Link to working paper

While citizens can register their land and property with the state to protect their rights, this registration potentially exposes them to taxes and expropriation. This paper studies how that tradeoff shaped registration behavior in post-independence Tunisia. With innovative text-as-data and geospatial methods, I create a rich dataset of the universe of citizen-initiated requests for land registration between 1956 and 1980 and support it with extensive qualitative archival research. I argue registration will be more likely and more prioritized if land has significant fixed capital investment making it vulnerable and if there are potentially threatening private neighbors. First, I find that the early adopters of registration  were disproportionately farmers growing tree crops, long-term immobile investments into land increased demand for property rights protection. Early-registering properties have a greater share of private, non-family member neighbors. Modeling diffusion between direct neighbors, I show that properties are especially likely to be registered following a neighboring property with similar land use. Finally, I leverage a temporal shock of a high profile case of the state violently evicting farmers from their land. With the threat of state expropriation suddenly increased, land registration dropped precipitously and were kept low by the prospect of forced collectivization of agriculture. This paper also highlights how citizens’ routine interactions with the state and the production of administrative records as a form of political behavior.

When are states able to collect comprehensive information about their populations? This paper aims to understand the political reasons for uneven legibility within the population. Rather than seeing legibility as a simple consequence of administrative capacity, we propose two types of mechanisms. Bottom-up mechanism involve ordinary people actively seeking to register their identities and property with the state in order to better access services and legal protection, but only if people trust the state to use its informational capacity wisely. A top-down story, by contrast, stresses that these distributional consequences of legibility may lead the state to avoid collecting information on disfavored out-groups. Taking the case of Cote d’Ivoire, we use four large household survey datasets collected by international NGOs over 30 years to examine differences in birth registration coverage, a) between migrant and non-migrant populations, and b) between time periods with different governments in power. We show a large decline in migrant birth registration relative to non-migrants under a political regime particularly hostile to migrant communities. We explore how both individual and community characteristics impact legibility and find support for both bottom-up and top-down mechanisms. We also suggest that new investment in the civil service after the country's civil war helped to correct the gaps in registration created during the civil war. This paper helps to explain subnational variation in state capacity across African states. It contributes to a broader strand of research that explains state capacity as the product of interactions between states and their citizens.

This paper examines the success and individual takeup of formal land titles in Cote d’Ivoire, part of a mass government campaign to encourage registration. Since 2015, the Ivorian state has invested heavily into rural land registration with the support of international development organizations, aiming to improve the livelihood of rural farmers by resolving land disputes and encourage capital investment. Despite these goals, however, programs have encountered significant hesitance from rural populations skeptical of the state’s intentions. I leverage administrative data on the success of programs that offer assisted, no-cost land registration in particular villages. I examine inter and intra-village differences in citizens’ willingness to seek a formal land title. I also differentiate between early adopters and those who adopt when a local program encourages it. I hypothesize that greater individual property rights threat encourages land registration, but only within communities where the state already has local capacity and public trust. Finally, this paper considers how past exposure to communal violence and access to nonstate property protections influence the decision of whether to register. 

With Daniel Markovits and Andrew Thompson

Under Review

Correcting false and negative beliefs about political opponents has shown promise in reducing anti-democratic attitudes and polarization. Despite the simple nature of such corrections, there is little extant evidence that they are effective beyond immediately administered survey outcomes and it is unclear which voters opt-in to such interventions. To test these mechanisms, we worked with a partner organizations to implement a depolarization initiative that bundled factual belief corrections with elites modeling civil disagreement. We recruited an online panel of 3,461 eligible respondents and then randomized an offer to attend a 30 minute depolarization event in which bipartisan elites defended democratic values and discussed polling information suggesting mass commitment to democracy across party lines. We report two main sets of findings. First, despite generous financial incentives, there was substantial differential compliance by partisanship, though not by pre-treatment attitudinal measures of affective polarization or anti-democratic attitudes. Second, our intervention achieved a durable reduction in beliefs that opponents were opposed to democracy (measured at 1 week and 2 months post-event) and in willingness to attend future depolarization events. However, we found no reduction in anti-democratic attitudes across many pre-registered outcomes. We use a follow-up survey experiment to explore the mechanisms underlying both of these findings.

The causal inference revolution in the social sciences has increased concerns over the external validity of findings.  While inference may be internally valid, it may be estimating a quantity that is difficult to interpret. This paper develops an approach for identifying heterogeneous effects under treatment non-compliance by estimating local average treatment effects for multiple types of compliers. Under a design with multiple gradated levels of encouragement, we can conceptualize complier type as a continuous latent variable representing the minimum amount of encouragement needed to take treatment. This approach requires a monotonicity assumption that increases in encouragement cannot decrease treatment uptake. If we make an even stronger monotonicity assumption that treatment effects are strictly monotonic with respect to compliance type, I show that we could place partial bounds on the treatment effects for the subsample of non-compliers. I use these methods to re-analyze outcomes in two public health interventions that randomize the level of subsidy provided for goods. I find strong evidence of heterogeneity by willingness-to-pay, but do not find support for the strong monotonicity assumption needed for bounding effects among non-compliers. The paper concludes discussing how heterogeneous effect estimation by compliance type can estimate the average effect of an intervention with different encouragement provided. If willingness-to-pay predicts stronger treatment effects, it suggests the market may be sufficient for a socially efficient distribution of the treatment. If the reverse is true, it suggests the necessity for continued subsidization.