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Why do candidates give voters handouts during political campaigns? Drawing on qualitative data from Mumbai, this article argues that competitive elections prompt candidates to distribute handouts for strategic reasons. While they know handouts to be inefficient, candidates face a prisoner's dilemma. Fearing that their opponents will distribute handouts, they distribute them themselves to counter, or neutralize, their opponents' strategies.

Much of the recent scholarship about ethnicity in comparative politics has focused on why ethnicity becomes a salient cleavage. Yet opinions still diverge as to how ethnicity matters. This article tests three hypotheses relevant to this question. Building on recent arguments, it first hypothesizes that voters take the ethnicity of parties and candidates into consideration. Second, it hypothesizes that wherever ethnicity is politically salient, it matters beyond coethnicity—that is, voters' decisions are guided by ethnicity even when they are choosing among non-coethnics. Third, it argues that the advantage conferred by ethnicity is mediated by non-ethnic factors. A large vignette experiment carried in 2013 in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh provides strong support for each of these hypotheses. These results imply that the influence of ethnicity on voting behavior may be subtler and more complex than what the main theories of ethnic politics usually assume.

Can descriptive representation for a stigmatized group change the beliefs and intentions of members of dominant groups? To address this question, I focus on quotas (reservations) that allow members of the scheduled castes to access key executive positions in India's village institutions. To measure the psychological effect of reservations, I combine a natural experiment with an innovative MP3-player-based self-administered survey that measures various beliefs and behavioral intentions. Results provide credible causal evidence that reservations affect the psychology of members of dominant castes. Even though villagers living in reserved villages continue to think poorly of members of the scheduled castes (stereotypes do not improve), reservation affects two other types of beliefs: perceived social norms of interactions and perceived legal norms of interactions. These changes in beliefs in turn appear to have far-reaching consequences for intercaste relations, as villagers' discriminatory intentions also decrease under reservation.

Fact-checks and corrections of falsehoods have emerged as effective ways to counter misinformation online. But in contexts with encrypted messaging applications (EMAs), corrections must necessarily emanate from peers. Are such social corrections effective? If so, how substantiated do corrective messages need to be? To answer these questions, we evaluate the effect of different types of social corrections on the persistence of misinformation in India ([Formula: see text]5,100). Using an online experiment, we show that social corrections substantially reduce beliefs in misinformation, including in beliefs deeply anchored in salient group identities. Importantly, these positive effects are not systematically attenuated by partisan motivated reasoning, highlighting a striking difference from Western contexts. We also find that the presence of a correction matters more relative to how sophisticated this correction is: substantiating a correction with a source only improves its effect in a minority of cases; besides, when social corrections are effective, citing a source does not drastically improve the size of their effect. These results have implications for both users and platforms and speak to countering misinformation in developing countries that rely on private messaging apps.

In countries ranging from the Philippines to Brazil, political actors have embraced WhatsApp. In India, WhatsApp groups backed by political parties are suspected of conveying misinformation and/or of circulating hateful content pointed towards minority groups, potentially leading to offline violence. They are also seen as one of the reasons for the dominance of the ruling party (the BJP). Yet, despite this narrative, we so far know littleabout the content shared on these partisan groups nor about the way in which (mis-)informationcirculates on them. In this manuscript, we describe the visual content of 533 closed threads maintained by party workers across the state of Uttar Pradesh, collected over aperiod of 9 months. Manual coding of around 36,000 images allows us to estimate the amount of misinformation/hateful content on one hand, and partisan content on the other. Additional matching of this data with other sources and analyses based on computer vision techniques inturn allows us to evaluate the extent to which the content posted on WhatsApp threads may serve the interests of the ruling party. Analyses suggest that partisan threads contain relatively few hateful or misinformed posts; more surprisingly maybe, most content cannot easily be classified as "partisan". While much content appears to be religion-related, which may serve an indirect partisan role, the largest share of the content is more easily classifiable as phatic or entertainment related.

In the study of electoral politics and political behavior in the developing world, India is often considered to be an exemplar of the centrality of contingency in distributive politics, the role of ethnicity in shaping political behavior, and the organizational weakness of political parties. Whereas these axioms have some empirical basis, the massive changes in political practices, the vast variation in political patterns, and the burgeoning literature on subnational dynamics in India mean that such generalizations are not tenable. In this article, we consider research on India that compels us to rethink the contention that India neatly fits the prevailing wisdom in the comparative politics literature. Our objective is to elucidate how the many nuanced insights about Indian politics can improve our understanding of electoral behavior both across and within other countries, allowing us to question core assumptions in theories of comparative politics.

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.