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Decisions about how to organize and run an election can shape political participation. Policy choices may distribute election resources unequally, skewing voting outcomes. In low- and middle-income countries where electoral capacity and resources are scarce and decision-making highly centralized, election administration has the potential to shape results on a large scale. In the context of Kenya's August 2017 elections, I study the consequences of a legislated threshold that determines the capacity of polling centers to quickly serve voters by reducing election-day lines. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that turnout is 2.4% lower in congested polling places just below the threshold relative to polling places above the threshold. Relative to other hypothetical thresholds, the chosen threshold benefits the incumbent president, as incumbent strongholds receive more polling resources than opposition areas. The results demonstrate how electoral resource allocation shapes political behavior and election outcomes.

Until the 1990s Kenya had a selective state-financed university system where students bore few educational costs. This limited the number of university students that the government could afford to educate and created fierce competition for university places. In the late 1990s the Kenyan government responded to this crisis in supply by liberalizing the tertiary sector. Barriers to accreditation of private universities were loosened and public universities began to establish parallel, fee-paying programmes, which only required applicants to meet minimum entry requirements, alongside the state-sponsored, selective programmes. By the late 2000s self-financed students accounted for roughly half of university admissions. Consequently, undergraduate enrolment rose sharply, from 33,000 in 1999, to close to 500,000 by 2017. The number of universities increased from a single public university in Nairobi in 1970, to over 50 tertiary institutions nationwide by 2014. [.] We find that horizontal inequalities in university access - between ethnic and religious groups and the sexes - have declined, while vertical, "class", inequality is likely increasing. Using a subsample of University of Nairobi graduates, we argue that parallel degree programmes absorbed a higher share of women and ethnic minorities than through the regular competitive admission stream, but that these students were on average from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. In this sense, the programmes are regressive. However, this should not overshadow the fact that students entering through the regular, meritocratic track are on average from socioeconomically privileged backgrounds too. We also show that intergenerational persistence in university access in Kenya is considerable, and its high level predates the reforms of the 1990s.

Decentralization is thought to facilitate poverty reduction by giving power overresource distribution to officials with local knowledge about where resources are mostneeded. However, decentralization also implies less oversight and greater opportunities for local officials to divert resources for political or personal ends. We investigate this tradeoff by exploring the degree to which Kenya's premier decentralized development program—the Constituency Development Fund—–targets the poor. Using a detailed spatial dataset of 32,000 CDF projects and data on the local distribution of poverty within Kenyan constituencies, we find that most MPs do not target the poor in their distribution of CDF projects. In places where they do, this tends to be in constituencies that are more rural, not too large, and, in keeping with the findings in Harris and Posner (2019), where the poor and non-poor are spatially segregated from one another. These factors all point to the feasibility of poverty-based targeting, rather than, as most of the literature emphasizes, political actors' motivation to pursue such a strategy. In addition to these substantive findings, we also make a methodological contribution by underscoring how aggregation to the administrative unit may truncate important variation within geographic areas, and how a point-level analysis may avoid these pitfalls.

We leverage innovative spatial modeling techniques and data on the precise geo-locations of more than 32,000 Constituency Development Fund (CDF) projects in Kenya to test whether Members of Parliament (MPs) reward their supporters. We find only weak evidence that MPs channel projects disproportionately to areas inhabited by their political allies, once we control for other factors that affect where projects are placed, such as population density, poverty rates, ethnic demographics, and distance to paved roads. Notwithstanding this result, we find evidence for cross-constituency variation in political targeting, driven in large part by the spatial segregation of the MP's supporters and opponents. Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom about the centrality of clientelistic transfers in Africa and underscore how local conditions generate particular incentives and opportunities for the strategic allocation of political goods. We also highlight the benefits and challenges of analyzing allocations at the project level rather than aggregated to the administrative unit.

We leverage innovative spatial modeling techniques and data on the precise geo-locations of more than 32,000 Constituency Development Fund (CDF) projects in Kenya to test whether Members of Parliament (MPs) reward their supporters. We find only weak evidence that MPs channel projects disproportionately to areas inhabited by their political allies, once we control for other factors that affect where projects are placed, such as population density, poverty rates, ethnic demographics, and distance to paved roads. Notwithstanding this result, we find evidence for cross-constituency variation in political targeting, driven in large part by the spatial segregation of the MP's supporters and opponents. Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom about the centrality of clientelistic transfers in Africa and underscore how local conditions generate particular incentives and opportunities for the strategic allocation of political goods. We also highlight the benefits and challenges of analyzing allocations at the project level rather than aggregated to the administrative unit.

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.

Understanding sources of judicial bias is essential for establishing due process. To date, theories of judicial decision making are rooted in ranked societies with majority–minority group cleavages, leaving unanswered which groups are more prone to express bias and whether it is motivated by in-group favoritism or out-group hostility. We examine judicial bias in Kenya, a diverse society that features a more complex ethnic landscape. While research in comparative and African politics emphasizes instrumental motivations underpinning ethnic identity, we examine the psychological, implicit biases driving judicial outcomes. Using data from Kenyan criminal appeals and the conditional random assignment of judges to cases, we show that judges are 3 to 5 percentage points more likely to grant coethnic appeals than non-coethnic appeals. To understand mechanisms, we use word embeddings to analyze the sentiment of written judgments. Judges use more trust-related terms writing for coethnics, suggesting that in-group favoritism motivates coethnic bias in this context.