The Program on Poverty and Governance releases report on Mexico's elections
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On July 1, over 50 million Mexicans went to the polls to elect the next president of the republic. The official count showed the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, as winning with 38.21% of the vote. He was followed by Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who received 31.59% of the vote and National Action Party (PAN) candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota with 25.41% of the vote.
Researchers with CDDRL's Program on Poverty and Governance compiled a comprehensive report on electoral patterns and the geography of the election. Using cutting edge statistical methods, they published this report through the Mexico City think-tank México Evalua.
The report is available in Spanish (check back soon for the English-language translation).
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How Governmental Corruption Breeds Clientelism: Evidence from Mexico
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Abstract:
It has long been recognized that corruption and clientelism feed upon each other. However, how public malfeasance affects citizens' willingness to engage in patron-client relations remains unexplored. This article shows that perceptions, experiences, and information about political corruption influence a citizen's likelihood to sell his or her vote, and the types of gifts, favors, or public services he or she is willing to trade for it. The context of the article is Mexico's presidential and local elections. To circumvent methodological challenges posed by social desirability bias and reverse causation, the article presents evidence from a list experiment embedded in a national representative survey conducted close to the 2012 presidential election, and evidence from a field experiment conducted close to the 2009 municipal elections. I conclude that, given favorable circumstances, governmental corruption breeds forms of political behavior that are detrimental to the proper functioning of democracy, such as vote buying.
About the Speaker:
Ana L. De La O is assistant professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is affiliated with the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Institution of Social and Policy Studies, and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Her research relates to the political economy of poverty alleviation, clientelism and the provision of public goods. She recently completed a book manuscript that explores the causes and political consequences of the proliferation of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. She earned her PhD in Political Science from M.I.T.
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Ana L. De la O
Assistant professor, Political Science, Yale University
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La Geografía Electoral de 2012 (México)
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On July 1, over 50 million Mexicans went to the polls to elect the next President of the Republic. The official count showed the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, as winning with 38.21% of the vote. He was followed by Democratic Revolucionary Party (PRD) candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who received 31.59% of the vote and National Action Party (PAN) candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota with 25.41% of the vote.
Electoral geography is a tool we use to visualize the overarching factors that divide Mexican society and motivate the citizens to express their distinct electoral preferences. Using a statistical analysis that encompasses the more than 66 thousand electoral sections based on the 2010 census cartography (created through a noble and intense effort by the IFE and INEGI), this report discusses which factors best explain voting behavior on election day. Notably, our analysis differs from those based on exit polls, which more accurately reflect the actual vote, but by their nature do not contain enough questions to assess in more depth the determinants behind that vote.(En): On June 1, over 50 million Mexicans went to the polls to elect the next President of the Republic. The official count showed the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, as winning with 38.21% of the vote. He was followed by Democratic Revolucionary Party (PRD) candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who received 31.59% of the vote and National Action Party (PAN) candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota with 25.41% of the vote.
One of the great advantages of working with electoral section data is that they reflect voting decisions of millions of voters. The risk associated with census data and exit polls is that they represent aggregated rather than individualized data because people’s votes are secret. With aggregated data, we cannot be absolutely certain that what happens in the aggregate also applies to all individuals within the group. Nevertheless, the possibility for error is diminished as we work with a large number of jurisdiction units that are highly disaggregated.
(Es): El pasado primero de julio más de 50 millones de mexicanos acudieron a las urnas para elegir al futuro Presidente de la República. El conteo nacional reflejó al candidato del Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN), como el ganador de la contienda electoral al recibir 38.21% de los votos. En segundo lugar se ubicó el candidato del Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) con 31.59% de los votos, seguido por la candidata del Partido Acción N, Josefina Vázquez Mota (JVM), con el 25.41% de los votos.
La geografía electoral permite visualizar de manera contundente los factores que dividen a la sociedad mexicana y motivan a los ciudadanos a expresar preferencias electorales distintas. Por medio de un análisis estadístico de las más de 66 mil secciones electorales y con base en la cartografía de los datos censales de 2010 (creada en un esfuerzo notable del Instituto Federal Electoral y el Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía), este reporte discute qué factores explican los resultados del comportamiento electoral tal como sucedió el día de las elecciones. Cabe destacar que nuestro análisis difiere de los que se basan en las encuestas de salida, las cuales reflejan con más precisión el voto efectivo, pero por su naturaleza no contienen suficientes preguntas que permitan evaluar en manera más profunda las determinantes del voto.
Una de las grandes ventajas de trabajar con los datos de las secciones electorales es que éstos reflejan las decisiones efectivas de millones de votantes. El riesgo de utilizar datos censales y votos efectivos es que nos vemos obligados a trabajar con datos agregados, pues el voto individual es secreto. El problema de la agregación es que no se puede tener certeza absoluta de que lo que sucede en el agregado también lo sea para los individuos que constituyen el conjunto. Sin embargo, las posibilidades de error se ven disminuidas al trabajar con un número tan grande de unidades jurisdiccionales que son sumamente desagregadas.
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México Evalua
Illicit Transnational Actors and Security: Myths, Misconceptions, and Historical Lessons
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About the Topic: Conventional accounts of the proliferation of illicit transnational actors--ranging from migrant smugglers to drug traffickers to black market arms dealers--describe them as increasingly agile, sophisticated, and technologically savvy. Governments, in sharp contrast, are often depicted as increasingly besieged, outsmarted, poorly equipped, and clumsy in dealing with them. While there is much truth in these common claims, Andreas argues that they are overly alarmist and misleading and suffer from historical amnesia. Drawing especially from the U.S. historical and contemporary experience, he offers a corrective that challenges common myths and misconceptions about the illicit side of globalization.
About the Speaker: Peter Andreas is a professor of political science and international studies in the Department of Political Science and the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. Andreas has published nine books, including Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo (Cornell University Press, 2008) and Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Cornell University Press, 2nd edition 2009). Other writings include articles for publications such as International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Political Science Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, and The Nation. His latest book is on the politics of smuggling in American history, titled, Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America (Oxford University Press, 2013).
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Peter Andreas
Professor of Political Science and International Studies, Brown University
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Evaluating the Effect of School and Teacher Incentives: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Mexico
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Merit‐based incentives are a topic of growing interest in labor economics due to their potential to increase performance for private and public employees. Following this argument, such pay schemes have been applied in numerous countries to provide incentives to teachers and schools based on their students’ achievement scores and other performance metrics. However, because of the multi-task, multi-principal and multi-period nature of education, they present several caveats. Observational and experimental research provides ambiguous conclusions about their impact. This paper contributes to this literature by evaluating the effects of the Mexican PECD, a program that since 2010 has provided salary bonuses to teachers in primary and secondary public schools based on their national standardized tests scores. Nearly 30,000 schools and 300,000 teachers have benefited from this program in its first implementation. Given its characteristics, the PECD provides an ideal ground for a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) and for a Multiple Rating‐Score Discontinuity (MRSD). Combining these quasi‐experimental techniques with a Hierarchical Linear Model (HLM), I show that the effect of this program on student performance is null. If any, this program seems to harm student performance; this negative effect is more evident for indigenous schools.
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Groundbreaking research into dropout rates in Mexican schools released
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CDDRL's Program on Poverty and Governance posted a research project update for the project The Incidence of Criminal Activity Near Schools in Mexico. Currently this project is studying the interaction between education and violence in the context of Mexico's war on drugs. The initial results shed light on falling secondary educational attainment in Mexico, and its relationship to gang activity and school dropout rates. The project is working to systematically analyze several Mexican governmental programs including Escuela Segura and Espacios Recuperados that seek to rebuild disintegrating communities in order to improve educational attainment. You can read the update here.
Increase in Drug Related Deaths, 2007-2010
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Sustainable agriculture and feeding 9 billion people - an interview with Pam Matson
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Pamela Matson, Dean of the School of Earth Sciences and FSE researcher, discusses agricultural research in the Yaqui Valley, Mexico and how it relates to the Green Revolution with Stanford's Generation Anthropocene. She also reflects upon the politics of sustainable agriculture and how we might go about feeding the 9 billion people we expect in the coming decades.
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Governance and Public Goods in Indigenous Mexico
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We exploit a unique institutional feature in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, where municipalities were allowed to choose between a form of autonomy called “usos y costumbres” or delegating decisions to “modern” forms of representative government. Using a geographic discontinuity approach to identify causal effects, we find strong evidence that political autonomy enhances development outcomes for indigenous communities. To explore plausible mechanisms, we collected a household survey in over 90 villages. In autonomous villages, direct participatory democracy practices lead to a more egalitarian distribution of services with a less notable anti-poor bias.
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Beatriz Magaloni
Dept. of Political Science
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magaloni@stanford.edu
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.
She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.
Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.
Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.
Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.
She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.
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Anternet: Ant Colony Networking Solutions to Ecological Problems
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Like many distributed systems, both natural and engineered, ant colonies operate without any central control. No ant can assess what needs to be done. Each ant responds to its interactions with other ants nearby and in the aggregate, these dynamical networks of interaction regulate colony behavior. Ecological studies show how collective organization evolves to respond to local, changing conditions. Harvester ant colonies living in the desert in Arizona use a simple positive feedback system, without any spatial information, to adjust foraging activity to the food supply. The rate at which foragers return to the nest with food determines the rate at which outgoing foragers leave the nest to search for more food.Turtle ant colonies living in the tropical forest in Mexico use interactions at temporary nest sites to regulate the shape and stability of the circuit of ants travelling through the trees. The talk will discuss models based on analogies between these systems and other dynamical networks, including the internet and brains. Exploring these analogies helps to elucidate how collective behavior evolves, shaping distributed algorithms in relation to changing environments.
Deborah M Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford. She studies the evolution of collective organization by investigating the ecology and behavior of ant colonies. Her work includes the long-term demography and behavior of harvester ant colonies in Arizona; the factors that determine the spread of the invasive Argentine ant in northern California; and the ecology of ant-plant mutualisms in tropical forests in Central America. She is the author of two books, Ants at Work (2000) and Ant Encounters:Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (2010). She has been awarded fellowships from Guggenheim and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. She is interested in analogies between ant colonies and other distributed networks such as brains, the immune system, the internet, and distributed robotic systems.
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Deborah M. Gordon
Professor of Biology
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Stanford University
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