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Experiments offer a useful methodological tool to examine issues of importance to political scientists. The historical and cultural differences between experiments in behavioral economics and social psychology are discussed. Issues of central concern to experimentalists are covered, including impact versus control, mundane versus experimental realism, internal versus external validity, deception, and laboratory versus field experiments. Advantages and disadvantages of experimentation are summarized.

Alastair Campbell came to UCL for a special opening event of the UCL Department of Political Science's Policy & Practice seminar series for 2023-24, so discuss how young people should get involved with politics and help to save democracy.

Inequalities are at the forefront of today's public and policy debates. They have been linked to some of the most important political events, including the rise of populism across the developed world and the vote for Brexit, and have sparked worldwide protest movements.

Last summer, Lord Nick Herbert launched the Commission for Smart Government to tackle the systemic problems of government in the UK.

The dissertation contains three essays exploring race and political economy. Leveraging large, novel datasets and applied econometric techniques, it explores the role that government policy may have on racial disparities in civic engagement and education. Chapter 1 examines the impact of federal election oversight restrictions established under the Voting Rights Act on electoral participation and outcomes. I find that these oversight measures led to large long-run gains in minority turnout, but actually decreased Democratic vote share in presidential elections. I provide evidence that this partisan shift was due to political backlash among racially-conservative whites. Chapter 2 investigates how acts of police violence affect the educational and psychological outcomes of Los Angeles public high school students. I find that students living near an officer-involved killing experience large and significant decreases in academic achievement and increases in emotional disturbance. These effects are concentrated among black and Hispanic students and police killings of other minorities, particularly those in which the individual killed was unarmed. Chapter 3 then explores how police violence influences voter turnout. I find that police killings lead to increased civic engagement among black communities, especially those that were historically critical of the criminal justice system.

My dissertation constitutes a contribution to the study of religion and political economy. It consists of four essays. My first essay argues that religious norms matter for the economic nature and modernization of political regimes. Religion is defined as a commitment device between the leader and his selectorate. More collectivist religions require a higher level of public goods provision by the government. In the collectivism-individualism continuum, Islam is treated as the most collectivist and Protestantism as the most individualist religion, while Judaism is denoted as the median religion. Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism are located in intermediate points between Judaism and Islam or Protestantism respectively. In the analysis of dominant religions in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, this ordered sequence of demands for public goods is defined by the structure of the Eastern Orthodox, Jewish and Muslim collectives: the monastery, the kibbutz, and the tariqa. Popular demand for public goods is shaped by religious norms. Leaders consider those in order to decide the intensity and nature of modernization. Regime transition occurs when the leader is not able to meet popular demand for public goods. Contrary to conventional wisdom, modernization does not reduce the influence of religious norms on public goods distribution and can facilitate transition both to democracy and dictatorship. In my second essay, I analyze the effects of religious identity on attitudes toward political centralization. I define religious identity as personal identification with distinct religious traditions and collective ideas regarding the provision of local public goods. In individualist religions such as Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, local public goods are defined as contracts between individuals and local government (contractual public goods). In societies where such religions dominate, we should expect to see negative effects of religious identity on evaluation of central government, because local governments providing such local public goods are more accountable to citizens and in this sense more consistent with individualist ideals. In collectivist religions such as Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy, on the other hand, local public goods are defined as welfare guarantees directed to citizens by the local government (hierarchical public goods). In societies where such religions dominate, we should expect to see positive effects of religious identity on evaluation of central government, since local administrations that are strongly accountable to the central government are best able to make good on such guarantees. Judaism combines elements from both collectivist and individualist religions. In Israeli Jewish society, where public goods are treated both as contractual and hierarchical, we should expect to see both negative and positive effects of religious identity on evaluations of central government. I test these predictions using survey data from Russia and Israel newly gathered for this project. Consistent with the theory's predictions, I find that in Russian Orthodoxy, Sunni Islam and Arab Christianity (Greek Orthodoxy and Eastern Catholicism), religious identity is positively associated with evaluations of central government. Similarly, in Judaism I find that religious identity as personal identification matters negatively and as collective ideas positively for evaluations of central government. My third essay examines experimentally the effects of collectivism on public goods contributions by regional bureaucrats in Tomsk and Novosibirsk, Russia. I expand the standard public goods experiment with three treatments, which I define as degrees of Orthodox collectivist enforcement: 1. Solidarity, 2. Obedience, and 3. Universal discipline. I argue for an Eastern Orthodox rationality in the Russian bureaucracy that prioritizes collective welfare over individual profit. Russian Orthodox collectivism is implemented through Bayesian and universal disciplinary monitoring such that hierarchical revelation of individual contributions and enforcement of collective punishment occur. Contrary to conventional wisdom about free-riding in administrative institutions, higher ranks in Russian Orthodox bureaucracies are associated with higher levels of contributions and enforcement. En lieu of conclusions, in my fourth essay, I discuss the political and economic incentives that led to the emergence, peak and contraction of Kulturkampf in the Catholic lands of Prussia between 1871 and 1878. I argue that Bismarck's Kulturkampf reveals the fallacies of secularism as a series of enforced state policies: 1. De facto dominance of religious majority over religious minorities that are in much higher need to preserve their public and social status, 2. Transformation of clergymen into bureaucratic experts. The distinction between collectivism and individualism can be validated through the degree of restrictions imposed on religious institutions and their presence in the public sphere. Secularism is not devoid of religion, as it consistently advocates bureaucratic expertise and thus transition to more individualist forms of government.

Corruption and political favoritism are considered major impediments to economic development. Although there is a growing consensus about the adverse efficiency consequences of corruption we still have a limited understanding of how corruption is shaped by political and economic institutions and how it affects our democracies. An increasing literature documents political favoritism and its welfare consequences relative to a no misallocation benchmark. In my dissertation, I complement this line of research by quantifying the effects of favoritism relative to relevant policy counterfactuals. My work highlights the importance of transparency and limiting regulatory discretion in improving the efficiency of public spending.In the first chapter, I investigate the determinants and consequences of increasing a buyer's discretion in public procurement. I study the role of discretion in the context of a Hungarian policy reform which removed the obligation of using an open auction for contracts under a certain anticipated value. Below this threshold, buyers can use an alternative "high-discretion" procedure to purchase goods and services. At the threshold, I document large discontinuities in procurement outcomes, but I also find a discontinuity in the density of anticipated contract value, indicating that public agencies set contract values strategically to avoid auctions. To distinguish the causal effects of increased discretion from the self-selection of agencies into high-discretion procedures, I exploit the time variation of the policy reform. I find that discretion increases the price of contracts and decreases the productivity of contractors. To dig deeper into the motivations of public agencies, I use a structural model to identify discretion's impact on rents from corruption. I also use the same structural approach to simulate the effect of alternative value thresholds. I find that the actual threshold redistributes about 2 percent of the total contract value from taxpayers to firms and decreases the average productivity of contractors by approximately 1.6 percent. My simulations suggest that the optimal threshold would be about a third of the actual. Moreover, case studies suggest that in addition to rent extraction corruption provides opportunities to buy political support in weakly institutionalized democracies (e.g. McMillan and Zoido (2004)). Consequently, detrimental effects of political favoritism may not be limited to misallocation of public resources but also constrain governmental accountability. In the second chapter, my coauthor Adam Szeidl and I confirm this conclusion by investigating political favoritism in the Hungarian media market. We scrutinize three different markets, printed media, billboards, and online newspapers. We establish three main results about favoritism in the Hungarian media. First, we document distortive two-way favors between politicians and the media, in the form of government advertising and media coverage. For both directions of favors, our empirical strategy is to compare the allocations of actors with changing versus unchanging connection status. More specifically we compare advertising behavior of state-owned and private companies and media content of outlets with more and less political connections. Since friendly news coverage systematically moves together with advertising favors we interpret our findings as media capture. Second, we document an organizational change in favoritism: a first phase when favored media was controlled by a single connected investor; a second phase when this relationship broke down and two-way favors were terminated; and a third phase when control of newly favored media was divided between multiple connected investors. Our preferred interpretation is that governments with more de-jure power shift the organization of favors towards a divide-and-rule style arrangement. Third, we develop and implement a portable structural approach to measure the economic cost of misallocative favoritism.