Research

In his seminal work on the political economy of dictatorship, Ronald Wintrobe posited the existence of a “dictator's dilemma,” in which repression leaves an autocrat less secure by reducing information about discontent. We explore the nature and resolution of this dilemma with a formalization that builds on recent work in the political economy of non-democracy. When the regime is sufficiently repressive, and the dictator's popularity correspondingly unclear to opposition as well as autocrat, the ruler faces two unattractive options: He can mobilize the repressive apparatus, even though there may be no threat to his rule, or he can refrain from mobilizing, even though the danger may be real. Semi-competitive elections can ease the dilemma through the controlled revelation of discontent. Paradoxically, the manipulation of information through such non-repressive means can allow for more rather than less repression. 

How do people deal with events they cannot control? Religious beliefs and practices are common responses to uncontrollable situations. We analyzed the responses of Singaporeans surveyed between November 2019 and March 2020—just before and just after Covid-19 hit the region—to understand how the beliefs and actions of both religious and non-religious people were affected by the emergence of the previously unknown virus. We find that after the emergence of Covid-19, religious respondents reported significantly higher levels of belief and service attendance frequency, while prayer frequency was not affected. We argue that the decrease in perceived controllability over people's lives explains these results. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding the dynamics of religious beliefs and practices during times of uncertainty. 

Using a pivotal costly voting model of elections, we study how participation quorum requirements affect voters’ decisions to cast votes, and how they ultimately impact voter and candidate welfare. We solve the model analytically for the case of three voters and then provide numerical solutions for larger numbers of voters, and obtain several consistent results. First, we find that the effect of quorum requirements on voter turnout is non-monotonic and depends on ex-ante support for the candidates. When support for the status-quo is low, a stricter quorum requirement results in higher turnout, while when it is high, the relationship is reversed. Second, we show that a stricter quorum requirement does not necessarily benefit a status quo candidate and can sometimes decrease her chances of winning an election. Third, we characterize optimal quorum requirements from the perspective of voter welfare, and find that, while optimal requirements vary with support for the candidates, too strict and too lenient requirements can be very harmful to voter welfare. Therefore, setting moderate quorum requirements close to half of the number of voters or setting no quorum requirement at all may be reasonable choices. 

Using a pivotal costly voting model of elections in which voters privately have formed preferences over two candidates and act sequentially, I study how different rules for disclosing information about the actions of early voters affect the actions of later voters, and how they ultimately affect voters’ and candidates’ welfare. Comparing three rules observed in real-life elections (no information disclosure, turnout disclosure and vote count disclosure), I find that vote count disclosure dominates the other two rules in terms of both voter welfare and the ex-ante likelihood of electing the candidate preferred by the majority. I show further that each of the rules can provide a candidate with either a greater or lesser chance of winning, depending on the levels of ex-ante support for the candidates. The findings may be useful for designing optimal voting procedures, particularly in settings with small numbers of voters.

Understanding how Public Service Motivation (PSM) is tied to ethical or unethical conduct is critically important, given that civil servants and other public-sector employees throughout the world have been shown to exhibit high PSM levels. However, empirical evidence about the relationship between PSM and ethical or unethical behavior remains limited, due in part to the challenges of observing unethical conduct and overcoming social desirability bias in self-reported measures. We address these challenges by employing incentivized experimental games to study the relationships between PSM and two types of unethical behavior—corruption and dishonesty—as well as one type of ethical behavior: altruism. Based on data from approximately 1,870 university students at three research sites in Russia and Ukraine, we find evidence of a robust negative association between PSM and willingness to engage in corruption and a positive association between PSM and altruistic behavior. Results concerning dishonesty are more mixed. Our findings indicate that corruption and dishonesty are related yet fundamentally distinct concepts, particularly with respect to their compatibility with PSM. The findings additionally demonstrate that hypotheses about PSM and behavioral ethics generated in the Western context generalize well to the starkly different institutional context of the former Soviet Union.

Numerous studies have shown that public service motivation (PSM) is higher among public sector employees, particularly in western countries. But whether these trends result from high-PSM individuals selecting into public sector employment or from on-the-job socialization remains subject to debate. We address this question utilizing novel panel data on Russian university students. Examining the relationships between PSM and sectoral employment both before and after students enter the labor force, we find that: (1) high-PSM students are more likely to prefer public sector employment; (2) high-PSM students are more likely to be employed in the public sector following graduation; and (3) PSM increases upon entry into the workplace at approximately the same rate in both the public and private sectors. These findings suggest that at least during early career stages, the association between PSM and public sector employment results largely from an attraction-selection process, rather than a socialization process. Our analyses additionally provide evidence that theories of PSM based on the western experience may generalize to the context of developing or post-communist countries, despite the prevalence of corruption and a less pronounced public service ethos in many of these countries.

Drawing on experimental games and surveys conducted with students at two universities in Russia, we compare the behavioral, attitudinal, and demographic traits of students seeking public sector employment to the traits of their peers seeking jobs in the private sector. Contrary to similar studies conducted in other high-corruption contexts, such as India, we find evidence that students who prefer a public sector career display less willingness to cheat or bribe in experimental games as well as higher levels of altruism. However, disaggregating public sector career paths reveals distinctions between the federal civil service and other types of public sector employment, with federal government positions attracting students who exhibit some similarities with their peers aspiring to private sector careers. We discuss multiple interpretations consistent with our findings, each of which has implications for the creation of effective anti-corruption policies and for understanding of state capacity in contexts where corruption is widespread.

Under the system of presidential appointments of regional governors, which existed in Russia from 2005 to 2012, gubernatorial loyalty to the central government and particularly governors’ ability to deliver satisfactory results to the ruling party in national-level elections were crucial to their likelihood of being reappointed to the next term. In this paper, we argue that governors, anticipating the relationship between loyalty and reappointments, attempted to deliver additional votes to the ruling party, and show that those attempts were subject to regional political cycles. Exploiting variation in the starting and expiry dates of Russian regional governors’ terms of office, we find that the winning margins for a pro-government party across Russian regions in national-level elections held between 2007 and 2012 were substantially higher when elections were closer to the beginning or to the expiration of a regional governor’s term. The effect is driven almost exclusively by the governors serving their first terms. However, for elections held between 1999 and 2004, when governors were subject to direct votes by regional constituencies, no similar effect is found. The results can be explained by, e.g., first impression and recency biases in appointment decisions. We then implement several exercises to identify the sources of the additional votes for the ruling party and demonstrate that governors, while unlikely committing electoral fraud, likely exerted effort to stimulate turnout among ruling party supporters.

It has been established that opportunistic incumbent politicians, both elected and appointed, adjust public policies in systematic ways over political cycles. We show that the corrupt behavior of appointed politicians also follows certain patterns which are driven by political cycles. Based on BEEPS data, exploiting variation in the dates of surveys and in the starting dates of Russian regional governors' terms of office, we find that corruption levels, as perceived by firms operating in different regions of Russia, are higher closer to the end of a regional governor's term. We argue that such a pattern cannot be explained by standard political budget cycle reasoning, but rather that the observed pattern may be generated by governors' accumulation of private information about their likelihood of remaining in office for another term. When a governor gradually learns that he will not be re-appointed once his current term has expired, he has increasing incentives to engage in corrupt activities in order to accumulate wealth before his departure. Alternatively, when a governor becomes more certain that he will remain in office, he may have higher incentives to smooth rent extraction over time and thus not to increase it. We test this explanation in several ways and consistently find supporting evidence.

I analyze a costly voting model of elections, in which the incumbent can stuff the ballot box, to investigate how electoral fraud affects the decisions of voters to participate. I find that two stable equilibria may exist: an abstention equilibrium, where none of the voters vote and the incumbent always wins, and a more efficient coordination equilibrium, where a substantial share of a challenger's supporters vote and the candidate preferred by the majority is likely to win. I further show that, because the higher capability of the incumbent to stuff a ballot box discourages the participation of his own supporters and creates coordination incentives for the challenger's supporters, higher fraud does not always benefit the incumbent, even when costless. The model may help to explain two empirical observations related to fraudulent elections: a positive relationship between fraud and the margin of victory and a negative impact of fraud on voter turnout.