Can crime victimization increase support for iron-fist crime-reduction policies? It is difficult to assess the political effects of crime, mainly because of the presence of unmeasured confounders. This study uses panel data from Brazil and strategies for reducing sensitivity to hidden biases to study how crime victims update their policy preferences. It also examines survey data from eighteen Latin American countries to improve the external validity of the findings. The results show that crime victims are more likely to support iron-fist or strong-arm measures to reduce crime, such as allowing state repression. Affected citizens are also found to value democracy less, which might explain their willingness to accept the erosion of basic rights in favor of radical measures to combat delinquency. These findings reveal that exposure to crime can change what people think the state should be allowed to do, which can have important political implications.

A common problem encountered in observational studies is limited overlap in covariate distributions across treatment groups. To address this problem, and avoid strong modeling assumptions, it has become common practice to restrict analyses to the portions of the treatment groups that overlap or, ultimately, are balanced in their covariate distributions. Often, this is done by matching on the estimated propensity score or coarsened versions of the observed covariates. A recent alternative methodology that, in a sense, encompasses these two approaches is cardinality matching. Cardinality matching is a flexible matching method that uses integer programming to find the largest matched sample that is balanced according to criteria specified before matching by the investigator. In this paper, we apply and illustrate the method of cardinality matching and show how to use it to directly balance several features of the covariates, including their trajectories in time and their distributions, without requiring exact matching. We demonstrate how cardinality matching addresses the problem of limited overlap using the original covariates, as opposed to a summarized or coarsened version of them. We discuss how this method can be extended to build matched samples that are not only balanced but also representative of a target population by design. We also show how this method enhances sensitivity analyses for hidden biases. We explain these advancements through an observational study of the electoral impact of the 2010 earthquake in Chile.

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Do economic perceptions affect voters’ electoral choices? There is ample evidence showing a correlation between how people perceive the current state of the economy and electoral decisions. However, there are reasons to believe that political preferences can also determine how voters evaluate economic conditions, which will reverse the causality arrow. The strategies previously implemented to address this problem have been based on the use of structural equations and instrumental variables, but they require very strong parametric or identification assumptions. In this paper, I follow a design-based approach by emphasizing the study design rather than statistical modeling. In contrast to previous studies that used the same panel data in Brazil, I find evidence that supports egotropic, rather than sociotropic, voting. This finding shows that traditional research designs may be overstating the magnitude of sociotropic economic voting.

In many elections around the world, voters choose between politicians who differ not only in personal background and policy promises, but also in their history of dishonest electoral conduct. While recent literature has begun to investigate the conditions under which voters punish electoral malfeasance, we know relatively little about whether they penalize different forms of illicit activities carried out by politicians differently. In this paper, we present the results of a candidate choice experiment embedded in a survey fielded prior to the 2016 Romanian local election. We asked voters to choose between two hypothetical candidates, randomly varying several attributes, including different illicit electoral activities. We find that citizens tolerate some forms of political malfeasance less than others depending on how much that malfeasance infringes on voters' autonomy. Informational campaigns carried out by prosecutorial agencies also affect how much voters punish different illicit exchanges.

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Do men and women exhibit different attitudes and behaviors toward COVID-19 public health measures? Is there a gender gap in support for and compliance with government recommendations during a public health crisis? While the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on women suggests that they would oppose burdensome quarantine measures, theories of gender differences in prosocial and communion attitudes indicate that women should be more likely to conform with public health measures designed to protect the most vulnerable. We test hypotheses about a gender gap in attitudes toward public health recommendations through an original, nationally representative survey implemented in Peru, one of the countries hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic, and the construction of a representative matched sample that allows us to make comparisons between women and men. We find that women are more likely than men to endorse lockdown measures and to support the continuation of a nationwide quarantine. We also find evidence of a gender gap in compliance with public health recommendations about avoiding crowded areas and social gatherings. Our findings have important policy implications. The results suggest that public health recommendations to fight COVID-19 should be framed in a way that maximizes compliance by both men and women.

91revista de ciencia pOLítica / vOLumen 31 / nº 1 / 2011 / 91 -115 * el autor agradece especialmente a david altman, sergio toro, valeria palanza y a los dos referís anónimos por las valiosísimas observaciones y sugerencias a esta investigación. además, a maría Jimena cosso y micaela Lobos por sus comentarios en los aspectos formales del artículo. Los errores u omisiones son de exclusiva responsabilidad del autor.