In Search of the Holy Grail: Policy Convergence, Experimentation, and Economic Performance by Sharun W. Mukand and Dani Rodrik. Published in volume 95, issue 1, pages 374-383 of American Economic Review, March 2005

This paper analyzes the relationship between economic reform and the democratic process to ask the following question: Does the likelihood of adoption of an economic reform increase with an increase in the efficiency benefits from that reform? A priori we might expect that this likelihood should increase monotonically, for two reasons. First, economic reform results in an increase in the size of the national pie. If the government has the ability to make compensatory tax-transfers, an increase in each citizen's income is possible. Second, a larger economic reform results in a greater number of winners. This might also be expected to reinforce the political support for economic reform. So we should expect a reform with greater efficiency benefits to a larger population to have a greater chance of adoption by the government. However, in this paper we show that this intuition is mistaken. In particular, we demonstrate that there exists a certain non-monotonicity between the distribution of winners from economic reform and the probability of its adoption. An increase in the number of winners may lower, rather than increase, the likelihood of adoption of economic reform. In particular, even though reforms that benefit a minority or an overwhelming majority are adopted, reforms that benefit a smaller majority are not adopted.

This paper examines whether propaganda broadcast over radio helped to change interethnic attitudes in postgenocide Rwanda. We exploit variation in exposure to the government’s radio propaganda due to the mountainous topography of Rwanda. Results of lab-in-the-field experiments show that individuals exposed to government propaganda have lower salience of ethnicity, have increased interethnic trust, and show more willingness to interact face-to-face with members of another ethnic group. Our results suggest that the observed improvement in interethnic behavior is not cosmetic and reflects a deeper change in interethnic attitudes. The findings provide some of the first quantitative evidence that the salience of ethnic identity can be manipulated by governments.