Harvard Seminar on Positive Political Economy

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences and The Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University are sponsoring a seminar on formal and quantitative political research. The Program on Positive Political Economy (PPE) supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies. All interested faculty and students are invited to attend. Professor Nancy Qian of Yale will be presenting, "Determinants of Local Elections in Autocracies: Evidence from Theory and Empirics." Abstract: This paper attempts to understand the conditions for an autocrat to prefer local elections for bureaucrats. We develop a model which shows that local elections impose tradeoffs between better governance and reduced control for the autocrat that depend on the alignment of preferences between the autocrat and the citizens; and that autocrats will prefer local elections more when they are poor relative to when they are rich. We provide evidence for the former with a large panel survey that we collect on the introduction of rural elections, policy and economic outcomes in China, and note that the latter matches stylized facts. ** We Reserve the right to change the room location.