Enrique Seira Bejarano is the Joe and Deborah Loughrey Professor of Economics and affiliated faculty at the Building Inclusive Growth (BIG) Lab.
How did you get interested in development economics and research?
Enrique Seira Bejarano: I was born in a developing country, in Chihuahua, Mexico, next to the border with the US. When I was a kid, we often traveled to El Paso. I was very impressed with the differences I saw just crossing the border. I was amazed by the freeways and by how my parents themselves behaved differently, respecting the traffic signals more. Everybody seemed to behave more orderly, and things seemed to work. I guess that's one of the deep sources of my interest.
I was also very interested in how to make things work better. Not just to describe what's wrong, but to fix it. So, when I was in college, I believed the best career would involve not just research but policymaking.
In your paper Apex Corruption Erodes Democratic Values, you look at corruption, both across events and with a field experiment. Could you tell us about the project?
Starting more broadly, I typically work in three areas. One is household finance, which is how households save, borrow, and do transactions in credit markets to suit their needs, and what market failures are involved in those markets in developing countries. And then, secondly, more recently, in the past ~8-9 years, I've been more and more interested in how courts and the judicial system work, and more recently on democracy and political economy. My shift toward this research came as development economics increasingly centered on institutions, mirroring the Nobel Prize-winning work of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson. I wanted to get more concrete. What do we mean by institutions? What case in particular? So I started thinking of courts. Courts are institutions, and very, very important ones. Courts work poorly in medium-income countries, likely decreasing investment, opportunities, and increasing violence and mistrust. How do courts work, or fail to work, and why? How can we fix that?
More recently, I've been concerned about democratic backsliding in many developed and developing countries. I wanted to understand two things. What is causing the democratic backsliding? And what to do about it? There's a lot of debate on what is causing it, and I would say we don't know exactly. We don't have rigorous studies of what's causing that. The most typical explanations are (a) that polarization is increasing—driven by social media—and that it's harder for democracy to work in polarized environments. Another explanation is about a withdrawal of the welfare state and austerity policies. If the state doesn't do its part, then citizens don’t feel they owe some loyalty to it. It's less legitimate. A third one is gridlock in Congress and ineffectiveness in policymaking.
I was concerned with a fourth alternative, which is that apex corruption —the use of public office for private gain by high-level government officials— was eroding citizens' trust in democratic institutions. Testing this idea, going beyond correlations, is not easy. One would need to exogenously manipulate the perception of apex corruption and observe if that makes people behave differently: turnout to vote less, believe in democracy less, and display lower levels of civic behaviors. We tested this two ways. Firstly, we looked at corruption scandals in 17 countries in Latin America, in all of Latin America basically, and compared people who were interviewed about their opinions on democracy a few days before a scandal happens versus a few days after. These people are basically the same as when exactly they are surveyed in a survey round and is almost as good as random. We find that people interviewed just after corruption scandals are less satisfied with democracy and say they're less willing to vote in the next election, and are more open to a strongman or the army leading the country.
We tested this result using a randomized controlled trial in Mexico. The study exposed people to real footage of high-level politicians taking bribes (counting stacks of cash). We then observed if they actually, using administrative data, voted less or not. We found that indeed exposure to corruption scandals caused less support for the democratic institution, less voting, less donation to organized elections, and many other negative consequences, including entrusting your neighbor with money in real stakes lab-in-the-field games. I am still doing research in that domain. It's also very important for the U.S. also, as perceptions of government corruption in the US are now as high as those in Latin America. This is very concerning as we have shown that it is corrosive for trust in institutions and in fellow citizens.
How was it working on this project and some of the challenges of running the field experiment within the project/research?
I have many funny stories about this project. It was challenging for many reasons. One, just the scale. We knocked on almost 4,000 doors as we went to people's houses to do this exercise, where we had tablets to show them the corruption scandal videos. But also, for example, as part of the experiment, there was a game where people could steal without researchers noticing. The way we did this is, we gave them 30 coins. Imagine a $1 coin, and we give you 30 of those, and we say, “Go to your room where nobody else can see you. Here's an envelope and a bag with 30 coins. This is a very simple game: you throw the coin, you try to guess tails or heads. If you guess right, you just pocket the coin; it's yours. But if you guess wrong, you put it in this envelope, which is going to be given to the city mayor to support public projects.” So, what's nice about that game is that someone can be lucky. So, for any single person, I don't know if you actually are stealing, but on average I know. It turns out that people steal more themselves if they see politicians stealing.
Because we have thousands of people, just the weight of the coins was close to like half a ton. When I went to the bank, and I told them I needed this, they told me, first of all, that was crazy. Second, they told me to pick it up at the bank branch in several cars, but in the end, the bank brought it to the university in an armored car. There were many challenges in this project; it was also implemented during COVID. It all worked in the end, and the effort paid off, thanks to the help of many people helping us, including research assistants and co-authors.
On your projects, you work with multiple partners. What in your experience has helped in forming effective working partnerships across stakeholders like governments, local implementing partners, or other organizations?
It's very important to understand what partners are interested in, what problems they are facing, and how we can help. When I start a conversation with partners, I always start by asking what they need and what their concerns and questions are. And then try to see if there is academic value in answering some of their questions. The other thing to understand is that there is risk in implementing projects. Good research is hard, and many things can go wrong. It's like starting a small firm. Most firms fail, and empirical research is similar. Having an interested and highly cooperative partner is critical. A third problem is that partners, especially governments, often have very short time horizons; they want responses within weeks or months. And research usually takes years. Governments are not always willing to wait. So, how do you have short-term results for the government that are useful for them and the partner without sacrificing the quality of the academic research? That's another challenge that is hard to overcome, but it can be done.
The last thing that I would like to say is that coauthors and team members are critical. For example, in our series of papers on Mexican labor courts my co-author, Joyce Sadka, was essential. She works many hours with the court leadership, helps them understand and tackle problems, and in this way she builds a lot of trust with the partner, which allows us to propose and rigorously test potential solutions. This is a win-win: we make sure the solution actually works, which is good for them, while we contribute to knowledge more generally. Some of the policy implementations we have undertaken have actually been codified through law in Mexico. But that's in a large part not only because of the quality of the research, but also largely because we manage to gain their trust and help them solve practical problems. That is very important for the partners, and it requires significant effort from researchers.
What research, be it new areas or new projects, are you looking forward to? Any new projects in the plans?
So I would like to do research on what to do about democratic backsliding and how to combat it. To what extent can pro-sociality and civic-mindedness be taught? There is the old American quote, “It may be an easy thing to make a Republic; but it is a harder thing to make Republicans,” in the sense of citizens. Citizens are made, they're not born. But we couldn't find a single well-identified study that showed whether civic education courses actually make people vote more, to be more informed of current events. So we're trying to do that in Mexico and hopefully in the U.S. too. That's one policy to strengthen democracy we want to study.
In courts, we want to study why trials take so long and why settlements are so limited in developing countries. We are currently testing to what extent we can use AI to give legal advice for simple cases. In many countries, lawyers are of poor quality and fuel conflict instead of helping to solve it. Mexico has almost 20 times more law schools than the US and no Bar exam!
Finally, I am interested in religion as a generator of civic solidarity and the role that culture plays in development. Talk about culture among economists was a sign of lazy thinking 30 years ago. Now we have better ways to measure culture and the influence and power of ideas. I believe research can help us understand who we are and improve lives.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was conducted as part of a series of faculty profiles on BIG Lab Affiliated Faculty. Stay up to date with the BIG Lab by following us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Bluesky.