Women constitute half of India’s electorate; yet politics in the country has traditionally been a forum for men to participate and articulate their interests. Studies indicate that women have distinct preferences, and that politics and policy choices change when women enter the political arena. In this context, the 2014 national election marked a watershed for Indian politics. There was an unprecedented increase in women’s participation in visibly partisan ways: 27% more women attended party meetings, rallies, and canvassing activities. But paradoxically, this growth was most pronounced among women voting for the BJP, whoseideology of political Hinduism, or Hindutva, prescribes traditional gender roles for women. What explains the BJP’s success at engaging women despite its ideology of masculine Hindu nationalism? And what are the effects of this engagement on women’s agency and democratic practice?

Women’s political activism in these visible ways, what I call active participation, is especially surprising because of the deeply patriarchal contexts in which it is taking place. When women engage with political parties in these public settings, it transgresses social and cultural norms that tie women to the home, and consider party politics as inappropriate for them. Breaching these norms can be costly, both for women and their families. Consequently, men act as gatekeepers to women’s participation. The key, then, for a political party that seeks to mobilize women, is to lower these costs.

I develop a theory of norm-compliant mobilization to explain how religiously conservative parties can incorporate women without disturbing the status quo within the family, party, or society. In patriarchal contexts, framing politics as congruent with traditional gendered norms reduces the costs of women’s participation by connecting the political sphere to theprivate. This domestication of politics helps women obtain social and familial approval for their public engagement as it is no longer perceived as challenging men’s authority within the family, or patriarchal structures of power in the party, or even society at large. In the case of India, the BJP’s solution to this predicament has been to frame politics as seva, a powerful norm of selfless service that overlaps women’s domestic care-giving roles. I test these arguments through a multi-method approach that emphasizes triangulating multiple data sources and strategies. I leverage extensive qualitative research—ethnography, participant observation, shadowing, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews—conducted over a span of three years to show how the BJP’s activists describe their active participation and agentic experiences in the language of seva. Next, I draw on computational text analysis of social media data, together with multiple innovative surveys and experiments administered to women party activists, female citizens, and male gatekeepers to show the causal effect of seva in enabling women’s active participation. Finally, I discuss the validity of my argument across a range of contexts, including Asia, Western Europe, and the US to show that the patriarchal separation of spheres for men and women, and norm-compliant mobilization frames have been powerful enablers for women’s political participation for conservative parties across Christian and Islamic traditions.

My research provides a bridge between several traditions in the study of political participation. First, it shows how political participation is an outcome of the interaction between the political and private spheres, where political parties can shape the public perception of women’s active participation. Second, it bridges institutional and behavioral approaches byhighlighting the vital role of social norms in determining the political inclusion of marginalized groups. In particular, it shows how norms can normalize activities that may otherwise be deemed as subversive, and as such, are vital for the sustenance of conservativism in India and across the world.

Finally, I highlight an important but understudied tension between political engagement and democratic deepening. Much empirical research implicitly assumes higher—and more equal—participation to be positively associated with democratic health. Yet the Indian case of democratic backsliding amidst rising participation belies this. The answer to this apparent paradox, as my dissertation shows, can partially be found in the increased deployment of traditional norms like seva as a strategy of political engagement and recruitment. While seva does nurture agency, it is ultimately not antagonistic to existing structures of power. It therefore preempts the productive models of citizen autonomy—seeking accountabilityand claim-making—that scholars have come to highlight as a feature of robust democracies. Thus, I show that the intensive margin of how people engage—a function of how they are mobilized—is at least as important as the extensive margin of how many people participate. Hence, the mechanisms that enable inclusion can help us understand political transformations in other countries, especially as conservative, right-wing and populist movements gain traction across the globe.

This dissertation explores how religious teachings about economic injustice and the moral obligation to address the economic and political roots of poverty shape religion's influence on political competition. At least since Marx, religion has been thought to decrease electoral support for left parties and undercut redistribution. Yet following Weber, scholars have also documented religious denominations' distinct perspectives about the economic sphere and the ways in which these views shape individuals' beliefs and behavior. I examine the effect of religious teachings on the electoral fortunes of left-wing political parties, specifically. While some religious denominations encourage believers to embrace affluence and view poverty as a consequence of individual effort (or lack thereof), others emphasize poverty's injustice and advocate structural changes to alleviate this economic hardship. I focus on the political influence of the latter---which I refer to as progressive religion---and study its effects on the organizational development, electoral support, and policy priorities of left-wing political parties.

I argue that progressive religion can provide critical organizational and electoral resources to left-wing political parties. When progressive religious leaders underscore the injustice of poverty and foster support for economic redistribution among their parishioners, they create a group of religious voters whose economic preferences align with those of left-wing political parties. Moreover, the emphasis on addressing poverty through structural reforms in society encourages parishioners to actively engage in social and political movements that prioritize these goals. In addition to their predisposition to support the economic policies that left-wing political parties champion, pious voters are thus also likely to become active and organized members of the left. Their support allows left parties to complement and extend their territorial presence by relying on an array of lay organizations. Hence, progressive religion provides the left with important resources in the electoral arena.

Yet the support of progressive religion does not come without consequences for left parties' policy platform. While pious voters share the left's preferences about economic redistribution and other reforms to reduce economic inequality, they are conservative with respect to social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. When these voters support left parties, they bring their socially conservative preferences to bear on the parties' policy agenda and oppose any effort to embrace non-conservative positions on these social issues. As a result, left parties that cultivate the support of progressive religion will adopt socially conservative positions.

I support these claims using a multi-method research strategy that combines qualitative, quantitative, and quasi-experimental evidence from the Catholic Church in Brazil. I first combine a historical analysis of Catholic social doctrine with a study of Brazilian diocesan publications to document variation in Catholic teachings on economic issues, particularly with respect to the roots of poverty and the need to address the economic inequality it engenders in the political realm. I then test my argument using original archival data and drawing on a natural experiment in Brazil following the transition to the papacy of Pope John Paul II in 1978. Leveraging plausibly as-if random variation in bishop vacancies that led some Brazilian dioceses to be overseen by progressive bishops while exposing others to conservative bishops appointed by Pope John Paul II, I study the effect of progressive bishops on religious involvement in progressive economic causes as well as the electoral success of the left-wing Workers' Party (PT). I find that the Catholic Church was significantly more likely to support progressive economic causes in dioceses led by economically progressive bishops and that the left enjoyed a remarkable electoral advantage in these areas. The party's stronger performance can be partly explained by its access to religious networks that allowed it to develop an organizational structure, particularly in areas where the party lacked an existing base of electoral support. However, the electoral benefits of progressive religion came at the cost of marginalizing the political demands of the party's feminist faction, thereby decreasing the PT's adoption of gender policies at odds with religious teachings.

Substantively, these findings contribute to the growing body of evidence that religious teachings shape religion's effect on political behavior. They also suggest that religion can serve as a critical source of support for economically progressive political and social movements. Moreover, this study contributes to our understanding of the broader policy considerations that left-wing parties face. My analysis suggests that socially progressive policy positions are not universally constitutive of left parties. Instead, left parties' reliance on partners to build their national infrastructure can lead them to strategically select a social policy position in order to capitalize on the organizational reach of existing social institutions. The recent decline in rates of industrialization and weakening of labor unions across both the developing and developed world has forced the left to seek new sources of organizational support in order to maintain its political relevance. The mobilizational capacity of religious organizations, particularly in the developing world, makes them an attractive partner for left parties to accomplish this goal.

Public opinion surveys suggest rising levels of distrust in parties and anti-elite preferences among voters around the globe. In this context, challengers to the political establishment have emerged and gained prominence by mobilizing voters who have become skeptical of existing political institutions and parties. In my dissertation, I develop a theory about the different strategies adopted by outsider candidates and the determinants of their electoral success. I argue that when entering electoral races, these candidates find it attractive to mobilize voters on the basis of valence issues, which are defined as those on which there is some consensus among voters. In particular, appeals to anti-corruption and anti-establishment sentiment allow candidates to reach a broad range of voters across the policy space. However, the extent to which candidates can credibly mobilize voters on such issues depends on the candidate and the contextual characteristics in which the election takes place. I show that disenchanted voters tend to be evenly distributed across the policy space and are also the least likely to turn out to vote. In doing so, I draw particular attention to how the institutional and informational environments shape one of the major hurdles that outsider candidates face when appealing to disenchanted voters: how to bring them to the voting booth.

In the first empirical chapter, I posit that certain institutional arrangements may be more conducive to the electoral success of anti-establishment candidates. Specifically, I argue that compulsory voting may boost anti-establishment candidates by encouraging turnout among voters who would have otherwise abstained. At the voting booth, these voters are more likely to vote for candidates who align with their anti-establishment sentiment. I test this theory in the context of Brazil’s 2018 presidential election, leveraging age thresholds that make voting compulsory at the individual level as well as randomized variation in the proportion of compulsory voters across voting booths. I demonstrate that compulsory voting led to a sizable increase in electoral support for anti-establishment presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. My findings underscore how critical turnout is for the prospects of anti-establishment candidates, as well as the unexpected effect of an institution often thought to bolster the quality of democracy.

Next, testing another part of my theory, I study the effect of shifts in the salience of corruption on outsider candidates' strategies. While corruption revelations have been shown to influence citizens' voting, less is known about how candidates take advantage of the heightened opportunity to campaign on this issue and their decision to enter the electoral race. Underpinning the link between these salience shocks and outsider entrance lies the assumption that these candidates enjoy a comparative advantage when campaigning on valence issues, such as corruption. Therefore, they should be more likely to rely on anti-corruption appeals when running for office. I demonstrate that outsider candidates are more likely to campaign on this (what I show to be) valence issue. To do so, I construct a rich database of corpora on over 50,000 mayoral candidates' manifestos, which I process to compute measures of anti-corruption leaning at the candidate level. Then, I test whether outsider candidates running in the municipalities exposed to those revelations are more likely to take advantage of shifts in the salience of corruption. I explore this using the yearly randomized audits conducted by the federal government in Brazil, whereby I leverage the revelation of corruption in mayoral accounts in municipalities. The evidence shows that outsiders are more likely to enter mayoral races in places exposed to shocks that increase voters' awareness of corruption.

Finally, I also assess how shifts in voters' awareness of valence issues can not only influence voters but also candidates' strategies. In many weakly institutionalized democracies, citizens' disregard of existing parties---and even of democratic institutions, such as elections---is largely motivated by rampant corruption and the pervasiveness of clientelism, both of which can hinder political accountability. Thus, in the third empirical chapter, co-authored with Mateo Montenegro, I use a large-scale field experiment to assess the effects of encouraging citizens to report electoral irregularities through an existing website hosted by a well-known NGO using a Facebook ad campaign. We also randomized the delivery of letters to the universe of mayoral candidates in the selected municipalities, informing some mayors about our citizen ad campaign. As expected, we find that the ads significantly increased the number of reports made during the 2019 mayoral elections. Interestingly, they also produced a large increase in the vote share of candidates perceived to be less corrupt and away from those perceived to be more corrupt. On the supply side, we show that the municipalities where candidates were informed about the campaign were less likely to report electoral misdeeds.

The three chapters of this dissertation delve into the conditions under which political outsiders gain prominence and break through the barriers they face when entering the electoral competition. In doing so, each of these essays sheds light on how contextual and institutional settings are more or less favorable to the rise of political outsiders. The broader implications of this dissertation contribute to advancing our understanding of the threats of democratic backsliding.

A prominent literature in political science holds that the meritocratic recruitment of public servants leads to gains in bureaucratic performance. It is also believed that this institution ought to also have positive effects on social cohesion, since the meritocratic distribution of civil service jobs theoretically enables members from all groups---ethnic minority or otherwise---to win coveted employment in the public sector. Looking predominantly at Southeast Asia, and drawing on large scale surveys and archival documents, this dissertation presents an argument and evidence to the contrary. Instead, under certain conditions, the introduction of meritocratic civil service reforms perpetuates existing inequalities, as privileged groups outperform marginalized groups on entrance exams and go on to staff administrative posts at disproportionately high rates, an outcome that heightens group-based resentment and weakens national solidarity.

This dissertation develops its argument in the context of an important but understudied tension between the twinned goals of state-building and nation-building---a trade-off that comes most into focus in the Asian context. At the moment of independence, the leaders of Asian states faced the urgent task of state-building, which mostly involved recruiting a competent corps of public servants to staff the organs of their new governments. But these leaders were also tasked with nation-building to generate a sense of solidarity across their diverse populations. These twinned goals often existed---and continue to exist---in tension with one another. The most "competent" applicants for public service typically hailed from historically privileged groups who had received formal education: the forward castes in India, the Javanese in Indonesia, or the Chinese in Malaysia. A narrow focus on state-building would have led to a disproportionate representation of certain groups in the apparatus of the state, which would have surely detracted from the task of nation-building.

Social scientists often argue that economic elites play an important role in thwarting the adoption of democracy. Yet, some economic elites have at times supported democratization, leading to deep elite divisions in struggles over regime type. Why do some economic elites support democratization while others oppose? This dissertation examines the counter-intuitive role of economic elites in supporting democratization and the ways in which these elites can shape redistributive outcomes post-transition.

The theory I develop argues that the strategies of labor control elites pursue under authoritarianism fundamentally shape their preferences over democratization. Historically, exercising control over workers was of critical importance to elites, whose primary economic activities--manufacturing and agriculture--relied heavily on labor. My theoretical framework distinguishes between two key strategies of labor control. The first is repressive control, which relies on the threat or use of force against workers. The second strategy, which I label co-optive control, involves the provision of resources that partially benefit workers but are structured to facilitate employer monitoring and influence over workers' activities, e.g. elite-led labor organizations and employer-provided housing. While individual elites often vary in whether they pursue either co-optive or repressive labor control, both strategies constrain workers' ability to act in ways that run counter to elite material interests.

I argue elites' investments in co-optive or repressive labor control under authoritarianism give rise to variation in their support for democratization. Repressive control is deeply tied to authoritarian regimes--it is difficult to exercise this strategy in democratic contexts in which institutional and electoral constraints greatly limit elites' ability to employ force against workers. Elites who depend on repression are thus more likely to oppose democracy because it entails the loss of their primary form of labor control. Co-optive control, on the other hand, does not rely on force to manipulate and constrain workers' behavior. It is thus easier to transfer co-optation to the democratic period, allowing elites who pursue this strategy to preserve their control over labor and thereby lower the risk associated with democratization. Crucially, these same elites can incur key benefits from the adoption of democracy. In democratic settings, elites who previously invested in co-optive control have a competitive advantage over those who relied on repression under authoritarianism, as this latter group of elites will face challenges in maintaining labor control in the democratic period. Co-optive control thus lowers the costs and raises the returns of democratization, making elites who rely on this strategy more likely to support democratization than those who depend on repression.

In addition to investigating the adoption of democracy, I also examine how forms of labor control, established under authoritarianism, affect post-transition outcomes. Specifically, I investigate how these different strategies of control shape workers' ability to secure material concessions following a democratic transition. I argue that post-democratization, workers operating under co-optive labor arrangements struggle to extract higher wages, improve their working conditions, and make related demands that threaten elite material interests. In contrast, workers in areas with a history of repressive control are more likely to secure these key labor concessions under democracy.

To test my argument, I employ a multi-method empirical approach that combines natural experimental data, archival material, and administrative records from Argentina at the turn of the twentieth century. The case of Argentina represents a hard test for the theory developed in this dissertation due to the relatively low labor intensity of most economic activity as compared to many other Latin American cases. To the extent strategies of labor control shape elite preferences over democratization in Argentina, we might expect the theory to also hold in contexts where economic elites are even more dependent on labor. A key feature of the Argentine case is that there exists a natural experiment in which forms of labor control can be considered randomly assigned. Leveraging this exogenous variation, I examine how different forms of labor control shape elite support for democratization, which I measure using an original dataset of local, pro-democracy committees. I complement the primary analysis with an examination of micro-level census data, historical electoral returns in which pro-redistributive candidates ran for elected office under democracy, and case study comparisons.

This dissertation develops and tests a theory to explain elite support for democratization. As such, it makes several theoretical and empirical contributions. First, it speaks to a large body of research suggesting that labor-dependent elites oppose democratic transitions due to fears of losing control over workers following democratization. My findings suggest this opposition critically depends on the strategies of control that elites employ. Second, the findings shed light on the degree to which such regime transitions represent a break with the authoritarian past. As I demonstrate, elite investments in co-optive labor control not only make them more likely to support the adoption of democracy but also endure following democratization and shape elite-labor conflict under democracy. Finally, the dissertation also generates new insights regarding the potential returns economic elites can obtain from transitions to democracy, suggesting elites who rely on co-optive control can secure a key economic advantage under democracy that may encourage them to support democratization.

The frequent emergence of new parties is a feature of democracies almost everywhere. While most of these new parties remain ephemeral, some manage to establish stable ties with voters and win substantial electoral support over repeated elections. This divergence raises the question why some new parties are able to take root in society, establish stable ties with voters, and successfully compete in elections over time, while others fail to do so.

Despite a vibrant literature on both the stability of party identification and de-alignment away from traditional parties, we do not have a good understanding yet of why some new parties succeed in taking root in society, while others fail to do so. This dissertation attempts to fill this gap. It explores different paths that new parties take to build mass support, i.e. to secure electoral support and build partisan attachments in the electorate, in the context of the recent wave of party formation in Latin America. It seeks to explain how new parties come to choose different mobilization strategies and how voters in turn respond to these different party strategies.

With the decline of unions, which played a central role in the historic founding of mass parties, much of the recent literature has concentrated on parties’ direct appeals to voters and explained variation in success to secure support in terms of the type of direct appeals, e.g. based on class vs. ethnic interests or identities or charismatic appeals. In this study, I consider different types of direct appeals and also explore organizationally mediated strategies, i.e. appeals that engage voters through societal organizations. I find that organizationally mediated strategies can secure electoral support very effectively and yield durable voter ties by socializing organization members into identifying with the party. Even though the mediating role that civil society organizations can play has been largely overlooked with the decline of labor unions, new types of organizations—particularly indigenous organizations, peasant unions, and informal sector unions—play similarly important roles in democratic societies today. While the existing scholarship has examined the formation of these organizations and their role in politicizing ethnic or class cleavages, little attention has been paid to the various ways in which different forms of party-organization linkages might influence vote choice and the emergence of partisanship.

The argument proceeds in two steps. First, I explain the adoption of different party mobilization strategies by focusing on the intra-elite dynamics during parties’ founding moments, the period before the party contests its first major election. Two features of the founding moments—one internal to the new party, the other one external to it—are key: (1) the cohesion of the coalition of party leaders and organizational allies and (2) the credibility of other attractive parties in the party system. These factors shape early-on whether a party-organization tie becomes institutionalized by adopting routinized rules and mechanisms that govern how candidates will be selected and factional disagreements will be settled. Whether party-organization ties become institutionalized, in turn, establishes whether a new party can rely on organizationally mediated strategies or is restricted to employing direct appeals only. Furthermore, I argue that the institutionalization of a linkage can provide the basis for different types of organizationally mediated strategies and resulting party structures, depending on the structure and resources of the organizational allies.

In order to explain new parties’ ability to create mass support, I then focus on voters’ responses to the different party strategies, in a second step. I show that organizationally mediated appeals can help parties obtain electoral support more effectively than most types of direct appeals. Furthermore, if the underlying party-organization linkages are institutionalized, mediated appeals also yield durable voter-party ties by socializing organization members into identifying with the party itself. Drawing on social identity and self-categorization theory, I contend that societal organizations, which serve as highly relevant and immediate reference groups to their members, provide social spaces in which socialization into new parties can occur, if the organization is organically linked to a party.

This argument is tested in the context of the recent wave of party formation in Latin America. My dissertation compares three major new parties, Bolivia’s MAS, Ecuador’s Alianza PAIS, and Mexico’s MORENA, with each other and with other new parties. Using a multi-method research strategy based on 24 months of fieldwork in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico, this research combines insights from over 230 in-depth interviews with representatives of parties and societal organizations with analyses of original and existing surveys, census data, and election returns, archival research, ethnographic work, and a series of novel experiments conducted in the field.

From the arrival of the first European settlers, indigenous groups in the Americas have experienced near-constant extraction of their land, labor, and capital, but they have also sometimes been offered greater autonomy over their local affairs. This dissertation explores the emergence and effects of indigenous autonomy. I investigate three central questions. Why do central states grant indigenous autonomy in some cases and not others? Why do native communities sometimes embrace government offers of autonomy and sometimes resist? And how does autonomy shape indigenous groups' long-term access to political representation? To answer these questions, I develop a theory that emphasizes the central explanatory role of resource extraction by state and private actors.

In a first section of the dissertation, I examine the decision by central states to grant indigenous autonomy. I argue that individual incumbents recognize autonomy when two conditions jointly obtain. First, national-level incumbents must view indigenous elites as strategic partners in achieving their central goal of remaining in power; this provides an incentive for incumbents to recognize autonomy. Second, rural elites, who view autonomy as a barrier to their extraction of indigenous land and labor, must be sufficently weak that they cannot block incumbents from recognizing indigenous autonomy. Once incumbents decide to grant autonomy, the specific form it takes--political or economic--depends on the relative value of indigenous factor endowments. To test this argument, I employ a series of historical and contemporary case studies from the Americas.

In a second section of the dissertation, I examine a central puzzle around indigenous community responses to autonomy. Scholars often argue that autonomy is the central demand of native groups. Yet, in a number of historical and contemporary cases, individual indigenous communities within a given country have resisted central state offers of greater autonomy. I argue that the decision of indigenous groups to embrace or resist autonomy arises from prior experiences with extraction, which may vary across native communities within the same country. Exposure to extraction by the central state generally leads indigenous communities to resist autonomy. Conversely, exposure to extraction by rural elites increases the likelihood that native communities embrace autonomy. I evaluate this argument using historical natural experiments from Peru and the United States, along with survey data and case studies from Bolivia.

In a final section of the dissertation, I examine how autonomy affects indigenous groups' representation within the state. I argue that economic autonomy undermines indigenous institutions and thereby reduces coordination to achieve political representation. I then argue that political autonomy often lumps disparate indigenous communities together, generating conflict and also undermining native groups' access to political representation. Granting both political and economic autonomy, on the other hand, may increase indigenous groups' access to political representation. I evaluate this argument using archival data, original surveys and experiments with indigenous elites, and natural experiments.

This dissertation develops and tests a theory that seeks to bridge historical and contemporary research on indigenous-state relations in the Americas. As such, it makes several distinct theoretical and substantive contributions. First, it highlights the key role of intra-elite conflict in shaping the decision of central states to extend indigenous autonomy. Second, it builds on a body of work in historical political economy that highlights the key role of extraction and factor endowments in shaping the long-term welfare of indigenous groups. Finally, the project highlights a number of important yet often understudied costs that may arise from autonomy. As I show in the different sections of the dissertation, autonomy may carry benefits for indigenous communities, but it may also increase their vulnerability to extraction by non-indigenous actors and reduce their long-term access to descriptive and substantive political representation.

This dissertation consists of a three-part study on criminality and organized crime---mainly gangs---on development and inequality. With a focus on El Salvador, each chapter analyzes the effects of the emergence and evolution of gang activity in the country starting in the late 1990s on human capital and material wellbeing, as well as the policies that have shaped the state's relationship with gangs. Chapter 1 provides context on the growth and expansion of gangs in El Salvador and situates the dissertation project in the broader literature. The importance of gangs' territorial control and its medium to long-term consequences for inequality and poverty are the focus of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 highlights the role of competition and collusion in driving gangs' main income source, extortion. Lastly, Chapter 4 turns to the externalities of a controversial, yet common, occurrence when dealing with robust criminal organizations: direct negotiations between the state and gangs. All chapters are unified by a focus on how criminality shapes developing, urbanizing societies.

The second paper of my dissertation studies how the growth, and in particular, territorial control of gangs affects socioeconomic development in El Salvador's urban areas. Leveraging a natural experiment stemming from the mass deportations of individuals with criminal backgrounds from the United States to El Salvador in the late 1990s, we find that gang members repatriated from the United States quickly exploited the power vacuums following the country's devastating civil war. Through a regression discontinuity analysis, we analyze socioeconomic inequality across gang and non-gang controlled areas. The results highlight strong, negative effects on educational attainment and wealth, and also point to a novel mechanism: mobility restrictions. In order to carry out their illicit activities, gangs severely limit the mobility of individuals living in territories under their control, limiting the degree to which individuals can seek gainful employment.

Relying on their extensive territorial control and widespread networks, gangs engage in repeated extortion of businesses and households. Using detailed data on individual extortion payments to gangs and sales from a leading wholesale distributor of consumer goods and pharmaceuticals in El Salvador, the third chapter documents evidence on the determinants of extortion payments, firm responses to extortion, and effects on consumers. Leveraging a non-aggression pact between MS-13 and Barrio 18, the country's two main gangs, in 2016, we examine how collusion affects extortion in areas where they previously competed. Although there is a precipitous drop in violence, extortion increases by upwards of 15%, affecting the prices for pharmaceutical goods and potentially contributing to a rise in hospital admissions for chronic illnesses.

Given the direct and indirect suffering brought about by gangs' territorial control and violence, governments often turn to unconventional measures to deal with organized crime. A common, and controversial, policy involves brokering or facilitating truces with and among criminal organizations. In the last chapter, we estimate the short-term impacts of the 2012 Salvadoran gang truce, a plausibly exogenous reduction in violence, on labor market decisions and human capital investments. The opaque negotiations between the Salvadoran government and the country's two main gangs lead to a significant drop in homicides. However, other economic agents did not react: neither businesses nor households changed their behavior after the gang truce. We discuss the role of uncertainty in explaining our null results.

Communal violence remains an enduring experience across many multi-ethnic societies. In these diverse communities, small-scale clashes can quickly escalate into severe cycles of violence. An interesting pattern emerges across these communities: tensions are nearly ubiquitous---yet, the outbreak of violence is not. What accounts for these pockets of peace within conflict zones? I advance a theory of violence that hinges on the role of local leaders in dispute resolution, which in turn will influence violent outbreaks. Specifically, I argue that the efficacy of local leaders---and citizen responses---in dispute resolution is shaped by the strength of ties leaders possess both within and across communities. Within-group ties (bonding capital) allows leaders the ability to induce compliance and enforce agreements, while out-group ties (bridging capital) is necessary for credibility and cooperation across group lines. In 88 communities across three states in Nigeria, I conducted a randomized control trial and surveys with local leaders and citizens to test my core theoretical predictions. First, I find that leaders with cross-group ties perceive out-group leaders with more credibility, report more successful dispute resolution and, ultimately, less violent events. I also demonstrate that cross-group ties between leaders affect citizen compliance, satisfaction with arbitration, citizen perceptions of insecurity and reported violence. Additionally, I find tentative evidence that traditional chiefs are more likely to possess extreme forms of in-group ties that may be detrimental to dispute arbitration. On the other hand, alternative leaders---specifically, youth and civil society leaders---often have stronger connections with the out-group, which I posit leads to more effective and credible inter-group mediation.