Romain Ferrali

Young citizens vote at relatively low rates, which contributes to political parties de-prioritizing youth preferences. We analyze the effects of low-cost online interventions in encouraging young Moroccans to cast an informed vote in the 2021 elections. These interventions aim to reduce participation costs by providing information about the registration process and by highlighting the election's stakes and the distance between respondents' preferences and party platforms. Contrary to preregistered expectations, the interventions did not increase average turnout, yet exploratory analysis shows that the interventions designed to increase benefits did increase the turnout intention of uncertain baseline voters. Moreover, information about parties' platforms increased support for the party closest to the respondents' preferences, leading to better-informed voting. Results are consistent with motivated reasoning, which is surprising in a context with weak party institutionalization.

The impacts of money in US politics have long been debated. Building on principal-agent models, we test whether and to what degree companies' political donations lead to their favored treatment in federal procurement. We expect the impact of donations on favoritism to vary by the strength of control by political principals over their bureaucratic agents. We compile a comprehensive dataset of published federal contracts and registered campaign contributions for 2004-15. We develop risk indices capturing tendering practices and outcomes likely characterized by favoritism. Using fixed effects regressions, matching, and regression discontinuity analyses, we find confirming evidence for our theory. A large increase in donations from $10,000 to $5m (in USD) increases favoritism risks by about 1/4th standard deviation (SD). These effects are largely partisan, with firms donating to the party that holds the presidency showing higher risk. Donations influence favoritism risks most in less independent agencies: the same donation increases the risk of favoritism by an additional 1/3rd SD in agencies least insulated from politics. Exploiting sign-off thresholds, we demonstrate that donating contractors are subject to less scrutiny by political appointees.

Who registers to vote? Although extensive research has examined the question of who votes, our understanding of the determinants of political participation will be limited until we know who is missing from the voter register. Studying voter registration in lower-income settings is particularly challenging due to data constraints. We link the official voter register with a complete social network census of 16 villages to analyze the correlates of voter registration in rural Uganda, examining the role of individual-level attributes and social ties. We find evidence that social ties are important for explaining registration status within and across households. Village leaders—and through them, household heads—play an important role in explaining the registration status of others in the village, suggesting a diffuse process of social influence. Socioeconomic factors such as income and education do not explain registration in this setting. Together these findings suggest an alternate theory of participation is required.

Do social networks matter for the adoption of new forms of political participation? We develop a formal model showing that the quality of communication that takes place in social networks is central to understanding whether a community will adopt forms of political participation where benefits are uncertain and where there are positive externalities associated with participation. Early adopters may exaggerate benefits, leading others to discount information about the technology's value. Thus, peer effects are likely to emerge only when informal institutions support truthful communication. We collect social network data for 16 Ugandan villages where an innovative mobile-based reporting platform was introduced. Consistent with our model, we find variation across villages in the extent of peer effects on technology adoption, as well as evidence supporting additional observable implications. Impediments to social diffusion may help explain the varied uptake of new and increasingly common political communication technologies around the world.

How does the structure of an organization affect corruption? This paper analyzes a model that views organizations as networks on which coalitions of corrupt accomplices may form. This network approach to corruption provides new insights into the problem: (i) corruption will arise in enclaves, i.e. coalitions that minimize joint exposure to witnesses, (ii) making the organization more connected may increase corruption, and (iii) corruption will involve larger coalitions under better monitoring. Simulation results also suggest that more hierarchical organizations are more corrupt than flatter organizations. I test these predictions in the lab. Results confirm the predictions and reveal a systematic deviation that has implications for why better monitoring reduces corruption: participants disproportionately fail to realize larger coalitions, which are more necessary under good monitoring. Results suggest it would be sensible to redesign public agencies to puncture the isolation of enclaves.

Honest and dishonest behaviors may both diffuse among the members of an organization. Knowing which of the two spreads faster is important because it impacts the extent to which managers will need to resort to other, potentially more costly solutions to curb dishonest behavior. Assessing empirically which of honest or dishonest behavior spreads faster is challenging, because this requires field measurements of social relationships and dishonest behavior of individual members, which poses both measurement and inference problems. We examine an original, fine-grained dataset from a large company that allows for identifying agents likely to be dishonest and interactions among employees while offering a natural experiment that circumvents the inference problems associated with identifying peer-to-peer diffusion. We find (1) that dishonest behavior diffuses while honest behavior does not, (2) that diffusion likely operates through spreading information about opportunities for collusion, and (3) that policies that screen on dishonesty at hiring may be efficient to curb dishonest behavior in environments with high turnover.

Corruption is often a collective endeavor involving both politicians and bureaucrats, yet most research on anti-corruption policies focuses on disciplining politicians. We examine how audits affect bureaucrats using a randomized audit program of Brazilian municipalities. We establish that audits effectively punish corrupt bureaucrats: they increase dismissals and resignations, with effects concentrated among likely patronage hires. Leveraging a theoretical framework that views mayors as bureaucratic supervisors, we show that the mayor's decision to dismiss is driven by legal rather than electoral accountability concerns. Our findings have implications for the design of anti-corruption policies and suggest that while patronage appointments come with rents, they are also exposed to greater punishment.

Online harassment is pervasive on social media, with particularly severe consequences in authoritarian regimes, where such behavior is often politically motivated and targeted at opposition figures. While counterspeech has proved effective at mitigating online harassment in democratic settings, its effectiveness in authoritarian settings remains poorly understood. We analyze an online randomized controlled experiment conducted by an NGO in an authoritarian regime, where harassment posts were reported, and victims received public or private counterspeech interventions. Results show that the effectiveness of counterspeech depends on its visibility: public interventions decreased victim activity and follower engagement, likely driven by fear of retaliation, while private interventions caused increases in both activity and follower engagement. Harassers remain unaffected by the intervention. These findings underscore the limitations of counterspeech strategies in authoritarian settings and underscore the importance of adapting interventions to context, including the heightened fear of repression in authoritarian settings.

We study a strategic model of community formation on networks. Starting from a seed community member, the process of community formation is sequential, with infinitely-patient and forward-looking agents making strategic offers to their neighbours. Each agent makes an irreversible binary choice, and each time she accepts an offer, she joins the community. For arbitrary payoffs, there is essentially a unique subgame perfect equilibrium, which maximizes the payoff of the seed. Next, we assume that the payoffs are a function of the community and neighbourhood sizes. This allows us to pin down the different types of communities that emerge in the equilibrium. Such equilibrium communities are a direct function of the monotonicity -positive or negative- of payoffs in community and neighbourhood sizes. Finally, we examine the impact of a key-player policy on the formation of communities and how denser networks affect the welfare of the equilibrium communities. Our results are informative for several economic situations in which the formation of communities is salient.

In response to the escalating climate crisis, and with major climate policy reforms under debate across Europe, many environmental activists have turned to extreme protest tactics, such as vandalizing museums and obstructing major highways. Research suggests that extreme protest tactics - protest behaviors perceived to be highly disruptive, harmful to others, or both - may attract media attention, but typically reduce public support for protest groups (e.g., Feinberg et al., 2020). However, this research has focused primarily on Americans' responses to public protest. Additionally, little experimental research has tested the causal effects of extreme tactics in the context of the climate movement, even though it is the largest social movement in the world (Hasegawa, 2022). To address these gaps, we fielded a large, pre-registered online survey experiment, conducted on a representative sample of French citizens (n = 8,001), testing the effects of exposure to four protest actions featuring different degrees of extremity - a peaceful march, occupying an office building, blocking public transportation, and damaging infrastructure. Results showed that, relative to a control condition, extreme protest actions reduced support for the activist group, willingness to join the climate movement, and support for climate mitigation policies (e.g., a carbon tax on fossil fuel companies), with these reductions increasing proportional to the extremity of the protest actions. Additionally, we found no evidence that exposure to these extreme tactics led to greater support for a more moderate climate protest group, offering evidence against the “radical flank effect” found in previous research (Simpson et al., 2022). Overall, results show that previously demonstrated negative effects of extreme protest tactics on popular support for social movements and their policy goals extends to activism on climate change, and also generalizes beyond the U.S. to the European context, a critical setting for policy efforts to address climate change.

Recent major elections have been marred by misinformation, in part due to biases in the way citizens process political information online. While behavioral nudges have been shown to improve rational consumption of information, their relative effectiveness is unknown, especially in online settings. We investigate scalable ways of encouraging rational consumption of political information in online settings through behavioral nudges. We partner with a global civil society organization (CSO) to implement around real elections a series of large-scale sequential experiments designed to identify the most effective nudge through their integration in an online quiz on party platform -- a commonly used tool to convey information to voters online. We estimate the impact of nudges on fostering rational consumption of information and informed political participation. Fundraising in progress.

For arms suppliers, the international trade in arms is simultaneously a lucrative source of foreign exchange and an effective bargaining tool in foreign policy. While all weapons exporters face this tradeoff, they differ in how they weigh strategic interests against the economic gains to be had from arms sales, with "vultures" putting relatively more weight on economic gains and "ideologues" putting relatively more weight on strategic considerations. We document variation in the position arms suppliers along this tradeoff using data on the international arms trade from 1950 to 2020 leveraging, among others, an important network feature: countries that supply to both parties of a conflict. We then devise a theoretical model that sheds lights on a series of mechanisms that may explain the observed variation, including economies of scope, commitment devices against time-inconsistent preferences, and strategic costs. We finally illustrate these mechanisms through a comparative case study of French and US arms trade policy.