Explore the vast range of titles available.

Why do parties and governments cheat in elections they cannot lose? This book documents the widespread use of blatant and excessive manipulation of elections and explains what drives this practice. Alberto Simpser shows that, in many instances, elections are about more than winning. Electoral manipulation is not only a tool used to gain votes, but also a means of transmitting or distorting information. This manipulation conveys an image of strength, shaping the behavior of citizens, bureaucrats, politicians, parties, unions and businesspeople to the benefit of the manipulators, increasing the scope for the manipulators to pursue their goals while in government and mitigating future challenges to their hold on power. Why Governments and Parties Manipulate Elections provides a general theory about what drives electoral manipulation and empirically documents global patterns of manipulation.

While effective preventive measures against COVID-19 are now widely known, many individuals fail to adopt them. This article provides experimental evidence about one potentially important driver of compliance with social distancing: social norms. We asked each of 23,000 survey respondents in Mexico to predict how a fictional person would behave when faced with the choice about whether or not to attend a friend’s birthday gathering. Every respondent was randomly assigned to one of four social norms conditions. Expecting that other people would attend the gathering and/or believing that other people approved of attending the gathering both increased the predicted probability that the fictional character would attend the gathering by 25%, in comparison with a scenario where other people were not expected to attend nor to approve of attending. Our results speak to the potential effects of communication campaigns and media coverage of compliance with, and normative views about, COVID-19 preventive measures. They also suggest that policies aimed at modifying social norms or making existing ones salient could impact compliance.

Social distancing policies have been widely used to curb the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19, but assessing their effectiveness is challenging. This study shows that widely-used methods to estimate the effects of such policies, like Two-way Fixed Effects and Difference-in-Differences, are highly sensitive to accounting, or failing to account, for the simultaneous adoption of policies and the presence of spillovers across geographies stemming from human movement. By estimating a series of nonparametric models on fine-grained mobility, epidemiological, and policy data from Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic, this research shows that failing to consider confounders, interactions, and spillovers can change the magnitude and the sign of estimated policy effects, hampering the design of optimal public policies.

The monitoring of elections by international groups has become widespread. But can it have unintended negative consequences for governance? We argue that high-quality election monitoring, by preventing certain forms of manipulation such as stuffing ballot boxes, can unwittingly induce incumbents to resort to tactics of election manipulation that are more damaging to domestic institutions, governance, and freedoms. These tactics include rigging courts and administrative bodies and repressing the media. We use an original-panel dataset of 144 countries in 1990–2007 to test our argument. We find that, on average, high-quality election monitoring has a measurably negative effect on the rule of law, administrative performance, and media freedom. We employ various strategies to guard against endogeneity, including instrumenting for election monitoring.

Diagnostic and contact tracing apps are a needed weapon to contain contagion during a pandemic. We study how the content of the messages used to promote the apps influence adoption by running a survey experiment on approximately 23,000 Mexican adults. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of three different prompts, or a control condition, before stating their willingness to adopt a diagnostic app and contact tracing app. The prompt emphasizing government efforts to ensure data privacy, which has been one of the most common strategies, reduced willingness to adopt the apps by about 4 pp and 3 pp, respectively. An effective app promotion policy must understand individuals’ reservations and be wary of unintended reactions to naïve reassurances.

Bureaucratic compliance is often crucial for political survival, yet eliciting that compliance in weakly institutionalized environments requires that political principals convince agents that their hold on power is secure. We provide a formal model to show that electoral manipulation can help to solve this agency problem. By influencing beliefs about a ruler's hold on power, manipulation can encourage a bureaucrat to work on behalf of the ruler when he would not otherwise do so. This result holds under various common technologies of electoral manipulation. Manipulation is more likely when the bureaucrat is dependent on the ruler for his career and when the probability is high that even generally unsupportive citizens would reward bureaucratic effort. The relationship between the ruler's expected popularity and the likelihood of manipulation, in turn, depends on the technology of manipulation.

Does electoral manipulation reduce voter turnout? The question is central to the study of political behavior in many electoral systems and to current debates on electoral reform. Nevertheless, existing evidence suggests contradictory answers. This article clarifies the theoretical relationship between electoral manipulation and turnout by drawing some simple conceptual distinctions and presents new empirical evidence from Mexico. The deep electoral reforms in 1990s Mexico provide a hitherto-unexploited opportunity to estimate the effect of electoral manipulation on turnout. The empirical strategy makes use of variation over time and across the states of Mexico in turnout and in electoral manipulation. The analysis finds that electoral manipulation under the PRI discouraged citizens from voting. Conceptually, the article shows that true and reported turnout need not move in the same direction, nor respond in the same way to electoral manipulation.

Social spending by central governments in Latin America has, in recent decades, become increasingly insulated from political manipulation. Focusing on the 3×1 Program in Mexico in 2002-2007, we show that social spending by local government is, in contrast, highly politicized. The 3×1 Program funds municipal public works, with each level of government—municipal, state, and central—matching collective remittances. Our analysis shows that 3x1 municipal spending is shaped by political criteria. First, municipalities time disbursements according to the electoral cycle. Second, when matching collective remittances, municipalities protect salaries of personnel, instead adjusting budget items that are less visible to the public, such as debt. Third, municipalities spend more on 3×1 projects when their partisanship matches that of the state government. Beyond the 3×1 Program, our findings highlight the considerable influence that increasing political and economic decentralization can have on local government incentives and spending choices, in Mexico and beyond. En décadas recientes, la manipulación política del gasto social gubernamental a nivel nacional en Latinoamérica ha mostrado una tendencia a la baja. Con base en el estudio del Programa 3×1 para Migrantes en México, este artículo demuestra que el gasto social a nivel local, en cambio, ha experimentado niveles sustanciales de manipulación política. El Programa 3×1 financia bienes públicos municipales, requiriendo que cada uno de los tres niveles de gobierno —municipal, estatal, y nacional—aproximadamente iguale el monto de remesas colectivas. Nuestro análisis muestra que el gasto de aquellos municipios que participan en el Programa 3×1 está influenciado por critérios políticos. Primero, el gasto municipal en 3×1 varía según el ciclo electoral. Segundo, al contribuir al Programa 3×1, los municipios protegen el gasto en salarios, y en cambio ajustan elementos presupuestales menos visibles al público, tales como el servicio de deuda. Tercero, los municipios gastan más en proyectos del 3×1 cuando su afiliación partidista es la misma que la del gobierno estatal. Más allá del contexto del Programa 3×1, nuestros hallazgos subrayan el efecto de la creciente descentralización política y económica sobre los incentivos y las decisiones de gasto de gobiernos locales, tanto en México como en otros países.

The credibility of election outcomes hinges on the accuracy of vote tallies. We provide causal evidence on the drivers and the downstream consequences of variation in the quality of vote tallies. Using data for the universe of polling stations in Mexico in five national elections, we document that over 40% of polling-station-level tallies display inconsistencies. Our evidence strongly suggests these inconsistencies are nonpartisan. Using data for more than 1.5 million poll workers, we show that lower educational attainment, higher workload, and higher complexity of the tally cause more inconsistencies. Finally, using an original survey of close to 80,000 poll workers together with detailed administrative data, we find that inconsistencies cause recounts and recounts lead to lower trust in electoral institutions. We discuss policy implications.