Reducing or Reinforcing In-Group Preferences? An Experiment on Information and Ethnic Voting

Adida, Claire L.; Gottlieb, Jessica; Kramon, Eric; McClendon, Gwyneth

doi:10.1561/100.00017018

Cited by 77 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For example, if one variable is an important feature driving effects in one study, then this can be tested systematically using data from other studies. While there is evidence from one of our experiments that coethnicity moderates the effect of information ( 30 ), overall we do not find that effects vary as a function of coethnic, copartisan, or clientelistic relationships between voters and individual candidates (table S15). We also explored whether local contextual factors, such as the extent of electoral competition, condition the impact of the treatments, but find no evidence that they do (tables S16 and S17).…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 68%

Voter information campaigns and political accountability: Cumulative findings from a preregistered meta-analysis of coordinated trials

et al. 2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives’ performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.

show abstract

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 68%

Voter information campaigns and political accountability: Cumulative findings from a preregistered meta-analysis of coordinated trials

et al. 2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…If leaders do update their decisions in light of new information, under what conditions are they more likely to more likely to do so? Recent literature stresses the importance of priors in understanding the effects of information (Adida et al, 2017;Arias et al, 2018;Dunning et al, 2019).…”

Section: When Will Party Leaders Update Their Nomination Decisions?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Information, Candidate Selection, and the Quality of Representation: Evidence from Nepal

Gulzar

Hai

Paudel

2021

The Journal of Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How do we improve the quality of representation in new democracies? This paper studies candidate selection by party leaders and asks whether poor information about public preferences can lead elite choices to diverge from mass opinion. Working with a political party in Nepal, we show that while elites value voter preferences, these preferences only explain onethird of elite candidate selection. Next, we embed an experiment in actual candidate selection deliberations for this party and find that party leaders not only select different candidates when polling data are presented to them, but that their updated decisions also improve the party's vote share. By opening the black-box of candidate selection, this paper demonstrates that closing the information gap between elites and voters has the power to improve the quality of representation.

show abstract

“…In sum, we expect that shared interests increase the level of cooperation between politicians from different ethnic groups. 3 But see Adida et al (2017) for a criticism; this study argues that due to ethnically motivated reasoning, performance information will actually enhance and not diminish ethnic voting. 4 Habyarimana et al (2007), studying a group of citizens in Uganda, find that preferences do not correlate with ethnicity and conclude that the level of ethnic bias cannot be driven by shared preferences.…”

Section: Shared Interests and Cooperation: Theoretical Argumentmentioning

confidence: 82%

Shared interests foster interethnic cooperation among politicians

Butler

Tavits

2020

PSRM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Ethnic relations play an important political role in many countries and can have serious consequences for policy and stability, with many conflicts occurring along ethnic lines. While most studies on ethnic relations focus on the behavior of the general public, ethnic bias among political elites may be equally consequential but remains understudied. This study explores tools that improve interethnic cooperation among politicians in governance (rather than electoral competition). We argue that shared interests incentivize elites to overcome ethnic bias. We conduct two experiments (one survey and one lab-in-the-field) with local politicians in Bosnia and Herzegovina and find support for this expectation, i.e., concrete information about shared policy priorities and goals foster interethnic cooperation.

show abstract

Reducing or Reinforcing In-Group Preferences? An Experiment on Information and Ethnic Voting

Cited by 77 publications

References 1 publication

Voter information campaigns and political accountability: Cumulative findings from a preregistered meta-analysis of coordinated trials

Voter information campaigns and political accountability: Cumulative findings from a preregistered meta-analysis of coordinated trials

Information, Candidate Selection, and the Quality of Representation: Evidence from Nepal

Shared interests foster interethnic cooperation among politicians

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About