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Post-Soviet African democratization has introduced elections into contexts that often lack restraints upon the behavior of candidates, resulting in the emergence of voter intimidation, vote-buying, and ballot fraud. We propose a model of electoral competition where, although some voters oppose violence, it is effective in intimidating swing voters. We show that in equilibrium a weak challenger will use violence, which corresponds to a terrorism strategy. Similarly, a nationally weak incumbent will use repression. However, a stronger incumbent facing local competition will prefer to use bribery or ballot fraud. We discuss the applicability of the model to several African elections. Adapted from the source document.

We challenge the conventional definition of corruption through the analysis of legal forms of corruption, and by devoting special attention to influence induced by the private sector. This paper studies the determinants of the world pattern of legal and illegal corruption by proposing a simple theoretical model of endogenous corruption and related legal framework, and its thorough empirical test. Three types of equilibrium outcomes are identified: one based on illegal corruption, where the elite does not face any binding incentives to limit corruption; one centered around legal corruption, where the elite must incur a cost to legally protect corruption; and finally a no-corruption outcome, where the population is able to effectively react to corruption. Testable implications from the model are derived based on country-wide parameters. Crucially, we use a rich corporate survey, including 8,279 firms in 104 countries, tailored for this research, and featuring measures of legal corruption that are novel to the literature. The microdimension of the database enables improving on familiar shortcomings associated with the use of endogeneity-prone, country-wide indices of perceived corruption. The empirical results, making use of a broad range of proxies and sources, generally validate the model's explanations. Adapted from the source document.

Can international migration promote better institutions at home by raising the demand for political accountability? A behavioral measure of the population's desire for better governance was designed to examine this question. A postcard was distributed to households promising that if enough postcards were mailed back, results from a survey module on perceived corruption would be published in the national media. Data from a tailored household survey were used to examine the determinants of this behavioral measure of demand for political accountability (undertaking the costly action of mailing the postcard) and to isolate the positive effect of international emigration using locality-level variation. The estimated effects are robust to the use of instrumental variables, including past migration and macro shocks in the destination countries. The estimated effects can be attributed mainly to migrants who emigrated to countries with better governance, especially migrants who return home.

This paper tests the hypothesis that international migration experiences may promote better institutions at home by raising the demand for political accountability. In order to examine this question, we use a simple postcard voting experiment designed to capture the population's desire for better governance. Using data from a tailored household survey, we examine the determinants of voting behavior in our experiment, and isolate the positive effect of international emigration on the demand for political accountability. We find that this effect can be mainly attributed to the presence of return migrants, particularly to those who emigrated to countries with better governance.

Does emigration really drain human capital accumulation in origin countries? This paper explores a unique household survey purposely designed and conducted to answer this specific question for the case of Cape Verde - the African country with the largest fraction of tertiary educated population living abroad, despite also having a fast-growing stock of human capital. Unlike previous literature, our tailored survey allows us to adjust existing inflated "brain drain" numbers for educational upgrading of emigrants after migration. We do so by combining our survey data on current, return and non-migrants with information from censuses of the destination countries. Our micro data also enables us to propose a novel, explicit test of "brain gain" arguments according to which the possibility of own future emigration positively impacts educational attainment in the origin country. Crucially, the innovative empirical strategy we propose hinges on the ideal characteristics of our survey, namely on full histories of migrants and on a new set of exclusion restrictions to control for unobserved heterogeneity of emigrants. Our results point to a very substantial impact of the brain gainʺ channel on the educational attainment of those left behind. Alternative channels (namely remittances, family disruption, and general equilibrium effects at the local level) are also considered, but these do not seem to play an important role. Overall, we find that there may be substantial human capital gains from allowing free migration and encouraging return migration. -- Brain drain ; brain gain ; brain circulation ; international migration ; human capital ; effects of emigration in origin countries ; household survey ; Cape Verde ; sub-Saharan Africa

Voter education campaigns often aim to increase voter participation and political accountability. Randomized interventions were implemented nationwide during the 2009 Mozambican elections using leaáets, text messaging, and a free newspaper. We study the local peer e§ecs triggered by the campaign. We investigate whether treatment e§ects are transmitted through social networks and geographical proximity at the village level. For individuals personally targeted by the campaign, we estimate the reinforcement e§ect of proximity to other individuals in our sample. For untargeted individuals, we estimate how the campaign di§uses as a function of proximity to others in the sample. We Önd evidence for both e§ects, similar across treatments and proximity measures. The campaign raises the level of interest in the election through networks, in line with the average treatment e§ect. However, we Önd a negative network e§ect of the treatment on voter participation, implying that the positive e§ect of treatment on more central individuals is smaller. We interpret this result as consistent with free-riding through pivotal reasoning and we provide additional evidence to support this claim. ; authorsversion ; published