Leopoldo Fergusson

Research Papers

“Media Markets, Special Interests, and Voters” [Download]

This paper examines the role of mass media in countering special interest group influence by studying county-level support for candidates to the US Senate from 1980 to 2002 as a function of media exposure and campaign finance profiles. I use the concentration of campaign contributions from Political Action Committees to proxy capture of politicians by special interests, and compare the reaction of incumbent vote margins to increases in concentration in two different types of media markets – in-state media markets and out-of-state media markets. Unlike in-state media markets, out-of-state markets focus on neighboring states’ politics and elections. Thus, if citizens punish political capture, increases in concentration of special interest contributions to a particular candidate should reduce his vote share in in-state counties relative to the out-of-state counties, where the candidate receives less coverage. I find that a one standard deviation increase in concentration of special interest contributions to incumbents reduces their vote share in about 0.5 to 1.5 percentage points in in-state counties relative to the out-of-state counties. Results are similar in specifications that rely solely on variation in concentration across time within the same county, and when the sample is limited to in-state counties that are contiguous to out-of-state counties and have similar demographic structures. A placebo test where in-state counties bordering out-of-state ones are compared to other in-state counties shows no effects, confirming the identification hypothesis that the results are not driven by geographic characteristics or distance from the media center of the state.

“The Political Economy of Rural Property Rights and the Persistence of the Dual Economy” (revise and resubmit, Journal of Development Economics) [Download ]

If property rights in land are so beneficial, why are they not adopted more widely? I propose a theory based on the idea that limited property rights over peasants' plots may be supported by elite landowners (who depend on peasants for labour) to achieve two goals. First, like other distortions such as taxation, limited property rights reduce peasants' income from their own plots, generating a cheap labour force. Second, and unlike taxation, they force peasants to remain in the rural sector to protect their property, even if job opportunities appear in the urban sector. The theory identifies conditions under which weak property rights institutions emerge, providing a specific mechanism for the endogenous persistence of inefficient rural institutions as development unfolds. It also predicts a non-monotonic relationship between the quality of rural property rights and land in the hands of peasants.

“He Who Counts Elects: Determinants of Fraud in the 1922 Colombian Presidential Election,” with Isaías N. Chaves and James A. Robinson, NBER Working Paper No. 15127, July 2009 (revise and resubmit, American Political Science Review) [Download]

In this paper, we construct measures of the extent of ballot stuffing (fraudulent votes) and electoral coercion at the municipal level, using data from Colombia's 1922 Presidential elections. Our main findings are that the presence of the state reduced the extent of ballot stuffing, but that the presence of the clergy, which was closely imbricated in partisan politics, increased coercion. We also show that landed elites to some extent substituted for the absence of the state and managed to reduce the extent of fraud where they were strong. At the same time, in places which were completely out of the sphere of the state and thus partisan politics, both ballot stuffing and coercion were relatively low. Thus the relationship between state presence and fraud is not monotonic.