Research

This paper studies how shocks to socioeconomic expectations induced by elections contribute to democratic discontent in polarized societies. Using new large-scale survey data collected throughout the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, I investigate how respondents' electoral and socioeconomic expectations, polarization, emotions, and attitudes towards violence and democracy evolved as a result of the close victory of the main opposition candidate. My analysis is guided by a stylized model, in which I show that highly polarized voters who assign a large probability to their candidate's victory experience a larger negative shock to their socioeconomic expectations in case their candidate loses. This expectation shock may then lead to an increase in violent and anti-democratic sentiments. By resurveying 1,200 respondents right after the election, I confirm the model's predictions and show how the role of this negative expectation shock is particularly strong among the most extreme supporters. In an additional survey experiment, I provide complimentary evidence in which I positively update respondents' expectations about the economy and find that this information treatment reduces their violent and anti-democratic sentiments.

This paper studies how beliefs about racial inequalities and their causes vary and shape support for race-targeted and redistribution policies among Black and white Americans, including both adults and teenagers. We collect original large-scale survey data to provide new evidence on perceptions, attitudes, and policy views on racial issues and study the causal impact of information on policy views. We highlight significant heterogeneity along racial and partisan lines in perceived racial gaps in income and mobility. Yet, the biggest discrepancies are in how people explain the existence of these gaps, i.e., their perceived causes. White Democratic and Black respondents are much more likely to attribute racial inequities to systemic factors, such as adverse past and present circumstances, and want to act on them with race-targeted and general redistribution policies. White Republicans are more likely to attribute racial gaps to individual-based factors, such as individual effort or actions. These views are already deeply entrenched in teenagers, based on their race and their parents’ political affiliation. A policy decomposition shows that the perceived causes of racial inequities are the strongest predictors of support for race-targeted or redistribution policies, a finding confirmed by the experimental results.

We conduct parallel surveys of legislators and citizens in three countries to study their tolerance for corruption. In Italy, Colombia, and Pakistan legislators and citizens respond similarly to hypothetical scenarios involving trade-offs between, for example, probity and efficiency: both perceive corruption as undesirable but prevalent. These novel descriptive data further reveal that legislators generally have accurate beliefs about public opinion on corruption and understand its relevance to voters. An informational treatment updates legislators’ beliefs about public opinion. The treatment produces downward adjustments among legislators who initially overestimated citizens’ anti-corruption preferences. We also present descriptive data that tolerance of corruption is predicted by politician attributes, most notably motivations for entering politics. Finally, results reconfirm partisan bias by voters in evaluations of corruption. Overall, results suggest that barriers to effective anti-corruption policies are unlikely to lie with lack of information by legislators or by their deliberate commitment to corrupt activities.

Using new survey and experimental data, I investigate what drives voters’ decisions when facing the competence-dishonesty trade-off. Looking at a representative sample of the US population, I find that, in line with salience models, a higher corruption level makes voters focus on other characteristics, such as competence, when choosing whom to vote for, leading to a higher vote share for corrupt politicians. When introducing the candidates’ party, I find that partisanship becomes the most salient characteristic, leading most respondents to vote for the candidate from their party, ignoring how competent and dishonest they are. By randomly exposing respondents to news on corruption scandals, I show that, by making them perceive corruption as more frequent, respondents become more willing to vote for a more corrupt candidate as long as they are more competent. At the same time, they become more supportive of policies designed to punish corrupt politicians. Finally, I do not find evidence that Democrats and Republicans react differently to these experiments. Moreover, they are aligned in their attitudes towards corruption and preferences for policies to reduce it, suggesting that corruption is a non-partisan topic.