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UID:20251008T2231Z-1759962682.6992-EO-35027-38@10.19.146.24
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DTSTAMP:20260306T001008Z
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SUMMARY: Michael Callen\, LSE (Development/Political Economy Seminar)
DESCRIPTION: Institutional Uncertainty and State Building: National-Scale E
 xperimental Evidence from Nepal Coauthors: Stefano Fiorin (Bocconi)\, Rohin
 i Pande (Yale)\, Soledad Prillaman (Stanford)\, Jonathan Weigel (Berkeley)\
 , Noam Yuchtman (LSE) Abstract: We report results from a nationwide field e
 xperiment testing whether policymakers’ beliefs about the durability of pol
 itical institutions affects their willingness to invest effort in building 
 state capacity. […]
X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html: <blockquote><p>Institutional Uncertainty and 
 State Building: National-Scale Experimental Evidence from Nepal</p></blockq
 uote><p>Coauthors: Stefano Fiorin (Bocconi)\, Rohini Pande (Yale)\, Soledad
  Prillaman (Stanford)\, Jonathan Weigel (Berkeley)\, Noam Yuchtman (LSE)</p
 ><p>Abstract:</p><p>We report results from a nationwide field experiment te
 sting whether policymakers’ beliefs about the durability of political insti
 tutions affects their willingness to invest effort in building state capaci
 ty. We randomly provided accurate information about either political stabil
 ity or political inclusion to 4\,400 local politicians and bureaucrats in N
 epal — a country that transitioned to federal democracy in 2015. The stabil
 ity treatment informed respondents about Nepal’s percentile ranking on inte
 rnational measures of political stability. This information increased expec
 tations that the country’s new constitutional rules — including those regar
 ding executive selection\, judicial independence\, and media freedom — will
  persist in the future. Participants were then offered a real-effort opport
 unity to contribute to a core state function: collecting data on births\, d
 eaths\, and marriages to support Nepal’s effort to modernize its civil regi
 stration system. The stability treatment increased participation in this st
 ate-building task from 22% in the control group to 26% in the treatment gro
 up (p < 0.05). By contrast\, providing accurate information about the polit
 ical representation of women and historically underrepresented caste groups
  reduced optimism about the durability of new constitutional guarantees and
  decreased participation among those groups. Taken together\, the results i
 ndicate that beliefs about the durability and character of political instit
 utions causally affect policymakers’ willingness to invest effort in buildi
 ng state capacity. More broadly\, the findings support institutionalist the
 ories emphasizing the role of expectations about how institutions allocate 
 and constrain political power in shaping incentives to invest in building t
 he state (North 1990\, 1991\; North\, Wallis\, Weingast\, 2009).Organized b
 y: <a href="mailto:miguel.ortiz@ubc.ca">Miguel Ortiz</a></p>
LOCATION:IONA 533
GEO:49.260872;-123.113952
URL;VALUE=URI:https://economics.ubc.ca/events/event/michael-callen-lse-deve
 lopment-political-economy-seminar/
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