A Heavy Hand or a Helping Hand? Information Provision and Citizen Preferences for Anti-Crime Policies

Abstract

Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC-IGO license. Following a peer review process, and with previous written consent by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a revised version of this work may also be reproduced in any academic journal, including those indexed by the American Economic Association's EconLit, provided that the IDB is credited and that the author(s) receive no income from the publication. Therefore, the restriction to receive income from such publication shall only extend to the publication's author(s). With regard to such restriction, in case of any inconsistency between the Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license and these statements, the latter shall prevail. Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Inter-American Development Bank, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent.

Transparency and Trust in Government: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

“…Gingerich and Scartascini (2018) show that because rationally ignorant individuals do not validate the accuracy of any new information they (passively) receive they are not necessarily able to separate the signal from the noise: their policy preferences are as likely to be driven by bad information as by good. This state of affairs leaves them highly vulnerable to the machinations of political entrepreneurs and other elites.…”

Do you have COVID-19? How to increase the use of diagnostic and contact tracing apps

“…We cannot precisely estimate age in our sample because respondents were asked to select an age bracket. Our median respondent is in the category [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] and the median Mexican person is 29 years old. However, older individuals appear to be underrepresented in our sample, as 15% of the population is 55 years or older, in comparison with about 10% in our sample (by design, we do not sample minors) (Mexican census and demographic data are available from INEGI at https:// www.inegi.org.mx/).…”

“…Still, focusing too much on data privacy in the public discourse, even if that is in fact the main concern preventing people from downloading and using these apps, may backfire. There is evidence, for example, that mentioning crime, even in the context of decreasing trends can provoke a 'knee-jerk' reaction that focuses people's mind on the existence of crime instead of focusing on the trend [31]. One of the potential mechanisms behind this effect may be 'priming': subtle cues in the environment may have significant, reliable effects on behavior [32].…”

How Can We Improve Air Pollution?: Try Increasing Trust First

“…Third, due to methodological improvements, our survey was particularly well-designed for capturing policy preferences (Gingerich and Scartascini, 2018). We measured preferences for the distribution of revenue to the government or citizens and for spending on public goods or private goods using a procedure that replicated real-life budget trade-offs.…”