In the past four decades, governments around the world have embraced principles of gender equality. Democratic transitions, feminist movements, international norms, lobbying by politicians, partisan competition, technocratic ...

Most literature on criminal deterrence in law, economics, and criminology assumes that people who are caught for a crime will be punished. The literature focuses on how the size of sanctions and probability of being caught ...

Methodological texts about comparative work have focused overwhelmingly on controlled comparisons aimed at causal inference. To show the range of possible goals and approaches, this piece reflects on our own choices while ...

This paper estimates the constituency-level development effects of quotas for the Scheduled Castes (SCs) in India, using a unique dataset of development indicators for more than 3,100 state assembly constituencies in 15 ...

We know more about why laws on violence against women (VAW) were adopted than about how much and in what ways these laws affect society. The authors argue that even weakly enforced laws can contribute to positive social ...

Recent years have seen widespread advances in women’s legal rights in many countries. In other places, restrictions on women’s autonomy remain entrenched. This study explores cross-country patterns in the association between ...

It is well established that a country’s institutional features can weaken economic voting because voters find it hard to attribute performance to specific parties. We argue that local-level party system institutionalization ...

How do politicians allocate public resources? Despite the extensive literature on distributive politics, we have limited micro-level evidence for why and under what circumstances politicians choose various allocation ...