When are governments most likely to use election violence, and what factors can mitigate government incentives to resort to violence? How do the dynamics of election violence differ in the pre-and post-election periods? Our central argument is that an incumbent's fear of losing power as the result of an election, as well as institutionalized constraints on the incumbent's decisionmaking powers, are pivotal in her decision to use election violence. While it may seem obvious to suggest that incumbents use election violence in an effort to fend off threats to their power, it is not obvious how to gauge these threats, and a central purpose of our research is to identify sources of information about the incumbent's popularity that can help predict the likelihood of election violence. The observable implications of our argument are tested using newly available cross-national evidence on elections, government use of pre-and post-election violence, and post-election protests from 1981 to 2004.2 When Do Governments Resort to Election Violence? 1 On paper, Azerbaijan is a multiparty democracy, and has held periodic multi-party presidential and parliamentary elections since the country regained independence in 1991. Despite the nominal existence of democratic institutions, tactics of electoral manipulation used by the government include overt election fraud, violence, and intimidation. Opposition supporters, opposition candidates, and journalists risk torture, arbitrary arrest, and political imprisonment-all strategies the government uses to "win" elections. 2 For example, in the run up to the 2005 parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan, facing the possibility that the "colour revolutions" of Georgia and Ukraine would spread, the government arrested journalists and attempted to prevent the opposition from campaigning.The police detained over a thousand activists before the election, and jailed hundreds without cause. 3 After the election, amid accusations of fraud, the government announced that the ruling party won an overwhelming majority, 4 Opposition supporters began to protest the results, assembling more than 7,000 people. Riot police and military forces disbursed the protesters using clubs and water cannons, and several opposition politicians were beaten. 5 In the end, despite international and domestic backlash, the incumbent remained in power. 6 Government-sponsored election violence-events in which incumbent leaders and ruling party agents employ or threaten violence against the political opposition or potential voters before, during, or after elections-is common. 4(including threats of violence such as harassment), we present and test a theory of when an incumbent government is likely to use election violence prior to or after an election. Our central argument is that an incumbent's fear of losing power as the result of an election, as well as institutionalized constraints on the incumbent's decision-making powers, are pivotal in her decision to use election violence. While it may seem obvious t...

Despite allegations that foreign aid promotes corruption and patronage, little is known about how recipient governments' electoral incentives influence aid spending. The article proposes a distributional politics model of aid spending in which governments use their informational advantages over donors in order to allocate a disproportionate share of aid to electorally strategic supporters, allowing governments to translate aid into votes. To evaluate this argument, the author codes data on the spatial distribution of multilateral donor projects in Kenya from 1992 to 2010 and show that Kenyan governments have consistently influenced the aid allocation process in favor of copartisan and coethnic voters, a bias that holds for each of Kenya's last three regimes. He confirms that aid distribution increases incumbent vote share. This evidence suggests that electoral motivations play a significant role in aid allocation and that distributional politics may help explain the gap between donor intentions and outcomes.3

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.

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Maritime piracy is a growing scourge on the international community-imposing large costs on maritime states and industries, as well as potentially undermining state capacity and funding terrorism. Using original data on over three thousand pirate attacks, we argue that these attacks are, in part, a response to poor labor market opportunities. To establish this, we take advantage of the strong effect of commodity prices on labor market opportunities in piracy-prone states. Consistent with our theory, we show that changes in the price of labor and capital-intensive commodities have consistent and strong effects on the number of pirate attacks in a country's territorial waters each month. We confirm these results by instrumenting for commodity prices using monthly precipitation levels.While conjuring images of cannons and tattered sails, piracy is also a modern scourge-and an increasingly costly as well as common one. Besides the costs of theft, sabotage and ransoms from hijackings, piracy delays shipping, drives up security costs, hinders development in coastal states and is a potential source of funding for terrorist groups, insurgents and international criminal organizations (Luft and Korin 2004;Murphy 2007; Lehr 2006). Furthermore, the number of pirate attacks (worldwide) reported by the United Nations' maritime branch-the International Maritime Organization (IMO)-has increased by more than 50% in the past five years.We argue that economic conditions play an important role in driving this variation. We argue that pirates take into account the rewards they might achieve through labor in alternative, presumably legitimate, activities when deciding whether or not to engage in piracy.In making this argument, we situate pirate groups within a larger class of predatory groups that include criminal organizations and some insurgent and terrorist groups. Like members of these groups, individual pirates balance the rewards from predatory behavior with benefits of legitimate employment and the risks of capture and punishment (Becker 1968).We therefore expect that the number of pirate attacks is not just a function of how much pirates can earn from predation, but is also a function of how much pirates can earn in other labor-intensive sectors. This paper offers multiple contributions to an emerging empirical literature on piracy (Hastings 2009;de Groot et al. 2011; Shortland and Vothnecht 2011). While some have suggested poverty plays a role in piracy, this is the first paper to explicitly test the role of labor opportunities in driving the decision to engage in piracy. In addition, this paper is among the first attempts to explain temporal variation in pirate attacks, and to use a causally motivated empirical strategy to test for a link between labor opportunities and piracy.There is also a growing literature addressing the effect of labor incentives, poverty and resource scarcity on predatory behavior more generally. Financial incentives appear play a role in both the attack and recruitment activities of terror...