Guy Grossman

Centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority promote cooperation in humans

Social sanctioning is widely considered a successful strategy to promote cooperation among humans. In situations in which individual and collective interests are at odds, incentives to free-ride induce individuals to refrain from contributing to public goods provision. Experimental evidence from public goods games shows that when endowed with sanctioning powers, conditional cooperators can discipline defectors, thus leading to greater levels of cooperation. However, extant evidence is based on peer punishment institutions, whereas in complex societies, systems of control are often centralized: for instance, we do not sanction our neighbors for driving too fast, the police do. Here we show the effect of centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority on cooperation. We designed an adaptation of the public goods game in which sanctioning power is given to a single monitor, and we experimentally manipulated the process by which the monitor is chosen. To increase the external validity of the study, we conducted lab-in-the-field experiments involving 1,543 Ugandan farmers from 50 producer cooperatives. This research provides evidence of the effectiveness of centralized sanctioning and demonstrates the causal effect of legitimacy on cooperation: participants are more responsive to the authority of an elected monitor than a randomly chosen monitor. Our essay contributes to the literature on the evolution of cooperation by introducing the idea of role differentiation. In complex societies, cooperative behavior is not only sustained by mechanisms of selection and reciprocity among peers, but also by the legitimacy that certain actors derive from their position in the social hierarchy.

Administrative Unit Proliferation

Numerous developing countries have substantially increased their number of subnational administrative units in recent years. The literature on this phenomenon is, nonetheless, small and suffers from several theoretical and methodological shortcomings: in particular, a unit of analysis problem that causes past studies to mistakenly de-emphasize the importance of local actors. We posit that administrative unit proliferation occurs where and when there is a confluence of interests between the national executive and local citizens and elites from areas that are politically, economically, and ethnically marginalized. We argue further that although the proliferation of administrative units often accompanies or follows far-reaching decentralization reforms, it likely results in a recentralization of power; the proliferation of new local governments fragments existing units into smaller ones with lower relative intergovernmental bargaining power and administrative capacity. We find support for these arguments using original data from Uganda.

I wld like u WMP to extend electricity 2 our village: On Information Technology and Interest Articulation

How does access to information communication technology (ICT) affect who gets heard and what gets communicated to politicians? On the one hand, ICT can lower communication costs for poorer constituents; on the other, technological channels may be used disproportionately more by the already well connected. To assess the flattening effects of ICTs, we presented a representative sample of constituents in Uganda with an opportunity to send a text message to their representatives at one of three randomly assigned prices. Critically, and contrary to concerns that technological innovations benefit the privileged, we find evidence that ICT can lead to significant flattening: a greater share of marginalized populations use this channel compared to existing political communication channels. Price plays a more complex role. Subsidizing the full cost of messaging increases uptake by over 40%. Surprisingly however, subsidy-induced increases in uptake do not yield further flattening since free channels are not used at higher rates by more marginalized constituents.

The Political Legacies of Combat: Attitudes Toward War and Peace Among Israeli Ex-Combatants

Does combat experience foster hardliner approaches to conflict, diminishing the likelihood of reconciliation? We exploit the assignment of health rankings determining combat eligibility in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to examine the effect of combat exposure on support for peaceful resolution of conflict. Given the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to global affairs, and with no resolution to the conflict currently in sight, the question of the political consequences of combat becomes all the more pressing. We find that exposure to combat hardens attitudes towards the rival and reduces support for negotiation and compromise. Importantly, these attitudes translate directly into voting behavior, such that combatants are more likely to vote for hardliner parties. These findings cast doubt on research highlighting the benign effects of combat and underscore the importance of combatant reintegration for the transition from conflict to peace.

Deliberate disengagement: How education decreases political participation in electoral authoritarian regimes

A large literature examining advanced and consolidating democracies suggests that education increases political participation. However, in electoral authoritarian regimes, educated voters may instead deliberately disengage. If education increases critical capacities, political awareness, and support for democracy, educated citizens may believe that participation is futile or legitimizes autocrats. We test this argument in Zimbabwe—a paradigmatic electoral authoritarian regime—by exploiting cross-cohort variation in access to education following a major educational reform. We find that education decreases political participation, substantially reducing the likelihood that better-educated citizens vote, contact politicians, or attend community meetings. Consistent with deliberate disengagement, education’s negative effect on participation dissipated following 2008’s more competitive election, which (temporarily) initiated unprecedented power sharing. Supporting the mechanisms underpinning our hypothesis, educated citizens experience better economic outcomes, are more interested in politics, and are more supportive of democracy, but are also more likely to criticize the government and support opposition parties.

Do Better Monitoring Institutions Increase Leadership Quality in Community Organizations? Evidence from Uganda.

We offer a framework for analyzing the impact of monitoring --- a commonly recommended solution to poor leadership --- on the quality of democratically elected leaders in community organizations in low-income countries. In our model, groups may face a trade-off between leader ability and effort. If the groups ability to monitor the leader is low, then the leader may exert too little effort. A higher level of monitoring increases leader effort, raising the value of the public good. However, more intense monitoring may also drive higher ability members to opt-out of candidacy, reducing public goods value. The result is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the level of monitoring and the value of the public good. The trade-off between leader effort and ability, however, only exists in the presence of sufficient private income opportunities. These predictions are assessed using original data gathered from Ugandan farmer associations.

Government Fragmentation and Public Goods Provision

We investigate the effects of territorial government fragmentation on the quality of public services. We argue that an increase in the number of regional governments has two effects: (1) it redistributes fiscal and administrative resources to underserved regions and (2) encourages yardstick competition. Extreme government fragmentation, however, limits efficiency gains by reducing administrative capacity, economies of scale, and enabling capture. We test this argument using original data on the number of regional governments in sub-Saharan Africa (1960–2012). Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we find robust evidence for an initial increase in the quality of services provision following regional government splits, which levels off at high levels of regional fragmentation. Three distinct difference-in-difference analyses of microlevel, georeferenced data on health outcomes in Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda further support our theoretical argument.

Courage to Refuse

In January 2002, a group of 51 Israeli reserve combat officers and soldiers published a “combatant letter” to the Israeli public declaring, “We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate an entire people.” This act, later known as the Courage to Refuse movement, was nothing less than a political and social earthquake, shaking up the dormant Israeli public and apathetic media, as well as bringing unprecedented public attention to the issue of the occupation. In a 2004 interview with Haaretz, Dov Weisglas, senior adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, pointed to the clamorous refusal movement as one of the main factors pushing Sharon toward determinate actions. According to Weisglas, the emergence of the refusal movement (together with the Geneva initiative and the economic recession) made Sharon understand the necessity of meaningful concessions in order to secure the unity of Israeli society.

How Sanctions Affect Public Opinion in Target Countries: Experimental Evidence From Israel

How do economic sanctions affect the political attitudes of individuals in targeted countries? Do they reduce or increase support for policy change? Are targeted, “smart” sanctions more effective in generating public support? Despite the importance of these questions for understanding the effectiveness of sanctions, they have received little systematic attention. We address them drawing on original data from Israel, where the threat of economic sanctions has sparked a contentious policy debate. We first examine the political effects of the European Union’s (EU) 2015 decision to label goods produced in the West Bank, and then expand our analysis by employing a survey experiment that allows us to test the differential impact of sanction type and sender identity. We find that the EU’s decision produced a backlash effect, increasing support for hardline policies and raising hostility toward Europe. Our findings further reveal that individuals are likely to support concessions only in the most extreme and unlikely of circumstances—a comprehensive boycott imposed by a sender perceived as a key strategic ally. These results offer theoretical and policy implications for the study of the effects of economic sanctions.

Social Networks, Social Context, and Political Participation: Evidence from Uganda

Citizens often mirror the behavior of their peers, but our understanding of the dynamics of this influence is limited. For example, in what settings does the choice of one person to vote cascade through a community and lead to high voter turnout? Despite substantial theoretical inroads into this question, direct empirical tests remain scarce. Using data on the social networks of 15 villages in rural Uganda, this paper develops theoretical predictions about expected cross-village variation in turnout based on the network structure of each village, and demonstrates that these predictions are tightly linked with actual turnout in low-salience local elections with limited media attention, though not in high-salience presidential elections. These results provide the first direct empirical validation of “social context” theory, and introduce a finding of importance for future empirical network research: the salience of social networks may be conditional on the information environment.