Do incidents of ethnic polarization influence voter behavior? I address this question through the case study of India, the world's largest functional democracy. Specifically, I test whether prior events of Hindu-Muslim riots electorally benefit Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), a prominent Hindu...

How do majority groups respond to a narrowing of inequality in racially polarized environments? We study this question by examining the effects of the Freedmen's Bureau, an agency created after the U.S. Civil War to provide aid to former slaves and launch institutional reform in the South. We...

We investigate the impact of the political representation of minority groups on the incidence of ethnic conflict in India. We code data on Hindu-Muslim violence and Muslim political representation in India and leverage quasi-random variation in legislator religion generated by the results of...

This paper uses a randomized experiment to study whether social networks affect vote choice. In a fiercely contested presidential election in Peru with ten candidates, only 35% of subjects were aware how their friends intended to vote. We compare people who were randomly informed how one of...

We build a model of secession crises where voters may wish to accommodate the minority to prevent secession. We show the existence of a majority voting equilibrium with a government's type biased in favor of the minority. We propose a measure of secession risk and perform the comparative static...

It can be advantageous for an office motivated party A to spend effort to make it public that a group of voters will lose from party A's policy proposal. Such effort is called inverse campaigning. The inverse campaigning equilibria are described for the case where the two parties can...

This article highlights a nefarious effect of elections during civil wars by demonstrating that they can facilitate the displacement of civilians. This occurs through two main mechanisms: they reveal information about civilians' loyalties directly to armed groups; and they threaten the status...

The current political situation in Sudan has deteriorated with the secession of its Southern part, the Darfur dilemma and the growing public feelings of deprivation, political disparities, elitism that possess the whole country. However, evidence proves that the situation is an accumulation of...