Scholars of International Organizations (IOs) increasingly use elite surveys to study the preferences and decisions of policymakers. When designing these surveys, one central concern is low statistical power, because respondents are typically recruited from a small and inaccessible population. However, much of what we know about how to incentivize elites to participate in surveys is based on anecdotal reflections, rather than systematic evidence on which incentives work best. In this article, we study the efficacy of three incentives in a preregistered experiment with World Bank staff. These incentives were the chance to win an Amazon voucher, a donation made to a relevant charity, and a promise to provide a detailed report on the findings. We find that no incentive outperformed the control group, and the monetary incentive decreased the number of respondents on average by one-third compared to the control group (from around 8% to around 5%).

Business closures and work-from-home orders have been a central part of Canada's plan to slow the spread of COVID-19. The success of these measures hinges on public support, which cannot be taken for granted as the orders induce considerable economic pain. As governments consider when to re-open the economy, one relevant variable is when the public expects the economy to re-open. At minimum, if public perceptions differ from government plans then additional government messaging is required to better align expectations.

Colonial institutions are thought to be highly persistent, but measuring that persistence is difficult. Using a text analysis method that allows us to measure similarity between bodies of text, we examine the extent to which one formal institution – the penal code – has retained colonial language in seven West African countries. We find that the contemporary penal codes of most countries retain little colonial language. Additionally, we find that it is not meaningful to speak of institutional divergence across the unit of French West Africa, as there is wide variation in the legislative post-coloniality of individual countries. We present preliminary analyses explaining this variation and show that the amount of time that a colony spent under colonisation correlates with more persistent colonial institutions.

Electricity demand exceeds supply in many parts of Africa, and this often results in rolling blackouts. This article argues that blackouts tend to concentrate on poorer places within countries, due to both economic and political factors. This argument is tested with an analysis of electricity availability across thirty-two neighborhoods in Accra and survey data from thirty-six African countries. Across these analyses, poorer people with a grid connection experience lower electricity supply than richer people. This article concludes by discussing implications for research on electricity availability, policymakers working on energy, and the distributive politics literature.

To examine the extent to which foreign aid reaches people at different levels of wealth in Africa, I use household surveys to measure the subnational distribution of a country's population by wealth quintiles and match this information to data on the location of aid projects from two multilateral donors. Within countries, aid disproportionately flows to regions with more of the richest people. Aid does not favor regions with more of the poorest people. These findings violate the stated preferences of the multilateral donors under study, suggesting that the donors either cannot or are not willing to exercise control over the location of aid projects within countries. The results also suggest that aid is not being allocated effectively to alleviate extreme poverty.

In 1999, the year before Ghana's 2000 election, the country experienced a large, unexpected decline in aid. The incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC) lost the election. Did the decline in aid hurt the NDC at the polls, or was it simply incidental? Using data from a national, World Bank-funded electrification project, this article shows that the NDC was able to allocate aid according to explicitly political criteria. The article also exploits a quasi-experiment in aid disbursements to show that electrification caused NDC voting to increase in the constituencies that received electrification. Pre-electoral aid fluctuations exert a modest but measurable force on voting patterns. These findings add weight to calls for donors to coordinate to reduce aid volatility. They also show that incumbent governments can allocate aid strategically to secure votes, even under the best-case scenario of strict donor monitoring in an established democracy.

We calculate in detail the expected properties of low redshift DLAs under the assumption that they arise in the gaseous disks of galaxies like those in the $z\approx 0$ population. A sample of 355 nearby galaxies were analysed, for which high quality H I 21-cm emission line maps are available as part of an extensive survey with the Westerbork telescope (WHISP). We find that expected luminosities, impact parameters between quasars and DLA host galaxies, and metal abundances are in good agreement with the observed properties of DLAs and DLA galaxies. The measured redshift number density of $z=0$ gas above the DLA limit is $dN/dz=0.045\pm 0.006$, which compared to higher $z$ measurements implies that there is no evolution in the co-moving density of DLAs along a line of sight between $z\sim 1.5$ and $z=0$, and a decrease of only a factor of two from $z\sim 4$ to the present time. We conclude that the local galaxy population can explain all properties of low redshift DLAs.