Political Economy Workshop (Gov 3007)

Co-taught by Professors Kenneth Shepsle and Jeffry Frieden, the Research Workshop in Political Economy (Government 3007) is a year-long graduate seminar that aims to encourage cross-disciplinary research and excellence in graduate training. Political economy is a research tradition that explores how institutions affect political and economic outcomes. The workshop emphasizes the development of dissertation proposals and is a place where graduate students can present their research to an audience of committed and informed peers. It is open to graduate students in the Departments of Government and Economics, and the Program in Political Economy and Government. The workshop holds both internal and public seminars and meetings. At the internal meetings, approximately twelve per semester, graduate students and faculty present their own work to one another. At the public meetings, up to two per semester, leading scholars are invited to Harvard to present their work. Although the workshop is by invitation only, affiliates of the Weatherhead Center are encouraged to attend the public meetings. Mauricio Fernández Duque will present his paper “Herding and Pluralistic Ignorance: A Model of Equilibrium Misinformation”. Aseem Mahajan will be the discussant. Pablo Balan will present his paper “Malfeasance revelations, coordination through social networks, and electoral sanctioning: experimental evidence from Mexico ”. Itzchak Tzachi Raz will be the discussant. Abstract for “Herding and Pluralistic Ignorance: A Model of Equilibrium Misinformation” I analyze a setting in which individuals take sequential actions among a group of people who is silently judging each other. Applications to political economy include public voting, or group deliberation. Individuals care about their action, but they also want to match the group's majority preference. Critically, they do not know what others prefer although preferences signal the distribution of preferences. They therefore rely on their beliefs of others' beliefs to determine how they will be judged. Equilibrium misinformation may arise from two mechanisms. There may be herding, in which individuals ignore their own signal due to signals others have revealed. There may also be pluralistic ignorance, in which all types act according to the population's majority preference expecting it to be the group's majority preference, leading no one to reveal their type. Herding increases with uncertainty over the distribution of preferences, while pluralistic ignorance diminishes with larger groups. In small groups, herding is the only mechanism through which a group with minority preferences can avoid pluralistic ignorance. Abstract for “ Malfeasance revelations, coordination through social networks, and electoral sanctioning: experimental evidence from Mexico '” (with Eric Arias, Horacio Larreguy, John Marshall, and Pablo Querubin) How do social networks moderate the effect of incumbent performance information on electoral sanctioning? We propose a simple model where voters update from the information they receive, but information shocks also enable voters in connected networks to coordinate their votes in favor of challengers against relatively poorly-performing incumbents. We test this argument using a field experiment in Mexico, where voters were randomly assigned information about malfeasant incumbent spending. Malfeasance revelations increased the incumbent party’s vote share on average, consistent with voters’ pessimistic prior beliefs. However, data from extended family networks show that this effect is conditional on network structure. In more connected networks—measured by average degree, the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix, and the clustering coefficient—information is significantly less likely to increase electoral support for the incumbent party. Individual level data indicates that this effect of networks is not due to greater information dissemination and voter belief updating, but instead because networks facilitate coordination among voters. Consistent with our model, social coordination is greatest where the incumbent compares poorly with the challenger. These results suggest that networks can enable voters to coordinate around information to remove poorly performing incumbent parties.