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Political Selection
2020. "Mitigating Adverse Political Selection: Experimental Evidence from a Leadership Training for Aspiring Politicians in the Philippines."
Abstract. Good political leaders matter for governance outcomes. Yet bad politicians - incompetent, dishonest, and low public-minded ones - get elected simply because they are more likely to select into politics. Can leadership training with performance-based incentives deter bad politicians? We randomly assigned 569 would-be-politician youths in the Philippines into no training, training with unconditional awards (T1), and training with performance-based awards (T2). Five years later, we find that respondents with below-median measures of public service motivation, aptitude, and integrity in T2 (but not in T1) are significantly less likely to run for office than their control group counterparts. We also find that T2 improved gender diversity in that males are significantly less likely - while females are no more likely - to run for office than their control group counterparts. These findings show how leadership training can mitigate adverse selection in politics and improve the quality of the political class. Democratic Accountability
2021. Ravanilla, Nico, Michael Davidson and Allen Hicken. "Voting in Clientelistic Social Networks: Evidence from the Philippines." Under review.
Abstract. In clientelistic environments, voters want to know which politicians are most likely to deliver on targeted benefits. We argue that in these contexts voters use their social proximity with candidates as heuristics to inform vote choice. To test our theory, we rely on local naming conventions to reconstruct family networks spanning one whole city in the Philippines, and asses blood and marriage links between voters and local candidates. We then collect survey data on pre-election candidate leanings and actual voting behavior of 895 randomly drawn voters. We show that the degrees of separation between voters and candidates explain not only aggregate electoral outcomes but also individual vote choice, controlling for pre-election leanings. We demonstrate that this is because private inducements are channeled through family networks. These findings highlight the electoral importance of social proximity with politicians as an information shortcut when voters are choosing whom to support at the polls.
Download manuscript here.2020. Ravanilla, Nico, Dotan Haim and Allen Hicken. "Brokers, Social Networks, Reciprocity, and Clientelism." American Journal of Political Science (Accepted).
Abstract. Although canonical models of clientelism argue that brokers use dense social networks to monitor and enforce vote buying, recent evidence suggests that brokers can instead target intrinsically reciprocal voters and reduce the need for active monitoring and enforcement. Combining a trove of survey data on brokers and voters in the Philippines with an experiment-based measure of reciprocity, and relying on local naming conventions to build social networks, we demonstrate that brokers employ both strategies conditional on the underlying social network structure. We show that brokers are chosen for their central position in networks and are knowledgeable about voters, including their reciprocity levels. We then show that, where village social networks are dense, brokers prefer to target voters that have many ties in the network because their votes are easiest to monitor. Where networks are sparse, brokers target intrinsically reciprocal voters whose behavior they need not monitor.
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