My current research focuses primarily on three broad themes: (1) the provision of public goods and services, (2) electoral accountability and policy attribution, and (3) political violence and state capacity. 
​My google scholar profile is here.

The provision of public goods and services

​Rural Democracy: Elections and Development in Africa
​Oxford University Press (2020).​​​​​
  • Link to book on publisher site 
  • Abstract: How have African rulers responded to the introduction of democratic electoral competition? Despite the broadly negative picture painted by the prevailing focus on electoral fraud, clientelism, and ethnic conflict, the book argues that the full story is somewhat more promising. While these unfortunate practices may be widespread, African rulers also seek to win votes through the provision and distribution of public goods and services. The author's central argument is that in predominantly rural countries the introduction of competitive elections leads governments to implement pro-rural policies, in order to win the votes of the rural majority. As a result, across much of Africa the benefits of democratic electoral competition have accrued primarily in terms of rural development. This broad claim is supported by cross-national evidence, both from public opinion surveys and from individual level data on health and education outcomes. The argument's core assumptions about voting behavior are supported with quantitative evidence from Ghana, and qualitative historical evidence from Botswana presents further evidence for the underlying theoretical mechanism. Taken together, this body of evidence provides reasons to be optimistic about the operation of electoral accountability in Africa. African governments are responding to the accountability structures provided by electoral competition; in that sense, democracy in Africa is working.
Who is democracy good for? elections, rural bias, and health and education outcomes in sub-saharan africa, Journal of Politics, 82:1 (2020).
  • Link to article on publisher site​​
  • Abstract: How do African governments respond to democratic electoral competition? Although the common perception is that African governments have sought to win elections by combining various types of electoral fraud, clientelism, and ethnic mobilization, I argue that democratic elections in Africa have also induced governments to compete for votes by providing basic services. One implication of this is a rural bias in the impact of democracy on basic health and education outcomes. Using individual-level data from 27 African countries, I investigate the theoretical claim that competitive elections create incentives for African governments to implement prorural policies in order to satisfy the rural majority. The results demonstrate that democratic elections significantly increase access to primary education and reduce infant mortality rates, but only for children in rural areas. As the argument expects, these effects are conditional on the level of urbanization.​
  • Awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Best Article Award given by the American Political Science Association's Democracy and Autocracy section.​
THE DEMOCRATIC DIVIDEND: PUBLIC SPENDING AND EDUCATION UNDER MULTIPARTYISM, in oxford research encyclopedia of Politics, oxford university press (2019).
  • ​Link to chapter on publisher site​​
  • Abstract: A substantial body of scholarship has considered the impact of regime types on public spending and basic service provision, much of which has implications for education. While some of the theoretical and empirical conclusions from this work are globally applicable, there are also important ways in which the relationship between democracy and education may be influenced by the African context. The most useful theoretical arguments for why democracy may influence public spending, and spending on education in particular, focus on the political incentives generated by multiparty electoral competition. Related but distinct arguments focus on how this may impact in turn on education outcomes, and on why these dynamics may vary because of factors that are particularly pertinent in many African countries. These include variations in the degree of electoral competitiveness and political competition as well as in levels of economic development and ethnic fractionalization. A large body of empirical evidence investigates these various arguments, evaluating the impact of democracy on both education spending and education outcomes. Although evidence for the positive impact of democracy on education is compelling, evidence for this relationship in Africa remains limited and is hampered by limitations to data. In particular, although evidence suggests democracy may have a positive impact on access to education in Africa, there is less evidence for its impact on the quality of education. Future work should continue to address these issues while seeking to investigate sources of heterogeneity in the impact of democracy on education in Africa.
What Democracy Does (and Doesn't) do for Basic Services: School Fees, School Quality, and African Elections (with David Stasavage), Journal of Politics, 76:1 (2014).
  • Link to article on publisher site​​
  • Abstract: Does democracy affect the provision of basic services? We advance on existing empirical work on this subject by exploring the potential mechanisms through which a democratic transition may prompt a government to alter provision of basic services to its citizens. In an environment of weak state capacity, in which it is difficult for voters to attribute outcomes to executive actions, we suggest that electoral competition is most likely to lead to changes in policies where executive action is verifiable. Considering the context of African primary education as an example, we suggest that electoral competition will therefore give governments an incentive to abolish school fees, but it will have less effect on the provision of school inputs, precisely because executive actions on these issues are more difficult to monitor. We evaluate this claim by approaching it in three different ways, using cross-national as well as individual-level data, including an original data set on primary school fee abolitions. First we show that in Africa, democracies have higher rates of school attendance than nondemocracies. Moreover, evidence suggests that this is primarily due to the fact that democracies are more likely to abolish school fees, not to the fact that they provide more inputs. We then estimate the likelihood that a government will abolish school fees subsequent to an election, taking account of endogeneity concerns involving election timing. Finally, we use survey data from Kenya to provide evidence suggesting that citizens condition their voting intentions on an outcome that a politician can control directly, in this case abolishing school fees, but not on outcomes over which politicians have much more indirect influence, such as local school quality.
Public Investment in Rural Infrastructure: Some Political Economy Considerations (with Moussa Blimpo and Leonard Wantchekon), Journal of African Economies, 22 (2013).
  • Link to article on publisher site​​
  • Abstract: We have constructed a unique dataset to study the extent of the relationship between political marginalisation, public investment in transport infrastructure, and food security in Benin, Ghana, Mali and Senegal. We first show a strong relation between food security and road infrastructures after controlling for other factors known to affect food security, including climate and land productivity. To trace a potential mechanism by which political marginalisation impacts on food security, we then look at its relation with the allocation of roads within countries. We find support for the argument that political factors affect the location of roads after controlling for the economic importance of the areas, as well as many other factors. This finding is robust to a number of alternative specifications. We conclude that politically marginalised areas have significantly fewer roads, thus supporting our claim that political marginalisation indirectly affects food security, by undermining the quality and the allocation of transport infrastructures. Although we do not establish a causal effect here, this study is the first to empirically substantiate this relationship at the micro-level.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT​ (with Leonard Wantchekon), undp research paper, october 2010.
  • Link to paper on publisher site​​
  • Abstract: What are the causes and consequences of human development? In the twenty years since the publication of the first Human Development Report (HDR), political scientists have invested a great deal of time and effort into answering this question. So what do we know? In this paper we seek to review these labors, the fruits of which can be summarized as follows. Democracy causes, but is not caused by, economic development. While total economic growth is no higher as a result of democratic institutions, they are more conducive than non-democratic alternatives to the growth of per capita income, which is an important aspect of individual well-being. Democratic institutions are also conducive to improvements in the two other essential elements of human development, longevity and knowledge - democracy has a positive effect on indicators of education and health. Given these findings, it seems pertinent to ask why democracy has such effects. Our conclusion from the literature is that the positive impact of democratic institutions stems from their provision of accountability structures. But in providing these structures, what democracy offers is the opportunity for human development. It is no guarantee of its realization, and in the absence of factors such as information and participation this opportunity can be missed.
Urban-Rural Differences in Incumbent Support Across Africa, Afrobarometer Working Paper Series, June 2010.
  • Link to paper on publisher site​​
  • Abstract: Across sub-Saharan Africa support for incumbent governments is significantly higher among rural residents than urbanites, although the magnitude of this difference varies across countries. In this paper I use public opinion data from the Afrobarometer Survey Series to provide systematic evidence of this urban-rural difference in incumbent support in 18 African countries. Moreover, I consider a number of different explanations for urban incumbent hostility, and present empirical evidence that provides preliminary support for an account that acknowledges electoral incentives created by the interaction between democracy and demography. Most simply stated, competitive elections make African governments more responsive to rural interests. Because a majority of Africans live in rural areas, democracy creates incentives for governments to favor rural interests at the expense of the urban minority, thereby resulting in dissatisfaction on the part of urban voters. A unique observable implication of this argument is that urban incumbent hostility should reduce as the urban proportion of a country’s population increases. I use individual- and national-level data in a hierarchical setting to show that this is indeed the case - while urbanites are less likely to support incumbents, this effect is mitigated by higher levels of urbanization. Along with data on perceptions of government performance across a range of policy tasks, this finding supports the argument that urban hostility results, at least in part, from the pursuance of pro-rural policies by incumbent governments.​

Electoral accountability and policy attribution

BUYING A BLIND EYE: CAMPAIGN DONATIONS, Regulatory Enforcement, AND DEFORESTATION (with mounu prem, Nelson A. Ruiz, and david vargas), American Political Science Review, 118:2 (2024).
  • Link to paper​​
  • Abstract: While existing work has demonstrated that campaign donations can buy access to benefits such as favorable legislation and preferential contracting, we highlight another use of campaign contributions: buying forbearance. Specifically, we argue that in return for campaign contributions, Colombian mayors who rely on donor-funding (compared to those who do not) choose not to enforce sanctions against illegal deforestation activities. Using a regression discontinuity design we show that deforestation is significantly higher in municipalities that elect donor-funded as opposed to self-funded politicians. Further analysis shows that only part of this effect can be explained by differences is contracting practices by donor-funded mayors. Instead, evidence from analysis of fire clearance, and of heterogeneity in the effects according to the presence of alternative formal and informal enforcement institutions, supports the interpretation that campaign contributions buy forbearance from enforcement of environmental regulations.​
  • Post for the Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog
Do Voters in Local Elections Prefer Campaign Promises About Attributable Policies? (with Tanushree Goyal), under review.
  • Link to paper​​
  • Abstract: It is widely accepted that policy attribution increases retrospective accountability. We extend this research by outlining the theoretical importance of policy attribution in electoral selection and investigating whether voters select candidates based on campaign promises for attributable policy outcomes. Selecting candidates on attributable campaign promises can increase political responsiveness and lower pandering, representing an overlooked channel that can increase accountability. We introduce novel measures of attribution and conduct comparative conjoint experiments in representative surveys in Accra, Ghana, and New Delhi, India. We find that in both settings the quality of attribution is high and policy promises are the strongest determinant of vote choice. Yet, we find no evidence that voters prefer attributable campaign promises. Instead, voters are just as likely to select candidates based on campaign promises for policies they do not attribute to them. Our findings have important implications for the operation of accountability, and for justifications of decentralization.
Candidate Coethnicity, Rural/Urban Divides, and Partisanship in Africa  (with​ Kristin Michelitch), Party Politics, 27:4 (2021).
  • Link to article on publisher site​​​
  • Abstract: Why do some citizens in new democracies attach to parties while others do not? We investigate the determinants of partisanship in Africa by theorizing the role of parties’ group mobilization tactics and testing our arguments alongside existing explanations from new democracies. First, using original data on candidate ethnicity, we evaluate a debate as to whether coethnicity with presidential and/or vice presidential candidates is associated with greater partisanship. Contrary to traditional wisdom, we find no continent-wide relationship—prominently studied cases (e.g. Kenya, Ghana) may be falsely overgeneralized. Second, we propose that partisanship is more likely among rural citizens. We find robust, continent-wide support for this relationship, which we show is partially driven by citizens’ links to traditional authorities, who often act as opinion leaders and/or brokers for parties. As in other new democracies, partisanship is positively associated with experience with multiparty democracy, the electoral cycle, age, male gender, and education.
Attribution and Accountability: Voting for Roads in Ghana, World Politics, 67:4 (2015).
  • Link to article on publisher site​​​
  • Abstract: Do voters in Africa use elections to hold governments accountable for their performance in office? In contexts of limited information and weak state capacity, it can be difficult for citizens to attribute the provision of public goods and services to political action. As a result, voters often have little information about government performance on which to condition their electoral support. Such contexts are frequently characterized by clientelism or ethnic politics, and there is a widespread impression that African elections are little more than contests in corruption or ethnic mobilization. Using an original panel data set containing electoral returns and detailed information on road conditions throughout Ghana, the author provides robust evidence that when a public good can be attributed to political action, as is the case with roads in Ghana, electoral support is affected by the provision of that good. The author also uses data on a variety of educational inputs to test the claim that votes are conditioned only on attributable outcomes.
  • Winner of the 2012 Best Graduate Student Paper Award given by the African Politics Conference Group, under the former title "One for the Road: Voting for Public Goods in Ghana".
What Democracy Does (and Doesn't) do for Basic Services: School Fees, School Quality, and African Elections (with David Stasavage), Journal of Politics, 76:1 (2014).
  • Link to article on publisher site​​
  • Abstract: Does democracy affect the provision of basic services? We advance on existing empirical work on this subject by exploring the potential mechanisms through which a democratic transition may prompt a government to alter provision of basic services to its citizens. In an environment of weak state capacity, in which it is difficult for voters to attribute outcomes to executive actions, we suggest that electoral competition is most likely to lead to changes in policies where executive action is verifiable. Considering the context of African primary education as an example, we suggest that electoral competition will therefore give governments an incentive to abolish school fees, but it will have less effect on the provision of school inputs, precisely because executive actions on these issues are more difficult to monitor. We evaluate this claim by approaching it in three different ways, using cross-national as well as individual-level data, including an original data set on primary school fee abolitions. First we show that in Africa, democracies have higher rates of school attendance than nondemocracies. Moreover, evidence suggests that this is primarily due to the fact that democracies are more likely to abolish school fees, not to the fact that they provide more inputs. We then estimate the likelihood that a government will abolish school fees subsequent to an election, taking account of endogeneity concerns involving election timing. Finally, we use survey data from Kenya to provide evidence suggesting that citizens condition their voting intentions on an outcome that a politician can control directly, in this case abolishing school fees, but not on outcomes over which politicians have much more indirect influence, such as local school quality.
Does information about attribution improve accountability for education? evidence from a field experiment in delhi (with Tanushree Goyal), In Progress.
COVID-19 Exposure and Government Support in England (with Nelson Ruiz and Alex Yeandle), In Progress.

Political violence and state capacity

COUPS AND SOCIAL Trust: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in BURKINA FASO (with THOMAS BRAILEY AND THOMAS ISBELL), Afrobarometer working paper, wp204 (2024). 
  • ​​Link to working paper
  • Abstract: How do coups affect social trust? Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the prevalence of coups, in particular across West Africa. Although significant attention has been paid to the effects of other forms of political violence and instability on social trust, to date very little research has considered how social trust is affected by coups, which represent a distinctive form of intra-elite conflict. Building on insights from work in philosophy and social psychology, we conceptualise trust as an adaptive response to vulnerability. Coupsrepresent moments of violent competition for power between elites that create uncertainty about the state as a provider of security and essential services. Consequently, we argue that social trust will increase in response to coups, as a means of offsetting this uncertainty and insecurity. We exploit a unique natural experiment in Burkina Faso to identify the causal effect of coups on social trust, using data from a survey that was in the field during September 2022, when Burkina Faso experienced its second coup of that year. This provides robust evidence that coups can increase social trust, and further analysis supports the proposed mechanism that increased social trust following the coup was a response to uncertainty and insecurity. For external validity, analysis of cross-national survey data from the Afrobarometer series suggests that the positive relationship between coup exposure and social trust holds more broadly.
Terrorism, Trust, and Identity: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Nigeria (with Arinze Nwokolo), AMERICAN journal of POLITICAL SCIENCE (2023). 
  • Link to open access article on publisher site​​
  • Abstract: We study the effects of terrorism on political trust and national versus ethic identification. Making use of unexpected attacks by the extremist group Boko Haram in Nigeria, which occurred during the fieldwork of a public opinion survey in 2014, we show that even in a context of weak state institutions and frequent terrorist activities, terrorist attacks significantly increase political trust. We also find that the attacks significantly reduced the salience of respondents' national identity, instead increasing ethnic identification. These findings run counter to arguments that "rally around the flag" effects following terror attacks result from increased patriotism. The results have important implications for understanding the effects of terrorism in contexts of weak state institutions, frequent political violence, and politically salient ethnic divisions. ​
SECURITY IN THE ABSENCE OF A STATE: TRADITIONAL AUTHORITY, LIVESTOCK TRADING, AND MARITIME PIRACY IN NORTHERN SOMALIA (with avidit acharya and j. andrew harris), Journal of theoretical Politics, 32:4 (2020).
  • Link to open access article on publisher site​​
  • Abstract: Without a strong state, how do institutions emerge to limit the impact of one group’s predation on another’s economic activities? Motivated by the case of northern Somalia, we develop a model that highlights the monitoring challenges that groups face in making cooperation self-enforcing, and two key factors that influence their likelihood of overcoming this challenge: the ratio of economic interests across productive and predatory sectors, and the existence of informal income-sharing institutions. Our model explains why conflicts between pirates and livestock traders can be resolved in the region of Somaliland, where the ratio of economic interests favors the productive sector and traditional institutions promote income sharing between groups, but not in the region of Puntland, where these conditions do not hold. The model also accounts for several of the empirical patterns in the relationships between piracy, livestock exports, and conflict in both regions.​
  • Winner of the 2022 Elinor Ostrom Award for Best Article Published in the Journal of Theoretical Politics, awarded by the American Political Science Association's Formal Theory section.​

Other related research

Rallying in fear? Estimating the effect of the UK COVID-19 lockdown with a natural experiment (with Andrew C. Eggers), European Journal of Political Research, 61 (2022).
  • Link to article on publisher site​​
  • Abstract: We use a natural experiment to study how the announcement of the UK COVID-19 lockdown affected citizens' attitudes towards the pandemic and the government's response to it. On the day of the lockdown announcement, YouGov ran a survey that captured responses before and after the announcement. Comparison of these responses suggests that the lockdown announcement made people more supportive of the government's response to the crisis but also (perhaps surprisingly) more concerned about the pandemic. Analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects suggests that the announcement narrowed gaps in perceptions of the crisis, increasing support for the government's response especially among those who had been least supportive and increasing concern about the pandemic especially among those who had been least concerned. Overall, the findings highlight a tension inherent in governing during times of crisis: actions that increase people's confidence in government and induce compliance with government directives may also tend to increase anxiety among the population.
Freedom to Choose and Democracy: The Empirical Question, Economics and Philosophy, 27:3 (2011).
  • Link to article on publisher site​​
  • ​Abstract: Intuitively it would seem that choice is important for democracy. Yet the empirical question, whether people actually do value facing distinct platforms when they vote, remains open. In this paper I seek to remedy that situation by systematically addressing the question using cross-national survey data. Specifically, I investigate whether satisfaction with democracy depends on the number and/or the substance of the choices that are available to people when they vote. The analysis offers strong support for the idea that what matters most to voters is the substance of electoral choices. Although the number of choices also matters, the significance of this factor is conditional on being able to vote for a party that represents one's views, or on voting for the winner.​