Person: Marshall, John Louis
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Marshall
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John Louis
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Marshall, John Louis
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Publication Information Consumption and Electoral Accountability in Mexico(2016-05-05) Marshall, John Louis; Iversen, Torben; Alt, James E.; Larreguy Arbesú, Horacio A.; Snyder, Jr., James M.Electoral accountability rests on voters re-electing high-performing and removing low-performing incumbents. However, voters in many developing contexts are poorly informed about incumbent performance, particularly of local politicians. This dissertation asks: how do voters in low-information environments hold local governments to account for their performance in office? I seek to explain when Mexican voters obtain performance information pertaining to their municipal incumbents, and ultimately how it impacts their beliefs and voting behavior. I argue that voters are able and willing to sanction local governments upon receiving incumbent performance indicators. However, electoral accountability requires incentives for voters and media outlets to respectively acquire and supply politically-relevant news. Information in the news just before elections, when these incentives align, thus strongly influences electoral accountability. I test these propositions by examining in detail voter responses to two key issues in Mexican politics - malfeasance in office and violent crime. The first chapter, coauthored with Eric Arias, Horacio Larreguy and Pablo Querubín, uses a large-scale field experiment to establish that voters indeed update from and act on malfeasance revelations. Reflecting voters’ negative priors, the distribution of leaflets documenting mayoral malfeasance increases the incumbent party’s vote share on average. However, consistent with Bayesian learning, these rewards decrease with positive prior beliefs, the strength of such priors, the severity of malfeasance revelations, and the extent of negative updating. Moreover, surprising information mobilizes turnout, while relatively unsurprising information reduces turnout. The second chapter then explores when and why voters choose to become informed. I argue that voters strategically acquire costly political information to cultivate a reputation among their peers as politically sophisticated. Leveraging a field experiment and observational variation, I demonstrate that social incentives increase political knowledge among voters nested in groups that collectively value political knowledge. This effect is most pronounced among relatively unsophisticated voters seeking to reach a minimum standard within their group, but is also evident among more sophisticated voters seeking to differentiate themselves from less-informed peers. The third chapter, coauthored with Horacio Larreguy and James Snyder, shows how broadcast media regulates access to relevant incumbent performance indicators. Supporting our argument that a media station’s potential audience shapes their incentives to provide local news, voters only sanction malfeasant parties in precincts covered by media stations whose principal audience resides in the precinct's municipality. Conversely, media outlets based outside the municipality do not aid, and in fact crowd out, electoral accountability. The final chapter combines these insights to explain how voters hold incumbents to account for homicides in their municipality. I argue that even short-term performance indicators in the news prior to elections shape the voting behavior of poorly informed citizens. I show that voters consume most news before elections and update about incumbent performance from pre-election homicide shocks reported at that time. Unlike longer-term homicide trends, pre-election homicides substantially reduce the incumbent party's probability of re-election. Sanctioning again requires, and increases with, access to local media, and is concentrated where voter priors are weakest.