings. We find that referenda reduce the influence of local...

Using data from a field experiment across 500 villages in Afghanistan, we study how electoral accountability of local institutions affects the quality of governance. Food aid distribution was organized to obtain outcomes that are comparable across villages with different structures of...

The conflict in Syria has killed hundreds of thousands and forced more than half of the country’s population to flee their homes. We constructed and analyzed comparable datasets of public messages and images from three popular social media platforms to study how Syrian users represent the...

Islamists have a reputation for winning over citizen support through service delivery. This reflects a worldwide trend in the use of service provision by non-state actors to gain political support. Existing works attribute the notable local-level variation in such provision to strategic choice...