Genocides rank among the darkest episodes in our history. What drives prejudice against targeted outgroups in the lead-up to mass killings? We theorize the role played by democratization, ethnoreligious threat perceptions, and economic discontent in generating antiminority hatred. We assess these factors’ predictive strength using a new 22,000-person survey of Islamophobia in Myanmar, fielded shortly before the 2017 ethnic cleansing of the country’s Muslim Rohingya population. Integrating survey responses with administrative data, events data, and geodata, we document a robust association between poverty and anti-Muslim attitudes among members of Myanmar’s Buddhist majority. The relationship holds ecologically and by individual. Further tests point to scapegoating rather than resource competition as the most likely mechanism. Other commonly cited drivers of intolerance receive little empirical support. By leveraging a critical contemporary case, our paper sheds light on the material foundations of polarized social preferences in settings at high risk of intergroup violence

Mass ritualized gatherings like pilgrimages are central to religious practice globally. Do they generate votes for religious parties? The events may heighten religiosity, enlarging support for parties seen as owning religious policy issues. Such parties might also co-opt the events to organize and campaign. We evaluate the electoral impact of India’s Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival considered the world’s biggest human assembly, leveraging its astrologically determined timing combined with districts’ proximity by rail to the festival sites. The Kumbh Mela boostsHindu nationalists’ vote share. Mechanisms tests suggest it does so by increasing religious orthodoxy—seen in the adoption of Brahminical dietary practices—and by strengthening Hindu nationalist party infrastructure. Communal violence is unaffected, but the events are electorally polarizing; they cause India’s main secular-leaning party to perform better in regions with denser concentrations of religious minorities. Our study offers a new account of how confessional parties make inroads in multiethnic democracies.

Mass ritualized gatherings like pilgrimages are central to religious practice globally. Do they generate votes for religious parties? Theoretically, the events may heighten religiosity, enlarging support for parties seen as “owning” religious policy issues. Such parties might also engage in “platform co-optation,” piggybacking on the events to organize and campaign. We evaluate the electoral impact of India’s Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival considered the world’s largest human assembly, leveraging its astrologically determined timing combined with districts’ proximity by rail to the festival sites. The Kumbh Mela boosts Hindu nationalists’ vote share. Tests of mechanisms suggest it does so by fomenting identity change—evidenced by increases in communal violence and the adoption of orthodox dietary practices—and by bolstering party infrastructure. India’s main secular-leaning party loses support, but not in regions with denser concentrations of religious minorities. Our study offers a new account of how confessional parties make inroads in multiethnic democracies.

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives' performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.