This dissertation contains three essays on electoral politics, with focuses on political dynasties, political participation, and the political context of Pakistan. All three essays deal with the barriers that certain individuals face when participating in politics. The first essay explores how certain institutional changes, but not others, curtail the power of political families and the conditions under which electoral reforms create space for new candidates for legislative office. While the second essay makes a largely methodological contribution, the central result that political dynasties hold advantages even in close elections also has implications for who can enter and win elections. The third essay documents how social norms act as barriers to female political participation in Pakistan and considers the kinds of expectations that may increase female turnout when it lags far behind male turnout.

In the first essay, my co-authors, Ali Cheema and Farooq Naseer, and I estimate the effect of institutions on political dynasties. Previous evidence is mixed on whether institutional change disrupts elite power and policy prescriptions for how to improve the competitiveness of elections are unclear. We contribute to this literature by studying the effects of two specific reforms enacted before the 2002 General Elections in Pakistan---reapportionment and an education minimum for legislative candidates. Introduced by General Musharraf's military regime, these reforms were specifically aimed at powerful political families. However, we provide evidence that only one was effective. Using a pseudo-regression discontinuity design relying on the formulaic assignment of seats to districts following reapportionment, we estimate that increasing the number of seats in the legislature dilutes the prevalence of political dynasties in elected positions. Political families were able to win just as many seats as before reapportionment, but were unable to capture many of the new seats, leaving room for politicians from other families to enter and win new seats. On the other hand, the education minimum was less effective at curtailing incumbent power. Using a differences-in-differences design, we estimate that areas most affected by the disqualifications caused by the education minimum were more likely to have connected family members entering and winning elections for the first time, while ``outsiders'' were even less likely to enter and win the newly vacated seats. We argue that elites may be more willing to respond to disqualifications than an expansion in the number of seats in a legislature due to diminishing marginal returns to the number of elected family members. This implies that increasing legislature sizes may be more effective at curtailing elite power than other institutional reforms that restrict who can run in an election.

The second essay makes a largely methodological contribution by providing evidence that members of political families are more likely to win very close elections. This imbalance in the dynastic status of winners and losers of close elections exists in datasets from Japan, the Philippines, Pakistan, and the United States. On average, the winner of a close elections is about 6 percentage points more likely to be a family member of a previously elected politician than a loser of a close election. This imbalance, while perhaps unsurprising given the well-documented advantage dynastic candidates have in general, has important implications for the validity of close elections regression discontinuity designs. Predicated on the assumption that those who barely win and those who barely lose elections are similar on many characteristics, close elections regression discontinuity designs aim to estimate the causal effect of winning an election. However, if there is a detectable imbalance in the characteristics of winners and losers of close elections, as with dynastic status here, then estimates using close elections regression discontinuity designs may be biased. In fact, I calculate that between 9 and 40 percent of top political science and economics papers that use these designs have their most robust estimate quartered by bias of this magnitude.

The third essay moves away from candidacy and the legislature and focuses on the issue of female political participation in Pakistan and the role that norms play in constraining or motivating behavior. Using data from 37 communities on the beliefs of men and women, their expectations about others in their community, and their social networks, this essay provides evidence that behavior and expectations about behavior are more strongly correlated with self-reported female political participation than normative beliefs and expectations. In other words, women self-report voting more often when they believe women in their social network vote and when women in their social network self-report voting. This relationship between self-reported voting and both empirical expectations---beliefs about what others actually do---and the actual behavior of others with a woman's own behavior is stronger than the relationship between self-reported voting and normative expectations---beliefs about what others think one ought to do. I argue that these results are explained by limited female mobility outside the home in Pakistan. Due to this restriction, female turnout takes the form of a coordination game and thus empirical expectations and behavior are more important than normative expectations in explaining when women will vote. Lastly, I provide evidence that expectations of both kinds serve to license political participation; women who think others support their right to vote will be more likely to turn out only if they themselves support a woman's right to vote. In a context like Pakistan, supportive social norms regarding suffrage only mobilize women when they themselves are supportive of female political participation.

This dissertation addresses the connections between politics and economic inequality. Although the main chapters are three independent essays, they share underlying research questions about redistribution: why do we observe significant differences in the amount of redistribution across democratic nations, and why do unequal countries redistribute less than do countries that are already more equal to begin with?

In Chapter 2, I investigate why the level of economic inequality does not explain the amount of redistribution by focusing on an individual’s perception about inequality. I argue that the amount of redistribution does not correspond to the extent of economic inequality because the assumption of the model that voters accurately perceive inequality does not hold. I will demonstrate this by examining survey data and revealing that people do not necessarily know how unequal their society is. People demand a larger public redistribution only if they perceive high inequality.

In Chapter 3, I ask who within a polity underestimates inequality and what consequences does this underestimation have for politics. In Japan, there are more people who underestimate inequality than people who overestimate it. Why do Japanese underestimate inequality rather than overestimate it? I argue that people living in a relatively equal area within a country are more likely to underestimate inequality than those living in a relatively unequal area. The statistical analysis reveals three things. First, certain demographic and political factors systematically affect the probability of underestimation at the individual level. Second, the degree of underestimation varies across prefectures in Japan. Third, underestimation of inequality affects electoral outcomes.

In Chapter 4, I show how individuals’ income and motivation affect their turnout decisions. Turnout rises as income increases. At the same time, motivation (driven by the salience of the outcome for voters) has a positive effect on turnout as well. This effect of motivation on turnout is stronger among the wealthy than among the poor. Thus, motivation can further widen the gap in turnout between haves and have-nots.

These findings suggest that we should pay more attention to subjective aspects of inequality. It is perceived inequality that matters to politics of redistribution.

We study the determinants of wage inequality in 16 OECD countries in the last two decades of the twentieth century. We find that these are quite different in the 1980s than in the 1990s. In the 1980s, growing wage dispersion is due to changes in the institutions of the labor market. Declining unionization and declines in the level at which wages are bargained collectively both contribute to widening pay dispersion in the 1980s. In the 1990s, by contrast, increases in pay inequality are due to increasing trade with less developed nations. To the extent that low-pay workers have been protected from rising wage differentials in the 1990s, it has been because of government policy, in the form of social insurance, and not thanks to labor organizations. This is the first study to report that the causes for pay inequality differed between the 1980s and the 1990s.

What explains African protests amid rising prosperity? I show that the main cause of the increasingly frequent urban protests that we observe in 21st-century Africa is economic inequality despite substantial economic growth. Using cross-national statistical analyses of 38 African countries and original ethnographic and individual-level survey data from fieldwork in Niger, I find that African protesters are driven largely by economic or material concerns, and less by ethnic antipathies or preferences for democracy. Examining different forms of inequality and grievance, I show that Africans are more likely to protest, all else equal, if they perceive their future economic opportunities as constricting instead of expanding. Economic or material concerns, however, are not sufficient to cause protest participation. Corroborating other scholars' research, I also find that social networks are important for mobilizing aggrieved people by providing solutions for coordination and cooperation problems.

This dissertation uses Italian data to investigate why parties nominate for reelection incumbents accused of corruption. In some elections, Italian parties renominated incumbent parliament members (MPs) regardless of whether they were accused of corruption by the judiciary. Once they were renominated, accused MPs were reelected to office. In other elections, parties refrained from renominating accused MPs. Non-renominated MPs were then unable to reenter parliament.

To explain this variation, I argue that media coverage of corruption decreases the chances of allegedly corrupt incumbents being renominated. Based on two dimensions of media coverage, I develop two hypotheses. By giving prominence to the issue of corruption, the media increases its public salience, discouraging party leaders from renominating legislators accused of corruption. Prominence of corruption in the media lowers the renomination chances of allegedly corrupt legislators. Then, by reporting on corruption accusations against specific legislators, the media enables voters to identify them and punish their party. When corruption is salient to voters, media mentions of corruption allegations against specific legislators decrease their chances of being renominated.

To test the first hypothesis, I analyze how the Italian media covered corruption before each election. I find a negative correlation between media prominence of corruption and the renomination rates of MPs accused of corruption. For the second hypothesis, I conduct a statistical analysis of MPs' renomination probabilities in two elections. Controlling for relevant confounders, newspaper mentions of corruption allegations against MPs appear to decrease their renomination chances. These findings indicate that media scrutiny promotes electoral accountability by influencing candidate selection.

In my dissertation, I study labour market institutions and their effects on political behaviour, as well as economic forces behind discriminatory policies against ethnic minorities. In the first chapter, I study electoral intimidation in Russia during the most recent 2011--12 and 2016--18 electoral cycles using a novel and rich municipality- and company-level dataset. I find a robust relationship between employment concentration, turnout, and votes for the regime in parliamentary and presidential elections. I argue that a dominant employer in a municipality can coerce its employees to turn out and vote for the regime, because voters have limited options for outside employment. I identify a causal effect of employment concentration on turnout and voting.

In the second chapter, co-authored with Imil Nurutdinov, we study the political economy of discrimination against Jewish entrepreneurs in the late Imperial Russia. Prior to 1889, a large share of Russian private capital was invested in state and state-subsidized assets that yielded a fixed return and were deemed safe. After the government received access to new external sovereign debt markets with lower interest rates, it forcefully converted bonds on the domestic market. Combined with other policy changes between 1889 and 1894, this shock freed large amounts of domestic private capital that now had to be reinvested in the equity market. We explore the relationship between anti-Jewish restrictions in the equity market that began around the same time, in 1890, and capital intensity of 3-digit manufacturing industries (SIC). Russian law required all corporate charters to be approved by the central government, which was also used as an opportunity to target specific corporations and to preclude Jews from creating and/or investing in them. Using the RUSCORP database of all manufacturing corporations created in 1891--1902 (Owen, 1992) and novel data on the universe of Russian factories in 1890, we find a positive relationship between capital intensity and the probability of restrictions. We address some of the possible alternative explanations for the observed pattern using the data on major merchant guilds and incorporated factories.

In the third chapter, I investigate the empirical relationship between land inequality, employment concentration, the percentage of state employees and electoral results in the 1907 parliamentary election in Imperial Russia. The electoral process was two-step and classified voters into four different groups: peasants, workers, urban residents, and landowners. What were the electoral manipulation strategies of the tsarist regime back then? I argue that the regime relied on the power of landed elites, industrialists, and state employees to manipulate turnout and deliver votes in the parliamentary elections. I find that land inequality is positively associated with the turnout of peasants, which indicates the power of landowners in rural areas. Higher employment concentration, which indicates the power of industrialists, does not appear to affect the turnout of workers directly. However, higher employment concentration is negatively associated with the percentage of failed elections at factories. The share of state employees is positively associated with urban voter turnout. This could indicate electoral pressure on the state employees by the tsarist regime.

This dissertation focuses on Tanzania, a hegemonic party regime where nearly half of the population lacks access to a clean and safe source of drinking water despite massive investments in this sector in recent years. In order to make sense of this disconnect between spending and improved outcomes, I analyze novel data on financial allocations and infrastructure construction for water provision, contextualized by public opinion surveys, interviews and focus group discussions conducted during six months of fieldwork. I find that Tanzania's strategy of decentralizing water provision to local governments has largely failed to promote responsiveness to local needs, due to local capture and politicized misallocation. I demonstrate how politicians have skewed resource distribution in such a way that favors their core supporters at the expense of demonstrably needier constituents. At the same time, citizens have been unable to compel responses to their needs given the lack of credible alternatives to the ruling party, as well as confusion over government responsibility for water provision, low expectations of self-efficacy and collective action, and entrenched gender norms. My study adds to the rich literature on decentralization by illuminating the challenges it can encounter in the context of a hegemonic party regime. By illuminating the role of local politics, my dissertation also adds to our understanding of how hegemonic party regimes -- the most common type of authoritarian rule in the post-World War II period -- survive and endure.

Why do governments sometimes fail to provide essential services that are fundamental to development and the well-being of their citizens? I investigate the role of gender, of both policy makers and of beneficiaries, in the variation of access to sanitation in rural India. I argue that politicians' gender can help explain why some elected officials are more responsive in providing sanitation services than others in terms of the quality and quantity of latrines. Given the close association between latrine quality and water-borne diseases, there is a need to examine the variation in the quality of latrines rather than access to latrines as previous studies do. Using an instrumental variable approach with sub-state level data that exploits the quasi-randomness of the gender of the winner in close elections, I study the influence of female state legislators of fifteen major states in India. When faced with increased electoral competition female politicians act in the same way as their male counterparts do, which is by widening latrine coverage, in order to signal good performance to the voters. However, female state legislators are more likely to improve sanitation services than their male counterparts by increasing higher quality latrines (flush toilets), after controlling for correlates of electoral incentives. Given that women benefit disproportionately from latrines, the role of gender in the decision making process among household members is likely to be relevant. Thus, the second part of my argument examines what influences women, the main beneficiaries of improved sanitation, to make financial investments towards having a household latrine. Drawing from nationwide household level survey data, I find that households are more likely to have latrines not only when women are more informed through mass media, but also when their intra-household status is higher, especially with respect to taking part in the financial decision making process in households.

This dissertation examines how reactions by political elites moderate the efficacy of anti-corruption policies. The focus is on how their reactions explain the resilience of corruption and the limit the functioning of different tools of democratic systems: electoral accountability, legislative oversight of the executive branch and the sanctioning of corruption by judicial authorities. I study these in the context of policies to curb corruption in Brazilian municipal governments that have been implemented since the beginning of the 2000s.

Professional and independent audits uncovered substantial evidence of corruption in most municipal governments but did not lead to substantial electoral consequences. I demonstrate that one ways through which Brazilian mayors avoid damages to their careers by changing their rent-sharing strategies. After an audit, they share more of the spoils of holding office with council members who are crucial for their short-term survival in government. If the share of legislators from their own party is low, council members benefit from a larger increase in their wealth. This makes council members less likely to defect from the mayors' coalition and helps mayors to get the support from other political parties in the subsequent election. This suggest that short-term gains targeted at specific individuals might come at the expense of long-run transformations in municipal governments.

In addition, mayors and potential participants in corrupt transactions respond to the removal from office of neighboring mayors, a visible form of punishment for corruption, by engaging less in activities that might latter result in their own conviction. My findings corroborate the resilience of the political elites to interventions that might undermine the status quo as well as their ability to adapt their behavior to new circumstances.