We study learning via shared news. Each period agents receive the same quantity and quality of first-hand information and can share it with friends. Some friends (possibly few) share selectively, generating heterogeneous news diets across agents akin to echo chambers. Agents are aware of selective sharing and update beliefs by Bayes’ rule. Contrary to standard learning results, we show that beliefs can diverge in this environment leading to polarization. This requires that (i) agents hold misperceptions (even minor) about friends’ sharing and (ii) information quality is sufficiently low. Polarization can worsen when agents’ social connections expand. When the quantity of first-hand information becomes large, agents can hold opposite extreme beliefs resulting in severe polarization. We find that news aggregators

We use a policy experiment in Indonesia to show how local political boundaries affect ethnic tension. Redrawing district borders along group lines reduces conflict. However, the gains in stability are undone or even reversed when new boundaries increase ethnic polarization. Greater polarization leads to more violence around majoritarian elections but has little effect around lower-stakes, proportional representation elections. These results point to distinct incentives for violence in winner-take-all settings with contestable public resources. Overall, our findings illustrate the promise and pitfalls of redrawing borders in diverse countries where it is infeasible for each group to have its own administrative unit.

We study optimal policy experimentation by a committee. We consider a dynamic bargaining game in which committee members choose either a risky reform or a safe alternative each period. When no redistribution is allowed, the unique equilibrium outcome is generically inefficient. When redistribution is allowed (even small amounts), there always exists an equilibrium that supports optimal experimentation for any voting rule without veto players. With veto players, however, optimal policy experimentation is possible only with a sufficient amount of redistribution. We conclude that veto rights are more of an obstacle to optimal policy experimentation than are the constraints on redistribution themselves.

Although a substantial body of research argues that women provide terrorist organizations with important tactical benefits, few studies draw out the implications of this argument or examine whether female recruits affect the outcomes of terrorist operations. Using data on individual suicide attacks from 1985 to 2015, I show that an attacker’s gender influences the lethality of an attack. However, this effect is conditional upon the gender norms of the state in which the attack occurs. The results demonstrate that a female advantage is more apparent only in societies where a woman’s role in public life is limited; attacks by female suicide attackers are more deadly in countries where women are largely absent from the workforce, civil society, and protest

Property titling enables tax collection and encourages private investment. Yet, governments across the developing world often fail to invest in land registration systems, such as cadastral maps, that record land ownership and values. In this paper, we describe and estimate the fiscal benefits and political costs that elected officials face when deciding whether to invest in this critical fiscal infrastructure. Focusing on Brazilian municipalities, we find that property tax revenue increases by over 10% following cadastre updates. Officials covet this revenue, but they simultaneously seek to secure their reelection, and investing in the cadastre can generate political costs by angering tax-averse voters or undermining clientelism. When these political costs are large, officials who do not face reelection pressures have

In this paper, Tai Ming Cheung examines the vision and paths put forward by China under Xi Jinping to build a militarily powerful and technologically advanced country, which is also called a “techno-security state.” Xi’s military reinforcement strategy is composed of the three following components―reform, modernization, and innovation; Xi has put particular emphasis on innovation and expanded its application to military arena far more compared to his predecessors. Cheung expects the Chinese techno-security state to make smooth progress under Xi’s leadership based on sufficient financial capacity and good access to foreign technology, despite hurdles such as bureaucratic fragmentation, corruption, and political interference.

We use a population resettlement program in Indonesia to identify long-run effects of intergroup contact on national integration. In the 1980s, the government relocated two million ethnically diverse migrants into hundreds of new communities. We find greater integration in fractionalized communities with many small groups, as measured by national language use at home, intermarriage, and children’s name choices. However, in polarized communities with a few large groups, ethnic attachment increases and integration declines. Residential segregation dampens these effects. Social capital, public goods, and ethnic conflict follow similar patterns. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of localized contact in shaping identity.

The most common image of world politics involves states negotiating, cooperating, or sometimes fighting with one another; billiard balls in motion on a global pool table. Yet working through local proxies or agents, through what we call a strategy of “indirect control,” has always been a central tool of foreign policy.

Elections can enhance state legitimacy. One way is by improving citizens’ attitudes toward government, thereby increasing their willingness to comply with rules and regulations. We investigate whether reducing fraud in elections improves attitudes toward government in a fragile state. A large, randomly assigned fraud-reducing intervention in Afghan elections leads to improvement in two indices, one measuring attitudes toward their government, and another measuring stated willingness to comply with governance. Thus, reducing electoral fraud may offer a practical, cost-effective method of enhancing governance in a fragile state.

The United States and Mexico face a powerful onslaught of criminal activity damaging both countries. They need to step up cooperation now. U.S. threats are counterproductive. What if Mexico threatened a 25 percent tariff on American corn and soybeans unless U.S. citizens stopped providing the estimated $19-29 billion in drug sale profits each year to Mexican criminal groups? Or, what if Mexico threatened to impose tariffs on American pork until the United States stops the illegal flow of automatic weapons and ammunition across the shared border?

Voters often rely on partisan attachments as they evaluate new policy proposals, but does partisanship also color their interpretation of incumbent efforts to entrench themselves in power by changing the “basic rules of the political game”? We explore this question by taking advantage of a rare instance where a single party held a supermajority sufficient to unilaterally amend the constitution and overhaul the electoral system. We embedded a randomized experiment in a panel survey around the 2014 Hungarian elections, providing respondents with different information about recent changes to the Hungarian electoral rules. While respondents were largely pessimistic about the reforms, providing information yielded no significant effects on their views on the elections’ legitimacy. But when information was presented alongside

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is responsible for prosecuting crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. Despite the potential for the ICC to deter human rights abuses, scholars and policy makers are divided on the effectiveness of it. This debate, however, is plagued by some important theoretical and empirical limitations. I address the problems in the literature and evaluate whether the ICC can prevent human rights abuses, finding that leaders from states that have ratified the Rome Statute commit lower levels of human rights abuses than nonratifier leaders.

Why do some postconflict states return to violence, while others remain at peace? Analysts increasingly credit postconflict justice institutions—such as truth commissions, amnesties, reparations, and trials—with contributing to the prevention of conflict recurrence following civil wars. But scholars remain divided about the overall effectiveness of these varied institutions. In this article, we directly engage this debate. We seek to overcome theoretical and data limitations that make it difficult to address the relationship between justice institutions and the likelihood that conflict will recur. We find that only postconflict justice processes that lessen conflict-induced grievances, and thus address individual motivations to rebel, are successful at keeping the peace.