State Action and Moral Attitudes Toward Sexual Consent (with Eli Baltzersen and Øyvind Skorge)
In recent years, several countries have in moved from a coercion-based to a consent-based legal definition of rape. Building on expressive law theory, we discuss how a move to consent-based rape legislation may shift moral attitudes toward sexual consent. In this Registered Report, we test this prediction experimentally in Norway, where a proposal was recently made to include consent in the current coercion-based legal framework. Providing information treatments about current and proposed legislation to a representative sample of Norwegian citizens and large additional samples of civil servants and elected representatives, allows us to test the expressive power of the proposed law while holding information about current legislation constant. Contrary to our pre-registered hypothesis, we find a small backlash effect among citizens who are informed about the proposed legal reform. In our exploratory sub-group analysis, we find a positive effect of our information treatment only in the sample of elected politicians.

Motivations for Partisan Attachment in the Developing World (with Ankita Barthwal)
In developing countries, partisanship is pervasive, but its motivations remain largely unexplored. Whereas non-programmatic party–voter linkages dominate the political discourse in these contexts, we posit that such linkages are probably not the sole motivating factor behind partisanship. Drawing on interviews and an original survey from India—a context rife with non-programmatic exchanges—we find that partisans generally attribute their loyalty to parties’ ideological positions and policy platforms. This finding is reinforced by a priming experiment in which respondents made to reflect on parties’ ideologies and policies were more likely to self-report as partisans. Priming non-programmatic party–voter linkages in the form of community-based favoritism produces no discernible effect. Exploring differences between those attributing their own partisan loyalty to more programmatic or more non-programmatic motivations, we find the former group to be more consistent in their voting patterns and more likely to report negative partisanship, though both groups express similar levels of affective partisan attachment. Our findings underscore the need for more nuanced theorizing of partisanship and its effects in the developing world.

Selecting the “Best”? Competing Dimensions of Politician Quality in the Developing World (with Ananish Chaudhuri, Vegard Iversen, and Pushkar Maitra)
Evidence suggests that politicians in advanced democracies are positively selected on characteristics relevant to their suitability for political office. Whereas stereotypes abound, much less is known about the quality of politicians in developing countries. Drawing on unique experimental and survey data on village-level politicians in West Bengal, India, we find some evidence of positive selection into office: elected politicians are more educated, motivated, and have greater integrity than their constituents. However, they also have lower cognitive ability and are more likely to come from politically networked families. Comparing first-timers with re-elected politicians, we observe that experienced politicians display somewhat more political knowledge and motivation than their inexperienced peers, but are also more likely to be wealthy and male. Our findings demonstrate that conclusions about politician quality depend critically on measurement choices and that there may be competing dimensions of politician quality in the developing world.

Political Determinants of the News Market: Novel Data and Quasi-Experimental Evidence from India (with Julia Cagé and Guilhem Cassan)
Information conveyed through news media influences political behavior. But to what extent are media markets themselves shaped by political determinants? We build a novel panel dataset of newspaper markets in India from 2002 to 2017 to measure the impact of changes in electoral importance on how news markets develop over time. We exploit the announcement of an exogenous change in the boundaries of electoral constituencies to causally identify the relationship between the (future) electoral importance of news markets and the change in the number and circulation of newspapers. Using both an event-study and a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we show that markets that became more electorally important experienced a significant rise in both circulation and the number of titles per capita. Both supply and demand seem to drive the increase, but we estimate that the former explains almost all the variation in the short run and around 50% in the long run. Finally, we document how effects vary with prior levels of political competition and newspapers’ characteristics, and discuss implications for voting behavior and democratic accountability.

Beyond Hate Speech: Online Rumors and Out-Group Resentment in Divided Societies (with Mathilde Bålsrud Mjelva, Sebastian Schutte, Helga Malmin Binningsbø)

The political consequences of hate speech on social media are the subject of intense research. Studies from Europe and North America have found that online exposure to hate speech affects both attitudes and offline behavior. Moving beyond hate speech, we show how little it takes for online rumors to stoke inter-group tensions in divided societies. In a pre-registered survey experiment with 3,075 Hindu social media users in India, we navigate ethical challenges with very mild information treatments, post-treatment fact-checks, and debriefs. We find that even subtle online rumors change sentiments toward entire groups and heighten conflict-related emotions, especially when combined with injustice frames. As none of our information treatments classify as hate speech, these problems appear inherent to social media technology and point toward a need for a broader debate on policy responses.

The Politics of Assisted Reproduction: Global Inequality and the Role of the State (with Eli Baltzersen, Catarina Barbieri, Mala Htun, and My Rafstedt)
Involuntary childlessness is a challenge across the world, but there is great global inequality in access to assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). In contrast to abortion, ARTs have been significantly less politicized, and state regulation is still evolving. In this paper, we draw on both cross-national data and case studies to demonstrate the uneven access to ARTs both across and within countries, something that constitutes a serious challenge for global reproductive justice. Further, we discuss how ARTs differ from abortion and other morality politics issues in that they only challenge religious doctrine to a limited degree. Finally, we unpack ARTs as a political issue that maps onto numerous ongoing political debates. Overall, our goal is to demonstrate that the politics of ARTs affect not only the lives of individuals needing assistance to achieve parenthood but are also relevant to various contentious political topics, and therefore warrant more attention from political actors and academics alike.