Thomas Fujiwara’s research while affiliated with Princeton University and other places

Do single women avoid career-enhancing actions because these actions signal undesirable traits, like ambition, to the marriage market? While married and unmarried female MBA students perform similarly when their performance is unobserved by classmates (on exams and problem sets), unmarried women have lower participation grades. In a field experiment, single female students reported lower desired salaries and willingness to travel and work long hours on a real-stakes placement questionnaire when they expected their classmates to see their preferences. Other groups’ responses were unaffected by peer observability. A second experiment indicates the effects are driven by observability by single male peers.

In a randomized experiment in cooperation with two national parties competing in the 2013 congressional election in the Philippines, we estimate the causal effect on voting behavior of a town-hall style campaign in which candidates discuss their campaign platform with small groups of citizens. Keeping the parties’ platform fixed, we find that this “deliberative” style of campaigning has a positive effect on parties’ vote shares compared to the status quo, in which voters play a passive role. Consistent with the parties’ advocacy for underprivileged groups, we observe heterogeneous effects by income and gender. We show that the larger effect of town-hall meetings on women and poor voters arises because deliberative campaigns increase voters’ attention to parties’ platforms and change their attitudes on gender discrimination and poverty.

We estimate habit formation in voting-the effect of past on current turnout-by exploiting transitory voting cost shocks. Using countylevel data on US presidential elections from 1952-2012, we find that rainfall on current and past election days reduces voter turnout. Our estimates imply that a 1-point decrease in past turnout lowers current turnout by 0.6-1.0 points. Further analyses suggest that habit formation operates by reinforcing the direct consumption value of voting and that our estimates may be amplified by social spillovers.

Exploiting regression discontinuity designs in Brazilian, Indian, and Canadian first-past-the-post elections, we document that second-place candidates are substantially more likely than close third-place candidates to run in, and win, subsequent elections. Since both candidates lost the election and had similar electoral performance, this is the effect of being labeled the runner-up. Selection into candidacy is unlikely to explain the effect on winning subsequent elections, and we find no effect of finishing in third place versus fourth place. We develop a simple model of strategic coordination by voters that rationalizes the results and provides further predictions that are supported by the data.

This paper studies the introduction of electronic voting technology in Brazilian elections. Estimates exploiting a regression discontinuity design indicate that electronic voting reduced residual (error-ridden and uncounted) votes and promoted a large de facto enfranchisement of mainly less educated citizens. Estimates exploiting the unique pattern of the technology's phase-in across states over time suggest that, as predicted by political economy models, it shifted government spending toward health care, which is particularly beneficial to the poor. Positive effects on both the utilization of health services (prenatal visits) and newborn health (low-weight births) are also found for less educated mothers, but not for the more educated.

Exploiting a regression discontinuity design in a sample of over 49,000 Indian state legislature elections we find that candidates that barely come in second place versus third place are five percentage points more likely to run in a subsequent election, and three percentage points more likely to win a subsequent election. These effects are large relative to the fact that close second place finishers run again only approximately 39 percent of the time, and win only 11 percent of the time. Since these elections are first-past-the-post and candidate ranking is redundant information given vote shares, the results indicate the presence of heuristic thinking and/or limited attention by political players. We also provide evidence that the runner-up effect on the probability of winning a subsequent election cannot be entirely explained by selection into candidacy.

This paper uses exogenous variation in electoral rules to test the predictions of strategic voting models and the causal validity of Duverger's Law. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design in the assignment of single-ballot and dual-ballot (runoff) plurality systems in Brazilian mayoral races, the results indicate that single-ballot plurality rule causes voters to desert third placed candidates and vote for the top two vote getters. The effects are stronger in close elections and cannot be explained by differences in the number of candidates, as well as their party affiliation and observable characteristics.

This paper studies the electoral effects of town hall meetings based on programmatic, nonclientelist platforms. The experiment involves the cooperation of leading candidates in a presidential election in Benin. A campaign strategy based solely on these meetings was assigned to randomly selected villages and compared to the standard strategy of clientelist rallies. We find that treatment reduces the prevalence of clientelism and does not affect turnout. Treatment also lowers the vote shares for the candidate with a political stronghold in the village and is more effective in garnering votes in regions where a candidate does not have a political stronghold.