Shelter-in-place policies reduce social contact and mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Inconsistent compliance with social distancing creates local and regional interpersonal transmission risks. Using county-day measures on population movement derived from cellphone location data, we investigate whether compliance with local shelter-in-place ordinances varies across US counties with different economic endowments. Our theoretical model implies economic endowments will influence compliance with social distancing. We find evidence that low income areas do comply less than counties with stronger economic endowments. Findings suggest targeted economic relief could improve future compliance with public health interventions.

Shelter-in-place policies reduce social contact and mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Inconsistent compliance with social distancing creates local and regional interpersonal transmission risks. Using county-day measures on population movement derived from cellphone location data, we investigate whether compliance with local shelter-in-place ordinances varies across US counties with different economic endowments. Our theoretical model implies economic endowments will influence compliance with social distancing. We find evidence that low income areas do comply less than counties with stronger economic endowments. Findings suggest targeted economic relief could improve future compliance with public health interventions.

After highly fragmented civil wars, order is often secured through the selective co-optation of rebel field commanders and atomized insurgents. This paper presents a formal model of civil war settlement as a coalition formation game between various regime and rebel factions. This approach emphasizes the ability of installed civilian rulers to lure warlords into the state based on promises of future wealth, then use divide-and-rule tactics to pit different warlord factions against one another. Quantitative and qualitative data from Tajikistan, including an original data set of warlord incorporation and regime purges during wartime reconstruction, are used to evaluate the model.

What are the political consequences of democratization assistance to regimes transitioning from authoritarian rule? By exploiting the downstream effects of a field experiment designed to encourage citizen monitoring of Georgia's 2008 parliamentary elections, we evaluate the political consequences of one type of democracy promotion aid. The intervention increased citizen activism, but it also had the unanticipated effect of suppressing overall voter turnout by approximately 5%. We hypothesize that the civic education campaign was interpreted as a sign of increased political attention to a selected voting precinct, which suppressed opposition turnout. Two additional experiments provide additional evidence for the hypothesis.

The discipline of anthropology recoils instinctively at the idea that its researchers' labor might contribute to the national security state; other disciplines celebrate the same contributions as evidence of policy impact. In this article, we examine the seductions of espionage for professionally vulnerable (untenured) researchers that employ ethnographic methods but are operating in the shadow of market incentives and the Global War on Terror. We define “extreme fieldwork” as a research design likely to yield the kinds of data that Price identifies as “Dual Use Anthropology.” The bulk of our essay is devoted to providing warrants for the claim that there are strong incentives to brand oneself as an “extreme” fieldworker – which may be the post-9/11 equivalent of chasing what Trouillot called the “savage slot.” We argue that for some topics in certain research settings, uncomfortably, the more care and effort one invests in ethnographic best practices, the more likely it is that the researcher will engage in behaviors that could be confused with spycraft.