Does the passage of anticorruption reforms affect the types of people that want to serve in government? This article evaluates the effects of a common tool to fight corruption—financial disclosures—using data on 25,642 elections in Putin-era Russia. I argue that financial disclosures function like a personal audit, generating information for journalists and prosecutors to investigate illicit gains earned inside and outside of government. Exploiting staggered elections, I find that requiring financial disclosures leads to roughly 25% fewer incumbents seeking reelection and 10% fewer candidates with suspicious financial histories. Greater media freedom and law enforcement capacity further increase the risk of corruption and tax evasion being uncovered, resulting in even fewer candidacies from those criminally exposed. Increasing transparency changes the incentives for serving in elected office, even in settings where other political motives may be at play.
published papers
money and politics
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Indecent Disclosures: Anti-Corruption Reforms and Political Selection. American Journal of Political Science, 67(3), 503-519. 2023.
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Private Sector Policymaking: Business Background and Politicians’ Behavior in Office. Journal of Politics, 83(1), 260-276. 2021.
Candidates often tout their private sector experience when running for public office. But do businessperson politicians actually govern differently? This paper argues that given their preferences and managerial expertise, businesspeople in office adopt policies favorable to the business community and improve government efficiency. To test these claims, I collect data on over 33,000 Russian mayors and legislators and investigate policy outcomes using detailed municipal budgets and over a million procurement contracts. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that businessperson politicians increase expenditures on roads and transport, while leaving health and education spending untouched. Prioritizing economic over social infrastructure brings immediate benefits to firms, while holding back long-term accumulation of human capital. Businesspeople also do not reduce budget deficits, but rather adopt less competitive methods for selecting contractors, particularly in corruption-ripe construction. In all, businessperson politicians do more to make government run for business, rather than like a business.
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Princelings in the Private Sector: The Value of Nepotism. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 14(4), 349-381. 2019.
What is the value of a family tie? Nepotism is a common feature of democratic and non-democratic systems, but our understanding of how and why family members of government officials receive preferential treatment is limited. Using administrative data on the universe of Moscow citizens to identify family links, I adopt a difference-in-differences design to estimate the labor market returns of having a relative enter the Russian government from 1999 to 2004. Employment rates and annual wages increase for individuals related to federal bureaucrats. Surprisingly, these relatives just as often find work in the private sector, over which the government has no formal control. To explain this, I demonstrate that companies strategically hire officials’ family members in order to receive state contracts and preferential regulatory treatment. Governments may be willing to overlook this type of favoritism in the allocation of jobs, since even if they do not benefit directly, nepotism creates a class of individuals invested in the current power structure.
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Businesspeople in Elected Office: Identifying Private Benefits from Firm-Level Returns. American Political Science Review, 112(2), 322-338. 2018.
Do businesspeople who win elected office use their positions to help their firms? Business leaders become politicians around the world, yet we know little about whether their commitment to public service trumps their own private interests. Using an original dataset of 2,703 firms in Russia, I employ a regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of firm directors winning seats in subnational legislatures from 2004 to 2013. First, having a connection to a winning politician increases a firm’s revenue by 60% and profitability by 15% over a term in office. I then test between different mechanisms, finding that connected firms improve their performance by gaining access to bureaucrats and not by signaling legitimacy to financiers. The value of winning a seat increases in more politically competitive regions but falls markedly when more businesspeople win office in a convocation. Politically connected firms extract fewer benefits when faced with greater competition from other rent-seekers.
autocracy
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Opposition Rule Under Autocracy: Evidence from Russia. American Journal of Political Science, 1-19. 2025.
How does the opposition govern under autocracy? Most authoritarian regimes tolerate some degree of internal opposition, allowing it to contest and even take power. Yet we know little about how such power-sharing dynamics affect governance. In this paper, I exploit a unique instance where the opposition won control of political institutions in a prominent electoral autocracy: the 2017 Moscow municipal elections. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find that opposition control of municipal councils reduced the financial returns from office for ruling party deputies. This decrease in earnings comes from opposition-held councils removing rent-seeking opportunities by organizing more competitive procurement, reducing unnecessary budget expenditures, and curbing over-the-top compensation. Using a survey experiment, I then show that voters prefer opposition candidates with municipal governing experience over ruling party ones without it. Even in repressive environments, challenging autocratic rule may be well served by joining rather than boycotting institutions.
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Corruption and Co-Optation in Autocracy: Evidence from Russia. American Political Science Review, 119(1), 402-419. 2025.
Do corrupt officials govern differently in elected office? This article develops a theoretical framework and analyzes new data from financial disclosures to estimate the governing costs of corruption. First, I uncover substantial hidden wealth held by roughly one quarter of the legislators in the Russian Duma; these “kompromat deputies” are vulnerable to damaging information being used against them by the regime. Analyzing their behavior in office, I find that these deputies are less active and more absent members of parliament. When called to vote, kompromat deputies from the opposition also more eagerly support the regime’s political agenda. Finally, kompromat deputies are less likely to win reelection, suggesting that they have shorter time horizons as well as that parties have incentives to rotate them out. Autocrats permit and then monitor corruption in order to co-opt potential challengers, who in turn trade loyalty to the regime in exchange for opportunities to self-enrich.
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Candidate Filtering: The Strategic Use of Electoral Manipulations in Russia. British Journal of Political Science, 52(2), 649-670. 2022.
Incumbents have many tools to tip elections in their favor, yet little is known about how they choose between strategies. By comparing various tactics, this article argues that electoral malpractice centered on manipulating institutions offers the greatest effectiveness while shielding incumbents from public anger and criminal prosecution. To demonstrate this, the study focuses on a widespread institutional tactic: preventing candidates from accessing the ballot. First, in survey experiments, Russian voters respond less negatively to institutional manipulations, such as rejecting candidates, than to blatant fraud, such as ballot box stuffing. Next, using evidence from 25,935 Russian mayoral races, the article shows that lower societal and implementation costs enable incumbents to strategically reject candidacies from credible challengers and then reduce their electoral vulnerability. In all, the technology behind specific manipulations helps determine when and how incumbents violate electoral integrity.
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Electoral Manipulation and Regime Support: Survey Evidence from Russia. World Politics, 73(2), 275-314. 2021. (with Ora John Reuter)
Does electoral fraud stabilize authoritarian rule or undermine it? The answer to this question rests in part on how voters evaluate regime candidates who engage in fraud. Using a survey experiment conducted after the 2016 elections in Russia, the authors find that voters withdraw their support from ruling party candidates who commit electoral fraud. This effect is especially large among strong supporters of the regime. Core regime supporters are more likely to have ex ante beliefs that elections are free and fair. Revealing that fraud has occurred significantly reduces their propensity to support the regime. The authors’ findings illustrate that fraud is costly for autocrats not just because it may ignite protest, but also because it can undermine the regime’s core base of electoral support. Because many of its strongest supporters expect free and fair elections, the regime has strong incentives to conceal or otherwise limit its use of electoral fraud.
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Elite Defection under Autocracy: Evidence from Russia. American Political Science Review, 113(2), 552-568. 2019. (with Ora John Reuter)
Elite cohesion is a fundamental pillar of authoritarian stability. High-level defections can signal weakness, embolden the opposition, and sometimes, lead to regime collapse. Using a dataset of 4,291 ruling party candidates in Russia, this paper develops and tests hypotheses about the integrity of elite coalitions under autocracy. Our theory predicts that ruling elites defect when there is greater uncertainty about the regime’s willingness to provide spoils. Regimes that share power with the opposition, limit access to spoils, and lack formal institutions see more defections. Co-opting the opposition assuages outside threats but leaves regime insiders disgruntled and prone to defection. Those with personal followings and business connections are the most likely to defect, since they can pursue their political goals independently of the regime. Taken together, our results highlight important tradeoffs among authoritarian survival strategies. Many of the steps autocrats take to repel challenges simultaneously heighten the risk of defections.
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Online Social Media and Political Awareness in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes. British Journal of Political Science, 45(1), 29-51. 2015. (with Ora John Reuter)
Do online social media undermine authoritarianism? The conditions under which online social networks can increase public awareness of electoral fraud in non-democracies are examined in this article and it is argued that a given online social network will only increase political awareness if it is first politicized by elites. Survey data from the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections show that usage of Twitter and Facebook, which were politicized by opposition elites, significantly increased respondents’ perceptions of electoral fraud, while usage of Russia’s domestic social networking platforms, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, which were not politicized by opposition activists, had no effect on perceptions of fraud. This study elucidates the causes of post-election protest by uncovering a mechanism through which knowledge of electoral fraud spreads.
bureaucracy
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Individuals and Organizations as Sources of State Effectiveness, and Consequences for Policy Design. American Economic Review, 113(8), 2121-67. 2023. (with Michael Best and Jonas Hjort)
Bureaucrats implement policy. How important are they for a state’s productivity? And do the tradeoffs between policies depend on their effectiveness? Using data on 16 million public purchases in Russia, we show that 39 percent of the variation in prices paid for narrowly defined items is due to the individual bureaucrats and organizations who manage procurement. Low-price buyers also display higher spending quality. Theory suggests that such differences in effectiveness can be pivotal for policy design. To illustrate, we show that a common one—bid preferences for domestic suppliers—substantially improves procurement performance, but only when implemented by ineffective bureaucrats.
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Who Benefits From Economic Reform? Firms and Distributive Politics. Journal of Politics, 76(3), 841-858. 2014. (with Johannes Urpelainen)
While the distributional consequences of economic reform have captivated political scientists, few studies have investigated the ability of different firms to reap gains from policy change. Reforms indeed create winners and losers, but there is scant evidence on specifically which firms benefit and which firms lose out. We propose that the benefits from liberalizing reform accrue mostly to firms that are not vulnerable to extortion by the state and that have past experience with lobbying through a business association. This theory goes against the common intuition that liberalization reduces the importance of the state in the distribution of gains from economic activity. To test the theory, we examine how India’s national electricity reform in 2003 changed the quality of power supply for 1,094 manufacturing firms between 2002 and 2005. We find that liberalization produced highly skewed benefits and identify the politically salient characteristics that drive firm-level distributional inequality.
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Veto Players and the Value of Political Control: A Theory with Evidence From Energy Privatization. Comparative Political Studies, 47(10), 1384-1415. 2014. (with Johannes Urpelainen)
We examine how veto players and the government’s valuation of political control of economic activity affect the likelihood of privatization. When the government ascribes a high value to political control, veto players impede privatization because they would have to be compensated for their losses. When the value of political control is low, the government prefers to privatize enterprises that become difficult to control with multiple veto players. We test the theory against data on energy privatizations in developing countries, 1988-2008. Oil prices offer a quantitative measure of the government’s valuation of controlling the energy sector. When oil prices are high, the government has a keen interest in controlling the energy sector. Accordingly, additional veto players reduce (increase) the likelihood of privatization in times of high (low) oil prices. Beyond illuminating the politics of privatization, the results inform debates on the role of veto players in government policy.
clientelism
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Vote Brokers, Clientelist Appeals, and Voter Turnout: Evidence from Russia and Venezuela. World Politics, 71(4), 710-746. 2019. (with Timothy Frye and Ora John Reuter)
Modern clientelist exchange is typically carried out by intermediaries—party activists, employers, local strongmen, traditional leaders, and the like. Politicians use such brokers to mobilize voters, yet little about their relative effectiveness is known. The authors argue that broker effectiveness depends on their leverage over clients and their ability to monitor voters. They apply their theoretical framework to compare two of the most common brokers worldwide, party activists and employers, arguing the latter enjoy numerous advantages along both dimensions. Using survey-based framing experiments in Venezuela and Russia, the authors find voters respond more strongly to turnout appeals from employers than from party activists. To demonstrate mechanisms, the article shows that vulnerability to job loss and embeddedness in workplace social networks make voters more responsive to clientelist mobilization by their bosses. The results shed light on the conditions most conducive to effective clientelism and highlight broker type as important for understanding why clientelism is prevalent in some countries but not others.
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Hitting Them with Carrots: Voter Intimidation and Vote Buying In Russia. British Journal of Political Science, 49(3), 857-861. 2019. (with Timothy Frye and Ora John Reuter)
Scholars have identified many ways that politicians use carrots, such as vote buying, to mobilize voters, but have paid far less attention to how they use sticks, such as voter intimidation. This article develops a simple argument which suggests that voter intimidation should be especially likely where vote buying is expensive and employers have greater leverage over employees. Using survey experiments and crowdsourced electoral violation reports from the 2011–12 election cycle in Russia, the study finds evidence consistent with these claims. Moreover, it finds that where employers have less leverage over employees, active forms of monitoring may supplement intimidation in order to encourage compliance. These results suggest that employers can be reliable vote brokers; that voter intimidation can persist in a middleincome country; and that, under some conditions, intimidation may be employed without the need for active monitoring.
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Political Machines at Work: Voter Mobilization and Electoral Subversion in the Workplace. World Politics, 66(2), 195-228. 2014. (with Timothy Frye and Ora John Reuter)
The authors explore how modern autocrats win elections by inducing employers to mobilize their employees to vote for the regime and thereby subvert the electoral process. Using two original surveys of employers and workers conducted around the 2011 parliamentary elections in Russia, they find that just under one-quarter of employers engaged in some form of political mobilization. They then develop a simple framework for identifying which firms engage in voter mobilization and which workers are targeted for mobilization. Firms that are vulnerable to state pressure—financially dependent firms and those in sectors characterized by asset immobility—are among the most common sites of workplace-based electoral subversion. The authors also find that workers who are especially dependent on their employer are more likely to be targeted for mobilization. By identifying the conditions under which workplace mobilization occurs in authoritarian regimes, the authors contribute to the long-standing debate about the economic bases of democratization. In addition, they explore an understudied means of subverting elections in contemporary autocracies: the use of economic coercion to mobilize voters. Moreover, their research finds that clientelist exchange can thrive in industrial settings and in the absence of deeply embedded political parties.