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Migrants are politically marginalized in cities of the developing world, participating in destination-area elections less than do local-born residents. We theorize three reasons for this shortfall: migrants' socioeconomic links to origin regions, bureaucratic obstacles to enrollment that disproportionately burden newcomers, and ostracism by antimigrant politicians. We randomized a door-to-door drive to facilitate voter registration among internal migrants to two Indian cities. Ties to origin regions do not predict willingness to become registered locally. Meanwhile, assistance in navigating the electoral bureaucracy increased migrant registration rates by 24 percentage points and substantially boosted next-election turnout. An additional treatment arm informed politicians about the drive in a subset of localities; rather than ignoring new migrant voters, elites amplified campaign efforts in response. We conclude that onerous registration requirements impede the political incorporation, and thus the well-being, of migrant communities in fast-urbanizing settings. The findings also matter for assimilating naturalized yet politically excluded cross-border immigrants.

AbstractRural‐to‐urban migration is reshaping the economic and social landscape of the Global South. Yet migrants often struggle to integrate into cities. We conduct countrywide audit experiments in India to test whether urban politicians discriminate against internal migrants in providing constituency services. Signaling that a citizen is a city newcomer, as opposed to a long‐term resident, causes incumbent politicians to be significantly less likely to respond to requests for help. Standard "nativist" concerns do not appear to explain this representation gap. We theorize that migrants are structurally disposed to participate in destination‐area elections at lower rates than long‐term residents. Knowing this, reelection‐minded politicians decline to cater to migrant interests. Follow‐up experiments support the hypothesis. We expect our findings to generalize to fast‐urbanizing democracies, with implications for international immigration too. Policywise, mitigating migrants' de facto disenfranchisement should improve their welfare.

Does secular party incumbency affect religious violence? Existing theory is ambiguous. On the one hand, religiously motivated militants might target areas that vote secularists into office. On the other hand, secular party politicians, reliant on the support of violence-hit communities, may face powerful electoral incentives to quell attacks. Candidates bent on preventing bloodshed might also sort into such parties. To adjudicate these claims, we combine constituency-level election returns with event data on Islamist and sectarian violence in Pakistan (1988–2011). For identification, we compare districts where secular parties narrowly won or lost elections. We find that secularist rule causes a sizable reduction in local religious conflict. Additional analyses suggest that the result stems from electoral pressures to cater to core party supporters and not from politician selection. The effect is concentrated in regions with denser police presence, highlighting the importance of state capacity for suppressing religious disorder.

AbstractRapid urbanization is among the major processes affecting the developing world. The influx of migrants to cities frequently provokes antagonism on the part of long‐term residents, manifested in labor market discrimination, political nativism, and violence. We implemented a novel, face‐to‐face survey experiment on a representative sample of Mumbai's population to elucidate the causes of anti‐migrant hostility. Our findings point to the centrality of material self‐interest in the formation of native attitudes. Dominant group members fail to heed migrants' ethnic attributes, yet for minority group respondents, considerations of ethnicity and economic threat crosscut. We introduce a new political mechanism to explain this divergence. Minority communities facing persistent discrimination view in‐migration by coethnics as a means of enlarging their demographic and electoral base, thereby achieving "safety in numbers." Our article sheds light on the drivers of preferences over internal migration. It also contributes insights to the international immigration literature and to policy debates over urban expansion.

Mass ritualized gatherings like pilgrimages are central to religious practice globally. Do they generate votes for religious parties? Theoretically, the events may heighten religiosity, enlarging support for parties seen as "owning" religious policy issues. Such parties might also engage in "platform co-optation," piggybacking on the events to organize and campaign. We evaluate the electoral impact of India's Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival considered the world's largest human assembly, leveraging its astrologically determined timing combined with districts' proximity by rail to the festival sites. The Kumbh Mela boosts Hindu nationalists' vote share. Tests of mechanisms suggest it does so by fomenting identity change—evidenced by increases in communal violence and the adoption of orthodox dietary practices—and by bolstering party infrastructure. India's main secular-leaning party loses support, but not in regions with denser concentrations of religious minorities. Our study offers a new account of how confessional parties make inroads in multiethnic democracies.

Machine generated contents note: Part I. Information, Accountability, and a New Approach to Cumulative Learning: 1. Do informational campaigns promote electoral accountability? Thad Dunning, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, Susan D. Hyde, Craig McIntosh and Gareth Nellis; 2. The Metaketa Initiative Thad Dunning, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, Susan D. Hyde and Craig McIntosh; 3. Informational interventions: theory and measurement Thad Dunning, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, Susan D. Hyde, Craig McIntosh and Gareth Nellis; Part II. Field Experiments: 4. Under what conditions does performance information influence voting behavior? Lessons from Benin Claire Adida, Jessica Gottlieb, Eric Kramon and Gwyneth Mcclendon; 5. When does information increase electoral accountability? Lessons from a field experiment in Mexico Eric Arias, Horacio Larreguy, John Marshall and Pablo Querubin; 6. Candidate videos and vote choice in Ugandan parliamentary elections Melina R. Platas and Pia Raffler; 7. Budgets, SMS texts, and votes in Uganda Mark T. Buntaine, Sarah S. Bush, Ryan Jablonski, Daniel L. Nielson and Paula M. Pickering; 8. Performance-based voting in local elections: experimental evidence from Burkina Faso Malte Lierl and Marcus Holmlund; 9. Horizontal but not vertical: accountability institutions and electoral sanctioning in Northeast Brazil Taylor C. Boas, F. Daniel Hidalgo and Marcus A. Melo; 10. Dilemmas and challenges of citizen information campaigns: lessons from a failed experiment in India Neelanjan Sircar and Simon Chauchard; Part III. Cumulative Learning: 11. Meta-analysis Thad Dunning, Clara Bicalho, Anirvan Chowdhury, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, Susan D. Hyde, Craig McIntosh and Gareth Nellis; 12. Learning about cumulative learning: an experiment with policy practitioners Gareth Nellis, Thad Dunning, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, Susan D. Hyde, Craig McIntosh and Catlan Reardon; Part IV. Conclusion: 13. Challenges and opportunities Thad Dunning, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, Susan D. Hyde, Craig McIntosh and Gareth Nellis; Part V. End Matter: 14. Appendix: meta-preanalysis plan (MPAP); 15. References; Part VI. Online Appendix.

Do informational interventions shape electoral choices and thereby promote political accountability? The chapters in Part II of this book provided answers to this question in particular contexts. The studies individually provide rich insights not only into the impact of interventions that were common to all studies, but also on the effects of alternative interventions that were specific to each one. In this chapter, we assess the larger lessons that we can glean from our coordinated studies. As outlined in Chapter 3, all studies seek to test common hypotheses about the impact of harmonized informational interventions, using consistent measurements of outcome variables. Our preregistered analysis allows us to evaluate whether, pooling data from the set of studies in the initiative, information about politician performance led voters to alter their electoral behavior. It also informs a discussion about the conditions under which they did or did not do so. We find that the overall effect of information is quite precisely estimated and not statistically distinguishable from zero. The analysis shows modest impacts of information on voters' knowledge of the information provided to them. However, the interventions did not appear to shape voters' evaluations of candidates, and, in particular, they did not discernibly influence vote choice. This slate of null results obtains in nearly all analyses for the individual country studies too. Nor is there strong evidence of impact on voter turnout, though under some specifications we find suggestive evidence that bad news may boost voter mobilization. Our results are robust to different analytic strategies and across a variety of modeling and dataset construction choices. The findings also suggest that the estimated effect in our missing study would have needed to be extremely large to alter our broader conclusions. The size of our meta-analysis reduces the chances that null estimated effects stem from low statistical power, and the fact that our results are so consistent across the individual studies limits the possibility that our mostly null effects are due to idiosyncrasies in implementation or study design. In the rest of this chapter, we first describe the prespecified approach that we use to analyze the pooled dataset. We then report our main findings, point out the consistency of results across studies, and report robustness checks. Next we consider several possible reasons for our null findings by testing the prespecified hypotheses. The most plausible reason for the null effects stems from the failure of the interventions to shape voters' perceptions of politicians; we do not find evidence, however, that this is due to partisan or ethnic attachments or other heuristic substitutes for information. It is critical to underscore the similarities of these interventions to previous treatments in the experimental research literature and to interventions for which donor organizations in the transparency space routinely advocate. Indeed, our interventions were crafted by researchers with substantial country-specific expertise, usually in collaboration with local NGOs. Our null results across wide array of contexts therefore provide an important baseline of evidence against which future studies can be weighed. This chapter could be profitably read in conjunction with Chapter 3, which discusses the common interventions and our measurement of key variables, but it can be read as a standalone chapter as well.