Abstract

Research shows that bureaucrats' performance is shaped by their personal traits, such as public service motivation, cognitive ability, grit, and "big five" personality. What impact do these traits have on citizen assessments of service delivery and governance? To test this question, we randomly assigned police officers to villages during a community-oriented policing program in the Philippines. This program involved meetings between police officers and community leaders, citizens who serve as key conduits between the population and the state. We find that community leaders' assessments of individual officers were meaningfully affected by officers' personal traits, but those traits matter less for assessments of broader institutional efficacy. These findings suggest that bureaucrats' traits can improve public service provision by shaping how citizens approach encounters with specific government representatives. However, they place limits on the suggestion that exceptionally positive (or exceptionally negative) bureaucrats can shape attitudes towards state institutions more generally.

Winner, APSA Southeast Asian Politics Group Best Paper Award

Abstract

In contrast to the expansive work on how community policing affects citizens' attitudes towards police, existing research says little about how community policing affects officers' attitudes towards citizens. We examine officer-facing outcomes using an experiment in the Philippines, in which a random subset of a province's 705 officers were assigned to intensive community policing activities for seven months. Treatment officers saw improved understanding of citizen concerns, but did not develop greater empathy or trust towards civilians, nor an increased sense of accountability for citizen-facing misconduct. We build from the experiment to develop an inductive theory of bureaucrat-citizen contact, relying on qualitative observations and exploratory analyses of heterogeneous effects. We propose that contact with citizens is only likely to improve attitudes among frontline bureaucrats who are not ex-ante embedded in their communities. Moreover, contact may have negative effects when it reveals threats to bureaucrats' personal safety.

Abstract

Effective public goods provision requires co-production by both citizens and the government. Search costs which impede citizens’ abilities to share information constitute a critical and understudied impediment to this co-production. We experimentally evaluate search costs in a rural, conflict-affected province of the Philippines. We randomize the rollout of a police hotline which dramatically reduces the costs of reporting, and compare it against both the status quo and an alternative intervention which builds trust but does not affect search costs. The hotline increased the likelihood of reporting crimes by 10–19 percentage points. The intervention reduced perceived insurgent activity but had no perceptible impact on ordinary crime. Our findings suggest that addressing search costs substantially impede service delivery, potentially explaining why policies imported from higher-capacity countries may fail to achieve results in developing contexts.

Abstract

Although canonical models of clientelism argue that brokers use dense social networks to monitor and enforce vote buying, recent evidence suggests that brokers can instead target intrinsically reciprocal voters and reduce the need for active monitoring and enforcement. Combining a trove of survey data on brokers and voters in the Philippines with an experiment-based measure of reciprocity, and relying on local naming conventions to build social networks, we demonstrate that brokers employ both strategies conditional on the underlying social network structure. We show that brokers are chosen for their central position in networks and are knowledgeable about voters, including their reciprocity levels. We then show that, where village social networks are dense, brokers prefer to target voters that have many ties in the network because their votes are easiest to monitor. Where networks are sparse, brokers target intrinsically reciprocal voters whose behavior they need not monitor.

Winner, APSA Southeast Asian Politics Group Best Paper Award

Abstract

Around the world, populists have won elections on the strength of crowd-pleasing but norm-defying policy proposals. Although effective at mobilizing support at election time, these policies are often difficult to implement because populists lack allies throughout the political system. Examining President Rodrigo Duterte's brutal "War on Drugs" in the Philippines, we find that mayors excluded from establishment patronage networks filled a critical implementation gap for the Duterte administration. Employing regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences approaches, we show that outsider mayors received 40 percent lower public works appropriations and, in turn, executed Duterte's drug war more aggressively. Outsider-led municipalities had 40 percent more anti-drug incidents and 60 percent more extra-judicial killings by police. The results illustrate a trade-off between patronage politics and corruption (politics-as-usual) and violent democratic backsliding.

Abstract

Citizen information sharing is crucial to a government's ability to respond to an outbreak of a pandemic disease such as COVID-19. In conflict zones, however, citizens and local leaders often lack trust in state institutions and are unwilling to cooperate, risking costly delays and information gaps. We report results from a randomized experiment in the Philippines regarding government efforts to provide services and build trust with rural communities in a conflict-affected region. We find that the outreach program increased by 20% the probability that local leaders provide time-sensitive risk information critical to the regional Covid Task Force. The effect is driven by leaders who at baseline were skeptical about government capacity and fairness, as well as neutral or positive attitudes towards rebels. These findings highlight the important role that government efforts to build connections with conflict-impacted communities can play in determining public health outcomes during national emergencies.

Honorable Mention, Luebbert Best Article Award, APSA Comparative Politics Section

Abstract

Is it possible to reduce crime without exacerbating adversarial relationships between police and citizens? Community policing is a celebrated reform with that aim, now adopted on six continents. However, the evidence base is limited, studying reform components in isolation in a limited set of countries and remaining largely silent on citizen-police trust. We designed six field experiments with Global South police agencies to study locally designed models of community policing using coordinated measures of crime and the attitudes and behaviors of citizens and police. In a preregistered meta-analysis, we found that these interventions led to mixed implementation, largely failed to improve citizen-police relations, and did not reduce crime. Societies may need to implement structural changes first for incremental police reforms such as community policing to succeed.

Abstract

Scholars and policymakers frequently advocate recruiting embedded bureaucrats with strong ties to citizens to improve service delivery. Yet officials who are too embedded in their community are often blamed for corruption, favoritism, and ineffectiveness. We argue that this ambiguity stems from a mismatch between individual- and community-level effects of embeddedness. While personal ties increase engagement by connected citizens, community-level embeddedness marginalizes unconnected citizens and undermines claims of impartiality. We test this argument in the context of public safety provision in the Philippines. We measure family networks in 289 villages, locate police officers within those networks, and analyze responses from two citizen surveys. Citizens are more willing to trust and engage with officers to whom they are more closely related. However, in villages where officers are highly embedded, unconnected citizens evaluate their performance more poorly. Consequently, village-level officer embeddedness is associated with higher rates of family feuds and neighbor disputes.

Abstract

Research on sensitive topics uses a variety of methods to combat response bias on in-person surveys. Increasingly, researchers allow respondents to self-administer responses using electronic devices as an alternative to more complicated experimental approaches. Using an experiment embedded in a survey in the rural Philippines, we test the effects of several such methods on response rates and falsification. We asked respondents a sensitive question about reporting insurgents to the police alongside a non-sensitive question about school completion. Respondents were randomly assigned to answer verbally, through a forced-choice experiment, or through self-enumeration. We find that self-enumeration significantly reduced nonresponse compared to direct questioning, but find little evidence of differential falsification. Forced choice yielded highly unlikely estimates, which we attribute to non-strategic falsification. These findings suggest that self-administered surveys can be effective for measuring sensitive topics when maximizing response rates is a priority.

Abstract

The position people occupy in their social and professional networks is related to their social status and affects their access to social resources. Behavioral traits shape network attainment, yet biological factors also predispose individuals toward certain behaviors and motivations. Prior work shows that exposure to fetal androgens (measured by second-to-fourth digit ratio, 2D:4D) correlates with traits linked to social status, which might increase social integration, but also correlates with anti-social behaviors associated with lower socialization. We test whether 2D:4D correlates with network position later in life and find that individuals with low 2D:4D become more central in their social environments. Low 2D:4D males are more likely to exhibit high betweenness centrality, connecting separated parts of the social structure, while low 2D:4D females are more likely to exhibit high in-degree centrality, being named as friends by more peers. These gender-specific patterns are reinforced by differences in transitivity: neighbors of low 2D:4D men tend not to know each other, while the opposite holds for low 2D:4D women. These findings suggest that biological predispositions influence the organization of human societies and that prenatal androgen exposure shapes distinct status-seeking behaviors in men and women.

Abstract

How does the network of international political alliances influence trade flows? Previous work suggests that alliances matter because governments align trade policies with national security interests and firms account for political relations when assessing risk. However, existing research focuses solely on direct political alliances, overlooking the broader structure of international alliance networks. I argue that states and firms consider both direct and indirect alliance relationships when shaping trade. I find that higher levels of trade occur when states have more shared alliances and when they belong to the same alliance community. Once indirect relationships are incorporated, the apparent effect of dyadic alliances diminishes sharply. Joint membership in an alliance community predicts an increase in trade more than twice the size of the effect of a dyadic alliance. This effect is especially strong for highly central states within the alliance network: states trade substantially more with central states in their own community and less with central states in other communities.

Abstract

Seasonal influenza infects roughly 5–20 percent of the U.S. population each year, causing more than 200,000 hospitalizations. Accurately assessing infection levels and predicting regional risk can guide targeted prevention and treatment, especially during epidemics. Google Flu Trends (GFT) sparked optimism that big data could estimate disease burden in real time, producing measures two weeks earlier than CDC surveillance. However, GFT suffered notable errors and is substantially less accurate at tracking laboratory-confirmed cases than syndromic influenza-like illness (ILI) measures. We construct an empirical network using CDC data and combine it with GFT to markedly improve predictive performance. The combined model predicts infections one week into the future as well as GFT predicts the present and performs particularly well in highly connected regions and during epidemic periods.