Research
Research
In the field. [Funding: ICTD; IGC; ESRC]
Working Within Norms to Change Gender Attitudes: Evidence from Community Policing in a Segregated Setting
Revise and Resubmit from: American Journal of Political Science
Are police officers' attitudes towards gender based violence malleable to change? How might such change occur in highly gender-unequal contexts? We study a community policing intervention in Pakistan which accommodates norms of physical segregation in public settings through creating separate spaces for women, yet challenges occupational segregation within the police force through the creation of integrated policing teams. Drawing on a field experiment and qualitative interviews, we find that when separate spaces exist, women attend community forums in large numbers and raise distinctive concerns around gender-based violence. This directly shapes the perceptions and priorities of the female officers who conduct these forums. Moreover, the effects spillover to male police officers, who continue to see GBV as a ``high priority'' issue a year after the intervention ends. Our findings demonstrate the potential to generate durable change in front-line bureaucrats' attitudes towards gendered issues by working around norms of gender segregation.
[Paper] [Pre-Analysis Plan: AEA Registry] [Funding: JPAL-CVI]
Journal Articles
Community policing does not build citizen trust in police or reduce crime in the Global South
High-profile instances of police brutality in the last few years have brought attention to patterns of abuse that have existed since the inception of modern policing. There have been many calls for police reform, a process that in many countries has taken the form of increased police engagement with communities. This meta-analysis reports the results of a large-scale experiment testing this approach's effectiveness across six Southern Hemisphere countries. The meta-analysis found that such community engagement did not increase trust in the police, and it did not reduce crime. Improving relationships between police and the community may require more profound structural changes before or in addition to approaches such as community policing.
I led the implementation and analysis for Pakistan, one of the six countries chosen as a study site.
[Paper] [Funding: JPAL-CVI, EGAP]
COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance and Hesitancy in Low and Middle-Income Countries, and Implications for Messaging
Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic. Yet, few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering ten low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America, Russia (an upper-middle-income country) and the United States, including 44,260 individuals. We find considerably higher willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine in our LMIC samples (mean 80.3%; median 78%; range 30.1 percentage points) compared with the United States (mean 64.6%) and Russia (mean 30.4%). Vaccine acceptance in LMICs is primarily explained by an interest in personal protection against COVID-19, while concern about side effects is the most common reason for hesitancy. Health workers are the most trusted sources of guidance about COVID-19 vaccines. Evidence from this sample of LMICs suggests that prioritizing vaccine distribution to the Global South should yield high returns in advancing global immunization coverage. Vaccination campaigns should focus on translating the high levels of stated acceptance into actual uptake. Messages highlighting vaccine efficacy and safety, delivered by healthcare workers, could effectively address any remaining hesitancy in the analyzed LMICs.
I led the data collection, cleaning and analysis for the experimental dataset on the economic impacts of COVID-19 covering two districts of Punjab, Pakistan.
[Paper] [Funding: JPAL-CVI COVID-19]
Book Chapter
Community Policing and Citizen Trust in Pakistan in Crime, insecurity, and community policing: Experiments on building trust
Forthcoming: Cambridge University Press
What is the effect of community policing in settings where trust in the police is low and local legal institutions make witness cooperation unusually critical for certain kinds of offences? We study the effect of a citizen-centric problem-oriented policing (CPOP) intervention introduced in March 2019 in Punjab's Sheikhupura Region, a mixed urban-rural region of 4.9M people. Treatment roll-out in Pakistan was significantly hampered by frequent transfers of the regional and district police officers, reflecting the challenges of implementing institutional reforms where the police face frequent personnel changes. Despite these challenges, the intervention, which included regular town hall meetings at which citizens could share their concerns, led to significant increases in overall perceptions about the police and in citizen beliefs that police have good intentions concerning addressing crime. Despite the favourable institutional environment for increased trust to reduce crime, we find no evidence of downstream impacts of the program on self-reported crime victimization or crime reported to the police. Observational evidence from follow-up visits suggests that this was because of resource and institutional challenges that limited community police officers' agency and prevented them from responding to community concerns.
[Pre-Analysis Plan: AEA Registry] [Funding: EGAP]