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Title: Modeling self-selection into vetting institutions: An application to purges in nascent democracies

Abstract: Political institutions often produce unintended consequences. Institutions intended to accomplish certain goals can modify incentives of actors in ways that make them depart from the goals the original designers had in mind. Can we use tools of formal modeling to detect when this is likely to happen? In this article, we illustrate such an approach. By combining a simple decision model (a naive reconstruction of an institution) with a costly signaling model, we show how social scientists can incorporate agents’ incentives into anticipating downstream effects of vetting institutions. To make our argument legible, we illustrate it with an application to police reform in the context of regime change. Throughout the manuscript, we use the running example of post-communist Poland, a country that faced the daunting challenge of having to reform its police apparatus after communism.

Title: Paternalism Across the World (joint work with Alexander Cappelen, Henning Hermes, Akshay Moorthy, Marit Skivenes and Bertil Tungodden).

Abstract: Paternalistic policies play a key role in the relationship between citizens and government, yet systematic evidence on public support for different types of paternalism remains limited. This study examines preferences for soft versus hard paternalism using a large-scale, between-subjects survey experiment with nationally representative samples from 58 countries and approximately 60,000 participants. Globally, we find a widespread preference for soft paternalism, which does not restrict individual autonomy, over hard paternalism, which does. These preferences predict support for specific paternalistic policies. We document substantial variation within and across countries, with preferences differing systematically by demographics such as age, education, religiosity, and urban vs. rural setting. These preferences are also associated with economic development and political institutions. To structure our findings, we introduce a conceptual framework and conduct exploratory analyses suggesting that economic shocks and exposure to regime transitions—democratic or autocratic—shape preferences for individual autonomy.