Saad Gulzar - University of Notre Dame

Research

Published Papers

20.

Democracy and the Environment

Annual Review of Political Science (Forthcoming). With Kathryn Baragwanath.

We survey research on the relationship between democracy and the environment. The first part of our review examines how democratic systems influence environmental outcomes. We show scholars find, at best, a weakly positive correlation between democracy and environment, with little support for the proposed Democratic Environmental Kuznets Curve, a finding we confirm with new data. We argue that democracy is too coarse a category to capture variation in environmental outcomes. Therefore, the second part of the review surveys how specific institutional features structure principal-agent relationships between citizens, leaders, and organized groups. We showcase that effective environmental governance depends on institutions that align incentives, reduce informational asymmetries, and match temporal horizons. These can arise in democracies but can also, under particular conditions, appear in autocratic contexts such as China, where state capacity and political incentives have aligned to produce targeted improvements. We conclude by identifying key open questions and promising directions for future research.

19.

Political Responsiveness, Information Provision, and Capacity Gaps

Comparative Political Studies (Forthcoming). With Miriam Golden and Luke Sonnet.

To investigate whether lack of information is one reason politicians may be unresponsive to voter preferences, we conduct a randomized control trial with senior politicians in Pakistan that collects citizen preferences using Interactive Voice Response (IVR). IVR allows politicians to script questions for citizens and allows the latter to respond on their cell phones. There is strong politician interest in soliciting opinions via IVR; additionally, response rates by citizens are relatively high. Nonetheless, politicians fail to use the new information to modify on-the-ground engagement with voters or service delivery. Nor do we observe improvements in citizen evaluations of politicians or in their electoral support for them. A forecasting exercise shows that experts find these null outcomes unexpected. Our findings reveal that even eager and informed politicians may be unable to respond to citizen preferences due to institutional capacity constraints, highlighting limits of information-centric theories of accountability.

18.

Air pollution could be reduced by incentivizing local government officials to control crop burning

Nature: Policy Brief (2025). With Gemma Dipoppa.

Crop-residue burning in South Asia decreases by up to 14.5% when smoke from fires would affect bureaucrats’ home districts instead of neighbouring ones. Bureaucratic action to punish farmers deters future fires by a further 13%. Thus, using administrator incentives to control crop burning could guide policy towards improving air quality and reducing infant and child mortality.

17.

Can Party Elites Shape the Rank-and-File? Evidence from a Recruitment Experiment in India

American Political Science Review (2025). With Durgesh Pathak, Sarah Thompson, and Aliz Toth.

Recruiting a large number of ground workers is crucial for running effective modern election campaigns. It is unclear if party leaders can shape the quality and quantity of the unpaid rank-and-file workforce as they can with prized nominations for candidates. We analyze a field experiment conducted by an Indian party that randomized recruitment messages reaching 1% of a 13-million-person electorate to join its rank-and-file. Contrary to concerns that parties can only attract a few poor-quality volunteers, we show that elite efforts can shape the rank-and-file. In fact, specific strategies can increase the size, enhance the gender and ethnic diversity, and broaden the education and political skills of recruits. Strategies that signal gender inclusiveness have a lasting impact on some dimensions up to three years later. Taken together, this paper provides the first causal evidence that rank-and-file recruitment is an opportunity for elites to shape long-term party development.

16.

Personalities and Public Sector Performance: Evidence from a Health Experiment in Pakistan

Economic Development and Cultural Change (2025). With Michael Callen, Ali Hasanain, Muhammad Yasir Khan, and Arman Rezaee.

This paper provides evidence that the personalities of policymakers matter for policy. Three results support the relevance of personalities for policy. First, doctors with higher Big Five and Perry Public Sector Motivation scores attend work more and falsify inspection reports less. Second, health inspectors who score higher on these measures exhibit larger treatment responses to increased monitoring. Last, senior health officials with higher personality scores respond more to data on staff absence by compelling better subsequent attendance. These results suggest that interpersonal differences matter are consequential for state performance.

15.

Good Politicians: Experimental Evidence on Motivations for Political Candidacy and Government Performance

Review of Economic Studies (2025). With Muhammad Yasir Khan.

How can we motivate good politicians – those that will carry out policy that is responsive to citizens’ preferences – to enter politics? In a field experiment in Pakistan, we vary how political office is portrayed to ordinary citizens. Emphasizing prosocial motives for holding political office instead of personal returns – such as the ability to help others versus enhancing one’s own respect and status – raises the likelihood that individuals run for office and that voters elect them. A year later, the treatment improves the alignment of policy with citizens’ preferences. These effects emerge only when treatments are randomly delivered in a public setting. Taken together, the results demonstrate that how politics is perceived shapes who decides to run for office, who is elected, as well the policies that democracies deliver.

14.

Bureaucrat Incentives Reduce Crop Burning and Child Mortality in South Asia

Nature (2024). With Gemma Dipoppa.

Air pollution in South Asia is one of the largest health emergencies on the planet, responsible for two million deaths every year. Crop residue burning accounts for 40-60% of peak pollution during the winter harvest months. Despite being illegal, this practice remains widespread. Any solution to curb the problem necessitates government action at scale. We study whether leveraging the incentives of bureaucrats tasked with controlling burning can mitigate this phenomenon. Using a decade of wind, fire, and health data from satellites and DHS surveys, we show that crop burning responds to bureaucrats’ incentives: fires increase by 15% when wind is most likely to direct pollution to neighboring jurisdictions and decreases by 14.5% when it pollutes their own. These effects intensify with stronger bureaucratic incentives and capacity. We also find that bureaucrat action against burning deters future polluters, further reducing fires by 13%. Finally, using an atmospheric model, we estimate that a 1 log increase in in-utero exposure to pollution from burning increases child mortality by 30-36 deaths per 1,000 births, underscoring the importance of bureaucrat action. Contrary to growing beliefs that the problem of crop burning is intractable, these findings highlight specific ways in which existing bureaucrats, when properly incentivized, can improve environmental management and public health outcomes.

13.

Inaccurate Forecasting of a Randomized Controlled Trial

Journal of Experimental Political Science (2024). With Mats Ahrehshop, Miriam Golden, and Luke Sonnet.

We report results of a forecasting experiment about a randomized controlled trial that was conducted in the field. The experiment asks Ph.D. students, faculty, and policy practitioners to forecast (1) compliance rates for the RCT and (2) treatment effects of the intervention. The forecasting experiment randomizes the order of questions about compliance and treatment effects and the provision of information that a pilot experiment had been conducted which produced null results. Forecasters were excessively optimistic about treatment effects and unresponsive to item order as well as to information about a pilot. Those who declare themselves expert in the area relevant to the intervention are particularly resistant to new information that the treatment is ineffective. We interpret our results as suggesting that we should exercise caution when undertaking expert forecasting, since experts may have unrealistic expectations and may be inflexible in altering these even when provided new information.

12.

Extending the Formal State: The Case of Pakistan’s Frontier Crimes Regulation

Economica (2024). With Michael Callen, Arman Rezaee, and Jacob Shapiro.

Why do modern states allow parts of their territory to be governed by non-state actors? We explore this using the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) in Pakistan, a British Colonial law only abrogated in 2018, which left governance to pre-colonial tribal councils in large parts of modern day Pakistan. In areas where the FCR did not apply, the British and Pakistani state built modern political and bureaucratic institutions. Using primary legal documents, we build a dataset of when and where FCR applied between 1901 and 2012. The territorial extent of the formal state is both cleanly demarcated by this law and varies substantially over time, permitting an empirical examination of the determinants of state control. The data reveal that the Green Revolution’s potential to transform agriculture played a major role in extending the formal state. The law was repealed from areas where agricultural productivity stood to benefit the most from the Green Revolution during 1960s. This is consistent with a model where technological changes that shift the returns to control influence where states choose to govern.

11.

Representation and Forest Conservation: Evidence from India’s Scheduled Areas

American Political Science Review (2024). With Apoorva Lal and Benjamin Pasquale.

How does political representation affect conservation? We argue that the mixed evidence in the literature may be driven by institutional arrangements that provide authority to marginalized communities, but do not make adequate arrangements to truly boost their voice in resource management. We study a 1996 law that created local government councils with mandated representation for India’s Scheduled Tribes, a community of 100 million. Using difference-in-differences designs, we find that the dramatic increase in ST representation led to a substantial increase in tree cover and a reduction in deforestation. We present suggestive evidence that representation enabled marginalized communities to better pursue their interests, which, unlike commercial operations such as mining, are compatible with forest conservation. While conservation policy tends to stress environmentally-focused institutions, we suggest more attention be given to umbrella institutions, such as political representation, which can address conservation and development for marginalized communities in tandem.

10.

The Political Economy of Public Sector Absence

Journal of Public Economics (2023). With Michael Callen, Ali Hasanain, Muhammad Yasir Khan, and Arman Rezaee.

The paper examines how politics relates to public sector absenteeism, a chronic and intractable public service delivery problem in many developing countries. In Punjab, Pakistan, we document that political interference routinely protects doctors from sanction in the health bureaucracy, while personal connections between doctors and politicians and a lack of political competition are associated with more doctor absence. We then examine how politics impacts the success of an at-scale policy reform to combat absenteeism. We find that the reform was more effective at increasing doctor atten- dance in politically competitive constituencies, both through increased monitoring and through senior health officials more effectively responding to data on poor performing health facilities. Our results demonstrate that politics can block the success of reform; instead of lifting the poor performers up, the reform improved places that were already performing better than others. The evidence collectively points to the fundamental importance of accounting for political incentives for policy design and implementation.

Can Campaign Contribution Limits Curb the Influence of Money in Politics?

American Journal of Political Science (2022). With Miguel R. Rueda and Nelson A. Ruiz.

Over 40% of countries around the world have adopted limits on campaign contributions to curb the influence of money in politics. Yet, we have limited knowledge of whether and how these limits achieve this goal. Using a regression discontinuity design that exploits institutional rules on contribution limits in Colombian municipalities, we show that looser limits increase the number of public contracts assigned to donors to the elected candidate. This is explained by looser limits increasing the influence of top donors over the elected candidate, rather than reducing electoral competition or changing who is elected to office. We further show that looser limits worsen the quality of public contracts given to the winner’s donors: These contracts are more likely to run over their stipulated costs. Overall, this article links looser campaign contribution limits, donor kickbacks, and worse performance of contracts awarded to donors.

How Campaigns Respond to Ballot Position: A New Mechanism for Order Effects

Journal of Politics (2022). With Thomas S. Robinson and Nelson A. Ruiz.

An established finding on ballot design is that prominent positions on the ballot improves the electoral performance of parties or candidates because voters respond behaviorally to salient information. This paper presents evidence on an additional unexplored mechanism: campaigns, who act before voters, adjust their behavior when allocated a salient position on the ballot. We use a constituency-level lottery of ballot positions in Colombia and first establish that a ballot-order effect exists: campaigns randomly placed at the top earn more votes and seat shares. Second, we show that campaigns react to being placed on top of the ballot: they raise and spend more money on their campaign and spending is correlated with higher vote shares. In addition to presenting evidence for how campaigns react strategically to election administration, our results provide the first evidence for a new mechanism for the ballot-order effects examined in many previous studies.

Information, Candidate Selection, and Quality of Representation: Evidence from Nepal

Journal of Politics (2021). With Zuhad Hai and Binod Kumar Paudel.

This paper studies candidate selection by party leaders and asks whether poor information about public preferences can lead elite choices to diverge from mass opinion. Working with a political party in Nepal, we show that while elites value voter preferences, these preferences only explain one-third of elite candidate selection. Next, we embed an experiment in actual candidate selection deliberations for this party and find that party leaders not only select different candidates when polling data are presented to them, but that their updated decisions also improve the party’s vote share. The results suggest that closing the information gap between elites and voters has the power to improve the quality of representation.

Who Enters Politics and Why?

Annual Review of Political Science (2021).

Despite the importance of politicians, empirical work rarely examines who decides to enter politics and why. This survey presents conceptual issues in measuring political entry; reviews work on individual, organizational, and institutional determinants of political entry; and summarizes the main findings and puzzles related to the representation/competence trade-off in recent microcensus studies on who runs for office. Fruitful directions for future work are highlighted throughout the article.

Does Political Affirmative Action Work, and for Whom? Theory and Evidence on India’s Scheduled Areas

American Political Science Review (2020). With Nicholas Haas and Benjamin Pasquale.

Does political affirmative action undermine or promote development? We present the first systematic analysis of Scheduled Areas in India, home to 100 million, where local political office is reserved for the historically disadvantaged Scheduled Tribes. A newly constructed dataset of 217,000 villages allows us to probe conflicting hypotheses on the implementation of the world’s largest workfare program, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. We find that reservations deliver no worse overall outcomes, that there are large gains for targeted minorities, and that these gains come at the cost of the relatively privileged, not other minorities. We also find improvements in other pro-poor programs, including a rural roads program and general public goods. Reservations more closely align benefits to each group’s population share, allaying concerns of overcompensation for inequalities. Contrary to the expectations of skeptics, results indicate that affirmative action can redistribute both political and economic power without hindering overall development.

Data and Policy Decisions: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan

Journal of Development Economics (2020). With Michael Callen, Ali Hasanain, Muhammad Yasir Khan, and Arman Rezaee.

We evaluate a program in Pakistan that equips government health inspectors with a smartphone app which channels data on rural clinics to senior policy makers. The system led to rural clinics being inspected 104% more often after 6 months, but only 43.8% more often after a year, with the latter estimate not attaining significance at conventional levels. There is also no clear evidence that the increase in inspections led to increases in general staff attendance. In addition, we test whether senior officials act on the information provided by the system. Focusing only on districts where the app is deployed, we find that highlighting poorly performing facilities on a dashboard viewed by supervisors raises doctor attendance by 75%. Our results indicate that technology may be able to mobilize data to useful effect, even in low capacity settings.

Can Political Alignment be Costly?

Journal of Politics (2020). With Michael Callen and Arman Rezaee.

Research on the benefits of political alignment suggests that voters who elect governing party politicians are better off than those who elect other politicians. We examine this claim with regression discontinuity designs that isolate the effect of electing a governing party politician on an important publicly provided service in Pakistan: health. Consistent with existing research, governing party constituents receive a higher quantity of services: more doctors are assigned to work in governing party areas. However, despite many more assigned doctors, there is no increase in doctor attendance. These findings contrast with the literature on political alignment by showing that alignment to the governing party affects voters’ welfare ambiguously: higher potential quantity of services may come at the cost of lower quality.

Political Identity: Experimental Evidence on Anti-Americanism in Pakistan

Journal of the European Economic Association (2020). With Leonardo Bursztyn, Michael Callen, Bruno Ferman, Ali Hasanain, and Noam Yuchtman.

We identify Pakistani men’s willingness to pay to preserve their anti-American identity using two experiments imposing clearly-specified financial costs on anti-American expression, with minimal consequential or social considerations. In two distinct studies, one-quarter to one-third of subjects forgo payments from the U.S. government worth around one-fifth of a day’s wage to avoid an identity-threatening choice: anonymouslychecking a box indicating gratitude toward the U.S. government. We find sensitivity to both payment size and anticipated social context: when subjects anticipate that rejection will be observable by others, rejection falls suggesting that, for some, social image can outweigh self-image.

Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Development: Evidence from India

American Political Science Review (2017). With Benjamin J. Pasquale.

When do politicians prompt bureaucrats to provide effective services? Leveraging the uneven overlap of jurisdictions in India, we compare bureaucrats supervised by a single political principal with those supervised by multiple politicians. With an original dataset of nearly half a million villages, we find that implementation of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the largest employment program in the world, is substantially better where bureaucrats answer to a single politician. Regression discontinuity estimates help increase confidence that this result is causal. Our findings suggest that politicians face strong incentives to motivate bureaucrats as long as they internalize the benefits from doing so. In contrast to a large literature on the deleterious effects of political interventions, our results show that political influence may be more favorable to development than is commonly assumed.

Working Papers

WP9.

Pay-to-Play: Campaign Contributions and Kickbacks in Public Procurement

With Juan Felipe Ladino and Juan Felipe Riaño.

Why do so few firms and individuals engage in political contributions despite its apparent sizable returns? This paper addresses a generalized version of the Tullock’s puzzle by examining (i) how campaign donations translate into persistent advantages in public procurement, (ii) why current policies fail to prevent such advantages, and (iii) why, despite high returns, few individuals and firms decide to donate. Using data linking the universe of political contributions to every public contract in Colombia from 2012 to 2025, we document that donors are more likely than non-donors to win public contracts.

WP8.

Does Revolution Work? Post-revolutionary evolution of Nepal’s political classes

With Bishma Bhusal, Michael Callen, Rohini Pande, Soledad Prillaman, and Deepak Singhania.

Decentralization bears the promise of more representative and accountable democratic institutions. In many countries, particularly new and developing democracies, this vision of decentralization has yet to be realized, instead yielding more extractive and corrupt institutions. Can new democracies generate institutions that are both representative and effective? As one of the world’s most ambitious decentralization processes, Nepal’s recent political transformation provides a useful laboratory to evaluate the consequences of decentralization in a new and developing democracy.

WP7.

Increasing Polarization of Hindu-Muslim Identity in India

With Feyaad Allie, Viktor Enssle, Tanushree Goyal, and Gufran Pathan.

We document the long-term evolution of religious identity in India by analyzing the names of 505 million Hindus and Muslims born between 1950 to 1995. We find that names increasingly signal a strong religious identity, showing heightened religious polarization. A preference for religious doctrine does not explain this rising polarization. Instead, we show how social dynamics generate asymmetric behaviors.

WP6.

Mobilizing Women at Scale: Mixed Evidence from a Field Experiment

With Anirvan Chowdhury and Durgesh Pathak.

Women constitute half of eligible voters in India, yet it is rare to see political parties mobilizing women as a concerted voting bloc, or grounding their electoral campaign on women-centric issues. In 2017, India’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chose to target women during local municipality elections by contesting a random set of constituencies on women-centric issues disseminated in private or public settings. Further, AAP cross- randomised this by using women canvassers to convey campaign messages in their door to door campaigns. In this paper, we study the effects of this new campaign in open and female-reserved constituencies on electoral outcomes and political participation by gender.

WP5.

From Paper to Digital: Understanding the Ecological Impacts of India’s Land Records Reform

With Aliz Toth and Anzony Quispe.

Abstract coming soon.

WP4.

Command and Can’t Control: Assessing Centralized Accountability in the Public Sector

With Juan Felipe Ladino, Muhammad Zia Mehmood, and Daniel Rogger.

A long-established approach to management in government has been the transmission of information up a hierarchy, centralized decision-making, and centralized accountability; colloquially known as `command-and-control.’ This paper examines the effectiveness of a centralized accountability system implemented at scale in Punjab, Pakistan. The scheme automatically identified poorly performing jurisdictions for the attention of central management. Using random variation in the intensity of the scheme’s implementation, we show that corresponding de facto punishments had negligible impact on school or student outcomes.

WP3.

Official Attendance Data for Politically Connected Bureaucrats Are Less Accurate

With Michael Callen, Ali Hasanain, and Muhammad Yasir Khan. (Resting Project)

Research shows that official data can often deviate from the truth. This paper shows that the absence of bureaucrats is underreported when they are politically connected. We compare absence reports in the universe of government inspections of public clinics in Punjab, Pakistan (N=79,318), with independent unannounced inspections of a representative sample of 850 clinics. We present robust evidence that government data underreport doctor and staff absence by up to 12.9 percentage points. Importantly, we show that doctors who personally know the local politician are less likely to be reported absent in official data.

WP2.

Random Acts of Kindness? How Gender Shapes Helping Behaviors Around the World

With Salma Mousa.

Everyday acts of cooperation between strangers from different social groups form the crux of social cohesion, a key driver of economic, political, and social development. This study examines how gender shapes these behaviors. Randomizing the gender, class, and ethnic identities of research assistants approaching over 25,000 pedestrians worldwide, we measure whether strangers provide directions, assist with dropped groceries, or lend their cell phone. Across all countries and experiments, gender consistently emerges as a stronger determinant of helping behavior than class or ethnicity: women are more likely to be helped — but less likely to help a stranger in need — compared to men.

WP1.

Pessimistic Beliefs of Norms: Descriptive Findings on Women’s Political Participation in Pakistan

With Muhammad Yasir Khan and Luke Sonnet.

Why does women’s political participation continue to lag behind men’s in much of the world? Using primary census and network data from 37 communities in Pakistan, this letter documents that perceptions of norms around whether women should participate in politics are pessimistic: individuals underestimate actual support men and women hold for women’s political participation. Further, despite previous evidence that the household primarily structures women’s behavior in patriarchal societies, we show that women’s social networks have little overlap with those of men in their own households.