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Social media's capacity to quickly and inexpensively reach large audiences almost simultaneously has the potential to promote electoral accountability. Beyond increasing direct exposure to information, high saturation campaigns—which target substantial fractions of an electorate—may induce or amplify information diffusion, persuasion, or coordination between voters. Randomizing saturation across municipalities, we evaluate the electoral impact of non-partisan Facebook ads informing millions of Mexican citizens of municipal expenditure irregularities in 2018. The vote shares of incumbent parties that engaged in zero/negligible irregularities increased by 6–7 percentage points in directly-targeted electoral precincts. This direct effect, but also the indirect effect in untargeted precincts within treated municipalities, were significantly greater where ads targeted 80%—rather than 20%—of the municipal electorate. The amplifying effects of high saturation campaigns are driven by citizens within more socially-connected municipalities, rather than responses by politicians or media outlets. These findings demonstrate how mass media can ignite social interactions to promote political accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diagnostic and contact tracing apps are a needed weapon to contain contagion during a pandemic. We study how the content of the messages used to promote the apps influence adoption by running a survey experiment on approximately 23,000 Mexican adults. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of three different prompts, or a control condition, before stating their willingness to adopt a diagnostic app and contact tracing app. The prompt emphasizing government efforts to ensure data privacy, which has been one of the most common strategies, reduced willingness to adopt the apps by about 4 pp and 3 pp, respectively. An effective app promotion policy must understand individuals' reservations and be wary of unintended reactions to naïve reassurances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While effective preventive measures against COVID-19 are now widely known, many individuals fail to adopt them. This article provides experimental evidence about one potentially important driver of compliance with social distancing: social norms. We asked each of 23,000 survey respondents in Mexico to predict how a fictional person would behave when faced with the choice about whether or not to attend a friend's birthday gathering. Every respondent was randomly assigned to one of four social norms conditions. Expecting that other people would attend the gathering and/or believing that other people approved of attending the gathering both increased the predicted probability that the fictional character would attend the gathering by 25%, in comparison with a scenario where other people were not expected to attend nor to approve of attending. Our results speak to the potential effects of communication campaigns and media coverage of compliance with, and normative views about, COVID-19 preventive measures. They also suggest that policies aimed at modifying social norms or making existing ones salient could impact compliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The credibility of election outcomes hinges on the accuracy of vote tallies. We provide causal evidence on the drivers and the downstream consequences of variation in the quality of vote tallies. Using data for the universe of polling stations in Mexico in five national elections, we document that over 40% of polling-station-level tallies display inconsistencies. Our evidence strongly suggests these inconsistencies are nonpartisan. Using data for more than 1.5 million poll workers, we show that lower educational attainment, higher workload, and higher complexity of the tally cause more inconsistencies. Finally, using an original survey of close to 80,000 poll workers together with detailed administrative data, we find that inconsistencies cause recounts and recounts lead to lower trust in electoral institutions. We discuss policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is culture a lasting driver of corruption? I study whether normative attitudes toward bribery persist through generational change. To disentangle cultural from institutional causes, I compare individuals who share an institutional environment but whose parents were born abroad. I find evidence of intergenerational persistence: average bribery attitudes in the parental country of ancestry explain variation in bribery attitudes across second-generation immigrants. Consistent with theoretical models, both family-based and community-based mechanisms of attitudinal transmission appear to matter, and cultural persistence appears to be greater in laxer environments. Finally, I find that bribery attitudes are associated with two measures of bribing behavior, highlighting the need to increase attention to cultural factors in corruption scholarship and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election-season handouts of goods and services by political parties are endemic in Mexico's new democracy, and the practice appears to be increasing since 2000. Using information from a 2018 election-season panel data set of ordinary citizens, we provide the most detailed examination yet available of vote-buying attempts in Mexico. Such efforts were practiced by nearly all parties, involved millions of citizens, included a variety of material offers, and attempted to induce voters to alter their electoral behavior in myriad ways. Nevertheless, descriptive evidence implies that compliance with political machines' wishes may have been low because many recipients had a muddled understanding of what they were asked to do and did not fear retribution from the vote buying party. In addition, circumstantial evidence suggests that vote-buying efforts were insufficient to overturn the winning candidate's advantage in the presidential election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A profusion of recent research has focused on historical legacies as key to understanding contemporary outcomes. We review this body of research, analyzing both the comparative-historical analysis (CHA) and modern political economy (MPE) research traditions as applied to the study of communism, imperialism, and authoritarianism. We restrict our focus to the sizeable subset of arguments that meets a relatively strict definition of legacies, i.e., arguments that locate the roots of present-day outcomes in causal factors operative during an extinct political order. For all their differences, the CHA and MPE approaches both face the challenges of convincingly identifying the sources of historical persistence and of reckoning with alternative channels of causation. We find that mechanisms of persistence in legacy research generally belong to one of three main categories. While both traditions acknowledge the role of institutions in historical persistence, CHA research tends to emphasize the lasting power of coalitions, whereas work in MPE often argues for the persistence of cognitions. We argue that, at their best, CHA and MPE approaches yield complementary insights. Further progress in legacy research will benefit from greater cross-fertilization across research traditions and deeper recognition of commonalities across communist, imperialist, and authoritarian regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]