Working with the Kenyan Cabinet and Ministry of Health, we experimentally evaluated the market-level impacts of healthcare regulation in settings with public and private providers. We randomly allocated 273 markets with 1258 facilities to treatment and control arms and in treatment arms, facilities were inspected to assess compliance with minimum patient safety standards with the potential for closure. To accurately capture how regulation functions in low-capacity environments, inspections and facility closures were carried out by the government using their own staff. The intervention (a) increased compliance with the patient safety checklist in both public and private clinics (more so in the latter); (b) increased closures of clinics without licenses and (c) reallocated patients from private to public clinics, primarily in markets with a facility closure. A decomposition approach shows that 93% of the increase in compliance with patient safety measures was due to improvements within facilities, rather than exits or changes in market shares. The intervention had no impact on patients’ out-of-pocket payments, and we find no evidence of declines in facility use, either in the aggregate or for poorer patients.
We then examine three classes of mechanisms: An information channel, a compliance channel, and a vertical differentiation channel due to Ronen (1991). We do not find evidence for the information channel and weak evidence for the compliance channel. Quantile treatment effects suggest that, consistent with Ronen (1991), there were quality improvements across the quality spectrum.
Our study thus brings the regulatory function of the state under the ambit of experimental methods and shows that even in low-capacity settings, regulations and inspections can improve the quality of care, as measured by compliance with patient safety measures.

Police crackdowns on recent protests by Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, and mourners of Sarah Everard all involved the use of anti-riot laws to disperse the protests. These cases pose a unique challenge to liberal political theorist’s focus on civil disobedience as the only legitimate means of expressing civil dissent. In all three cases the protestors were resisting structural injustices, yet by declaring these protests unlawful assemblies, the police deprived protestors of their right to public assembly thereby delegitimizing their political demands. While recent political philosophy on civil disobedience has increasingly contested the Rawlsian ideal of civil vs. uncivil protest, far less attention has been played to the crucial role of the police in constituting protests as riots. Under UK public order law, the sole authority to deem a protest an act of unlawful assembly (aka a riot) rests in the judgment of the senior police officer on the site of the demonstration. Beginning from this crucial feature of anti-riot law, this paper asks how the constitution of political protests as riots by the authorities shape the public’s perceptions of the legitimacy of the grievance underlying the protest? And how did protestors resist moral condemnation of their action by public authorities? Without an understanding of how the interpretation of a protest as a riot is itself a site of political struggle, theorists of civil disobedience neglect the crucial power of the police to declare certain political protests illegal, hence illegitimate. Given the UK Government’s proposed Crime, Policing, and Sentencing Bill, with even greater legal restrictions on demonstrations and processions, an analysis of this power is particularly urgent.

To answer these questions, this paper will draw upon the method of grounded normative theory. Grounded normative theory incorporates original empirical analysis in “a recursive process of theory development striving for accountability to persons in empirical contexts” (Ackerly, et al., 2021, 3). Specifically, this paper analyzes an archive I have assembled of public statements, testimony, press coverage, and official reports of over 40 riots in the UK from 1996-2021. By focusing on the actual normative justifications protestors and authorities gave for their actions, rather than the abstract arguments of political theorists, this paper will challenge the unhelpful dichotomy between civil and uncivil disobedience, and the narrow focus on violence that grips much of the political theory literature on the topic. Instead this paper will treat riots as political struggles in which protestors resist state authority and through which state authorities constitute political grievances as legitimate or illegitimate.

Vipin Narang’s research interests include nuclear proliferation and strategy, North Korea's nuclear weapons, South Asian security, and general security studies. His first book Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era (Princeton University Press, 2014) on the deterrence strategies of regional nuclear powers won the 2015 ISA International Security Studies Section Best Book Award. His second book Seeking the Bomb: Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation is forthcoming with Princeton University Press.

We study the impacts of 1,500 large-scale irrigation projects that have affected more than 250,000 villages in India. To identify treatment effects, we use high-resolution spatial data, and exploit discontinuities in program inclusion arising at project boundaries. Irrigation increases agricultural output and population density in rural villages. However, in and near towns, it causes a decline in indicators of development including population density, nightlight density, built-up area, and firm employment, reallocating factors of production away from non-agricultural activities. The results are consistent with a model in which permanent agricultural productivity gains slow the process of structural transformation.
 

As the Land Back movement gains momentum, making sophisticated and urgent claims that ought not be dismissed, these claims also demand an honest confrontation with how Western political theory conceives of land. As Indigenous thinkers such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) and Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene), have shown in their accounts of grounded normativity, land is not just a location for Indigenous world-building, but also an agentic teacher with political standing. These approaches provide powerful insight into some of the most pressing struggles of our times, including the events of the Standing Rock uprising and the Line 3 protests. Yet dominant traditions in political theory continue to treat land as an inert territory on which politics happens. We examine one theorist in the Western tradition whose iconoclastic approach to political theory has driven much critical work, much of which claims to avoid the pitfalls of abstraction and liberal universalism: Hannah Arendt. We show not only how consequential her understanding of land is to her political theory, but also how it leads her to circumscribe plurality in such a way as to render Indigenous political theory and practice nonsensical, nonpolitical, and therefore a proper target for destruction by political orders that will properly organize the land. Put differently, through attention to land, we show that settler colonialism is central to Arendt’s political theory, and not a mere oversight that can be acknowledged and dismissed. Given Arendt’s influence on critical (and often self-described “left”) approaches to political life, Arendt’s reliance on the ongoing violence of settler-colonialism runs deeper than many theorists have been able to acknowledge. Yet as we explain, critical resources that avoid these pitfalls are both readily available in Indigenous political theory and are directly in service of the broader argument that Land Back, and Indigenous resurgence more generally, present a profound challenge to dominant modes of Western theorizing, even in its critical and heterodox forms.

Vohla Charnysh presented the introductory chapter of her book project titled on migration, diversity, and economic development. Specifically, she investigates how post-WWII transfers remade Europe. In 1944-51, nearly 20 million people, including 12 million Germans and 5 million Poles, were uprooted from their homes and resettled elsewhere. She argues that this redistribution of population profoundly diversified societies within states. Migrants coming from different regions, espousing different religious beliefs, and speaking different dialects suddenly shared close quarters with one another. Her book seeks to explore how they learned to live together and why some uprooted populations are economically better off than others today. Using hand-collected archival and census data from Poland and Germany, Charnysh shows that communities diversified by forced migration initially struggled to cooperate and provide public goods, as individuals coming from different regions viewed each other with suspicion and distrust. At the same time, forced migration shored up the role of formal state institutions in the provision of public goods and welfare in the long run. Charnysh further argues that with time, communities that received a larger and more heterogeneous migrant population reached higher entrepreneurship rates and personal incomes.

Modern museums of natural history, ethnography, civilization, and/or cultures typically claim to represent humanity, in its unity and diversity. Yet how did such museums come to be the representatives of humanity? And what has shaped the way such museums have represented humanity? These questions point to the heart of major contemporary controversies surrounding modern museums across Europe and North America. I understand the critical scrutiny of modern museums to be sparked by increasing acknowledgement of their colonial origins, and to be sustained by increasing recognition that the legacies of colonialism have afterlives in museums’ custodianship and representations of material culture, which function to reproduce forms of colonial injustice and alienation. Museums are thus sites where contemporary agents fight over the unfinished project of decolonization. In this paper, I aim to clarify what it might mean to decolonize museums, and what decolonization practices aim towards with respect to redressing different forms of colonial alienation.

Olyvia Christley presented a part of her dissertation project that investigates the relationship between the traditional gender attitudes and support for radical right parties. She argues that support for and the appeal of radical right parties is enmeshed with the gendered logic of masculine protection and feminine vulnerability. Christley finds evidence to support the notion that highly gendered traditionals are more likely to both select radical right parties and find their platforms appealing over mainstream conservative parties as compared to those who harbor egalitarian gender values. Her work has broader implications for being a common denominator of radical right support.