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 Asim Khwaja of the Harvard Kennedy School will be presenting, "Shifting allegiance to the State: Experimental Evidence from Dispute Resolution in Pakistan." w/ D. Acemoglu (MIT) , A. Cheema (LUMS) & J. Robinson (Chicago) Abstract Trust in state institutions is critical for the state to function. Its absence may not only jeopardize the ability of the state to deliver services and of the citizens to productively engage with the state and its agents but, we hypothesize, it might even induce citizens to shift their allegiance to non-state actors. We examine these issues using lab experiments in the field in rural Lahore, Pakistan. We provide (true) information to individuals about improvements in state courts in the area of dispute resolution in a neighboring district. We then use a within-person design to investigate whether this information changes peoples’ beliefs and perceptions as well as their willingness to give resources to the states in a relatively high-stakes experimental setting. Crucially, we also study how this treatment affects their beliefs and willingness to give resources to a competing non-state actor (informal village panchayats, which provide an entirely different path for dispute resolution). We also compare these results to a “placebo” treatment in which experimenters share their (positive) opinions about state institutions with the subjects, but provide no hard data about real-life improvements in dispute resolution. Our main results are as follows: First, this relatively simple intervention appears to change peoples’ beliefs and willingness to provide resources to the state or its agents significantly. In contrast, the placebo treatment has essentially no effect. Second, this positive informational treatment about the state makes individuals downgrade their opinions about non-state actors and makes them less willing to provide resources to the non-state actor, even though it has no information about the efficacy or other characteristics of the non-state actor. We interpret this second result as individuals shifting their allegiance away from non-state actors towards the state, and then endogenously changing their beliefs about non-state actors to justify this shift in allegiance. ** We Reserve the right to change the room location.