Avidit Acharya

The Political Legacy of American Slavery

We show that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the American South trace their origins to slaverys prevalence more than 150 years ago. Whites who currently live in Southern counties that had high shares of slaves in 1860 are more likely to identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action policies, and express racial resentment and colder feelings toward blacks. These results cannot be explained by existing theories, including the theory of racial threat. To explain these results, we offer evidence for a new theory involving the historical persistence of racial attitudes. We argue that, following the Civil War, Southern whites faced political and economic incentives to reinforce racist norms and institutions. This produced racially conservative political attitudes, which in turn have been passed down locally across generations. Our results challenge the interpretation of a vast literature on racial attitudes in the American South.

Explaining Causal Findings without Bias: Detecting and Assessing Direct Effects

Researchers seeking to establish causal relationships frequently control for variables on the purported causal pathway, checking whether the original treatment effect then disappears. Unfortunately, this common approach may lead to biased estimates. In this article, we show that the bias can be avoided by focusing on a quantity of interest called the controlled direct effect. Under certain conditions, the controlled direct effect enables researchers to rule out competing explanations—an important objective for political scientists. To estimate the controlled direct effect without bias, we describe an easy-to-implement estimation strategy from the biostatistics literature. We extend this approach by deriving a consistent variance estimator and demonstrating how to conduct a sensitivity analysis. Two examples—one on ethnic fractionalization’s effect on civil war and one on the impact of historical plough use on contemporary female political participation—illustrate the framework and methodology.

The Calculus of the Security Dilemma

Some scholars known as offensive realists claim that in the uncertainty of world politics, trust and cooperation between states is extremely unlikely. Others, such as defensive realists , claim that rational states are capable of finding ways to counteract the complications created by misperceptions and distrust, and to reduce uncertainty to levels where it no longer inhibits cooperation. In this paper, we construct a formal model to show how in some situations cooperation between states is indeed very unlikely: even in the presence of minor misperceptions, states fail to cooperate. We then ask whether diplomacy (modeled as cheap talk) is able to remedy the failure. We show that in many situations, allowing the countries to communicate prior to taking their actions does not enable them to cooperate.

Delays and Partial Agreements in Multi-Issue Bargaining

We model a situation in which two players bargain over two issues (pies), one of which can only be resolved at a future date. We find that if the players value the issues asymmetrically (one player considers the existing issue more important than the future one, while the other player has the opposite valuation) then they may delay agreement on the first issue until the second one is finally on the table. If we allow for partial agreements, then the players never leave an issue completely unresolved. They either make a partial agreement on the first issue, and wait for the second one to emerge before completing the agreement; or they come to complete agreements on each of the issues at their earliest possible dates. We discuss applications to legislative bargaining and international trade negotiations.

The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal and the Political Economy of Violence

This paper studies the incidence of political violence associated with the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. I take a cross-sectional approach where the unit of analysis is the district, and dependent variable is total killings by state and Maoists normalized by district population. I find no evidence that political and economic grievances are linked to the incidence of political violence. There is also very little evidence that district prosperity or political ideology are associated with the incidence of violence. On the other hand, I find that the intensity of violence was greatest in the Midwestern districts and in districts with low road density. Historical evidence suggests that the dummy variable for Midwestern districts that appears robust and significant reflects the political entrepreneurship of leftist leaders more than half a century ago. The results support a theory of conflict that treats an insurgency as analogous to a profit maximizing firm.

Explaining Preferences from Behavior: A Cognitive Dissonance Approach

The standard approach in positive political theory posits that action choices are the consequences of preferences. Social psychology—in particular, cognitive dissonance theory—suggests the opposite: preferences may themselves be affected by action choices. We present a framework that applies this idea to three models of political choice: (1) one in which partisanship emerges naturally in a two-party system despite policy being multidimensional, (2) one in which interactions with people who express different views can lead to empathetic changes in political positions, and (3) one in which ethnic or racial hostility increases after acts of violence. These examples demonstrate how incorporating the insights of social psychology can expand the scope of formalization in political science.

Sincere voting in large elections

Austen-Smith and Banks (1996) showed that sincere/informative voting is not typically an equilibrium of the Condorcet voting model when the size of the electorate is large. Here, we reverse their finding by adding a third type of voter—one that receives no information in favor of either of the alternatives—as well as global uncertainty about the probability that each voter is such a “no evidence type.” The expected number of no evidence type voters can be arbitrarily small; nevertheless, if the electorate is large enough, then each of the two standard Condorcet types votes sincerely in every nondegenerate type-symmetric equilibrium.

Information aggregation failure in a model of social mobility

I study a model in which high and low income voters must decide between continuing with a status quo policy or switching to a different policy, which is more redistributive. Under the status quo policy, low income voters may get an opportunity to become high income earners. Such opportunities are expected to arise infrequently, so in expectation these voters prefer the more redistributive policy. Nevertheless, there is an equilibrium in which the vast majority of them cast their ballots in favor of re-electing the less redistributive status quo. Although these voters are fully strategic and correctly assess their chances for upward mobility, they vote exactly as if they are naive voters who over-estimate their chances of becoming rich. As the size of the electorate grows, the status quo policy can be re-elected with certainty, and the election fails to fully aggregate information.

‘Sons of the soil’: A model of assimilation and population control:

We model the cultural outcomes of ‘sons of the soil’ conflicts. These are conflicts between the local inhabitants of a particular region and migrants to the region, typically belonging to a dominant national culture. Our goal is to understand the conditions under which migrants assimilate into the local culture, or in which locals assimilate into the national culture. The model has two main actors: a national elite of a dominant ethnic group, and a regional elite seeking to promote the traditional culture of the sons of the soil. Both actors have parallel strategies, viz. assimilating the other group into their culture, controlling the size of the migrant population, doing both, or allowing market forces to determine outcomes. The model has three possible cultural outcomes: the culture tips to that of the sons of the soil; the culture tips to that of the migrant group; or the region remains bicultural, with each group retaining its own culture. We illustrate these outcomes through four cases: (i) Bengalis and Assamese in the Indian state of Assam; (ii) Russians and Estonians in the Ida-Virumaa county of Estonia; (iii) Tamils and Sinhalese in Jaffna and the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka; and (iv) Castilians and Catalans in the autonomous community of Catalonia in Spain.