“What Corruption is Most Harmful? Unbundling Citizen Perspectives” (with Aaron Erlich, Simeon Nichter, and Arne Holverscheid)
Under review
To combat corruption, many countries employ information campaigns aimed at citizens. When designing such campaigns, practitioners often consider citizen perceptions of corruption’s harms, but typically lack data about two key questions. Which forms of corruption do citizens deem especially pernicious? And how do citizens’ perceptions differ when considering distinct types of harms? This article introduces a diagnostic approach to investigate these questions, drawing on a conjoint experiment conducted in collaboration with Armenia’s Corruption Prevention Commission. This approach maps citizen perceptions of corruption’s consequences across four distinct types of harms: economic, political, moral, and personal. It not only identifies forms of corruption viewed as particularly damaging, but also reveals how findings may diverge across harms. For example, our findings suggest that Armenians perceive high-level embezzlement as especially harmful for all four types of harms we examined. By contrast, they deem healthcare corruption to inflict more personal and moral harm — but less economic and political harm — than corruption in other sectors. While citizens’ perceptions of corruption harms are context specific, our approach has broad applicability both for practitioners designing campaigns, and for scholars seeking to conceptualize corruption and its consequences.
“Sharing Accurate News in the Face of Government Repression: A ‘Mega-Study’ in Wartime Russia” (with Julia Minson, Aaron Erlich, Christopher Higgins and 24 other contributors)
Under review
We report the results of two large-scale field experiments examining the effectiveness of email-based communication in the context of Russian information manipulation following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We contacted academics across the behavioral sciences and asked them to produce messages to persuade Russian residents to watch a video about the invasion. In partnership with the non-profit Mail2Ru, we randomly assigned eleven expert messages and two control treatments to approximately 260,000 email addresses. Only one message led to significantly greater engagement with the video relative to the control treatments, with nine messages performing in line with the controls and one underperforming them. We then successfully replicated the effectiveness of our top-performing intervention in a second field experiment. Our work highlights the challenges associated with effective communication in the face of disinformation and government surveillance and highlights the urgent need for experimental research in this area.
“Corruption and Property Rights: Evidence from the Russian Commercial Court System” (with David Szakonyi)
Corruption is often rampant within state bureaucracies and judicial systems, yet we know little about its micro-level consequences on policymaking and the provision of public goods. In this paper, we investigate how corruption shapes property rights protection in one prominent autocracy: Russia. First, we use income and asset disclosures to construct novel individual-level measures of corruption for 366 commercial court judges working in and around Moscow. Then, drawing on data from more than 400,000 court cases heard between 2011-2018, we leverage random assignment of cases to judges to show that corrupt judges are much more likely to find in favor of private firms in their disputes with government agencies. Not only are these decisions of lower judicial quality, but they tend to favor disreputable firms. In contrast to existing studies’ emphasis on political pressure’s impact on Russian court cases, we show that judicial corruption enables firms to capture the state, depriving it of financial resources and undermining the rule of law.
“Wartime Compliance and Consent” (with Timothy Frye and Oleksandra Keudel)
How does war shape citizens’ willingness to pay taxes, engage in military service, and comply with laws? We investigate this question in the context of wartime Ukraine, drawing on experimental games and survey experiments embedded in an ongoing panel survey. In line with classic theories of state building, preliminary analyses based on the first two waves of our survey show that citizens who (1) receive state-provided services and/or (2) believe in their compatriots’ willingness to contribute to the public good are more willing to consent to taxation and conscription and comply with legal decisions. Results concerning threat perception and exposure to violence are more ambiguous. Our unique combination of longitudinal and experimental analyses, along with the collection of data under wartime conditions, promises to offer novel insights into the factors shaping citizen compliance and consent, which in turn are essential prerequisites for building high-capacity states.
“The Effects of International Educational Exchange Programs on Attitudes About the United States, Democracy, and Corruption“
US government-sponsored international educational exchanges are a key tool of public diplomacy. By providing high school or university students from other countries with the opportunity to reside in the U.S., these programs have the potential to favorably shape attitudes about the American people and about democracy more broadly. Additionally, for students from regions with endemic corruption, cross-cultural immersion in an environment where bribery and graft are less common may shift expectations about corruption's inevitability, catalyzing anti-corruption efforts upon return to their home countries. To date, however, empirical evidence about international exchanges' impact on the attitudes of program participants is limited. Leveraging similarities between Eurasian high school students selected for a highly competitive State Department-funded exchange program to spend a year in the U.S. and students who reached the final round of the program's selection process but ultimately were not selected, this paper analyzes the impact of such programs on attitudes toward the U.S., democracy, and corruption. The findings indicate that program participants returned to their home countries with more favorable views of America and of democratic political systems, as well as a greater willingness to engage in efforts to curb corruption.
“The Triple Threat to Property Rights: Credible Commitment Dilemmas, Principal-Agent Problems, and Private Coercion”
Ongoing Data Collection Projects
“War’s Impact on the State, Civil Society, and Democratic Governance: A Panel Survey in Wartime Ukraine” (with Timothy Frye and Oleksandra Keudel)
“The ‘New’ Area Studies: The Role of Regional Expertise in Contemporary Political Science” (with Daniel Gingerich and Tom Pepinsky)