Governments around the world conduct ethics trainings with public employees to enhance public integrity. Yet, causal evidence on the effectiveness of ethics trainings to enhance integrity in government remains rare. We address this gap through a field experiment with 1,400 police officers in Bangladesh. In collaboration with one Bangladeshi police district, we randomly assign half of the district’s police officers to a state-of-the-art ethics training. Our training trains and primes each participating police officer to be an ethical leader in the police district.

Earmarking taxes for specific expenditure categories is thought to be a crucial factor in the development of the early modern European fiscal states and remains a widespread, yet fiscally rigid and oftentimes inefficient, policy tool. I explore a decidedly political logic to the puzzling prevalence of tax earmarking. In this paper, I test an initial micro-behavioural condition for this political logic of earmarking: that general fund taxation may produce more political mobilization than earmarking would, threatening political survival of governments in low-capacity states.

Authors: Eli Baltzersen, Francesca Jensenius, and Øyvind Søraas Skorge

The accuracy of voters' perceptions of party issue positions is critical for the functioning of representative democracy, and as a result, it has received heightened scholarly attention in recent years, thanks mainly to the availability of survey data asking respondents about their perceptions of party left-right positions.

Citizens from minoritized groups, including women and people of colour, tend to feel better represented by politicians who share their identity, often translating into electoral support. Is this also the case for disabled people, one of the largest yet often ignored minority groups in our societies? In-group affinity in representation can be driven by assumptions about shared preferences or by affective orientations and group consciousness.

Last year, 2023, went down as the hottest ever recorded as also one with an alarming increase in the frequency and severity of a wide range of climate change induced extreme weather events. This gives us a stark warning of climate change impacts we can expect in the future. Scientists have urged world governments to urgently make use of one last window of opportunity to shift course. However, considering the scale of this challenge, the responsibility extends to all key stakeholders, including the news media.

The two most powerful people in India today, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, both embody a notion of ascetic sovereignty or rājayoga. In this talk I shall look at historical precedents of the ascetic sovereign, primarily in the period which is the main focus of my research, the 11th to 15th centuries, when several monastic institutions became independently powerful and their rulers functioned like kings.