Resumen de Essays in empirical political economy
This thesis is composed of three chapters. In the first chapter, joint work with Federico Masera (UNSW), we study how the capacity of the state in providing similar services influences the support for the non-state organizations. We do so in the context of Pakistan and study the competition between the Pakistani state and the Taliban in the provision of natural disaster relief. We first look at the floods of 2010 that received an inadequate response from the government due to poor Pakistan-U.S. relations at that time. We show that support for the Taliban increased in the areas affected by the flood. We then study the 2005 earthquake that instead received a swift government response and show that the Taliban lost support in the areas affected by the earthquake. Alternate mechanisms such as anger against the incumbent, political competition and substitution, and religiosity do not account for these results.
In the second chapter, I study the indirect impact of international terrorism on politics. Using the September 11 attacks as an exogenous shock to the salience of terrorism and employing a Difference-in-Differences strategy, I compare changes in political participation in areas with higher risk of terrorism to areas with lower risk. I measure the risk of terrorism for each county in the U.S. based on three different measures: Department of Homeland Security funding, presence of critical infrastructure, and distance from the state capitol. I find that areas with higher risk of terrorism increased political participation and campaign contribution in the subsequent elections. Using instrumental variable strategy based on the distance of each county from the state centroid yield similar results. The results highlight how unfortunate national shocks such as international terrorism can increase the political engagement among citizens.
In the third chapter, I study the political impacts of mass shootings in the United States. Mass shootings are unfortunately frequent events which keep drawing public attention towards gun policy. The divide on gun policy among Republicans and Democrats has increased both among voters and politicians. However, we know very little about mass shootings and its effects. In this paper, I construct a list of mass shootings in the U.S. from 2001-12 and analyze their impact on electoral outcomes, voter preferences, and gun policy. Using a Difference-in-Difference strategy, I find that Republicans lose significant votes in all federal (Presidential, Gubernatorial, Senatorial, and House) elections after mass shootings. Variations of identification strategy, placebo and falsification exercises suggest that this decline reflects a causal impact of mass shootings. While mass shootings result in lower individual campaign contributions for the Republicans, the NRA increases its contributions to Republican candidates. I then show that mass shootings do not change the average preferred gun policy among the electorate, but rather impact the electoral outcomes through an increase in the importance of gun policy among voters. The lack of change in the average preferred policy masks the increase in the polarization between Republicans and Democrats. Mass shootings lead to an even greater disagreement on gun policy among voters: while Democrats demand greater gun control after mass shootings, Republicans shift towards lower gun control. Likewise, politicians from both parties shift to more diverging stances on gun policy.
