Policy Deliberation & Voter Persuasion
Policy Deliberation and Voter Persuasion: Estimating Intrinsic Causal Effects of Town Hall Meetings - Part of 3ie London Evidence Week 2016
Abstract: Prof Leonard Wantchekon will talk about experimental evidence on the effect of town hall meetings on voting behaviour. He will provide a simple statistical framework for causal inference in randomised experiments where the treatment is a decision- making process or an institution such as voting, deliberation on decentralised governance. The proposed framework builds on a standard set up for estimating causal effects in randomised experiments with noncompliance. The same model is used to analyse the effect of policy deliberation on voting behaviour. He will provide practical suggestions for estimating intrinsic causal effects of institution.
Speaker: Leonard Wantchekon is Professor in the Politics department and associated faculty in the Economics department. Prior to joining Princeton University, he was on the faculty of New York University (2001-2011), and Yale University (1995-2001). He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University (1995) and his M.A. in Economics from Laval University and University of British Columbia (1992).
His research is broadly focused on Political and Economic development, particularly in Africa and his specific interests include topics such as democratization, clientelism and redistributive politics, resource curse, and long-term social impact of historical events. He is the author of numerous publications in leading academic journals, including “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa” (with Nathan Nunn), in the American Economic Review; “The Paradox of “Warlord” Democracy: A Theoretical Investigation,” in the American Political Science Review (2004); Clientelism and Voting Behavior: A Field Experiment in Benin, World Politics (2003) as well as “Electoral Competition under the Threat of Political Unrest” (with Matthew Ellman) in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2000).
Professor Wantchekon is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Executive Committee of the Council for International Teaching and Research at Princeton. He served as the Secretary of the American Political Science Association (2008-2009) and on the Ibrahim Index Technical Committee (2009-2013). Finally, he is a core partner director at the Afrobarometer Network and the founder the Africa School of Economics (ASE) set to open in Benin in 2014.
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