Can information and communication technologies help citizens monitor their elections? We analyze a large-scale field experiment designed to answer this question in Colombia. We leveraged Facebook advertisements sent to over 4 million potential voters to encourage citizen reporting of electoral irregularities. We also cross-randomized whether candidates were informed about the campaign in a subset of municipalities. Total reports, and evidence-backed ones, experienced a large increase. Across a wide array of measures, electoral irregularities decreased. Finally, the reporting campaign reduced the vote share of candidates dependent on irregularities. This light-touch intervention is more cost-effective than monitoring efforts traditionally used by policymakers.

We present the first field experiment on how organized interest groups’ television ads affect issue opinions. We randomized 31,404 voters to three weeks of interest group ads about either immigration or transgender nondiscrimination. We then randomly assigned voters to receive ostensibly unrelated surveys either while the ads aired, one day after they stopped, or three days afterwards. Voters recalled the ads, but three ads had a minimal influence on public opinion, whereas a fourth’s effects decayed within one day. However, voters remembered a fact from one ad. Our results suggest issue ads can affect public opinion but that not every ad persuades and that persuasive effects decay. Despite the vast sums spent on television ads, our results are the first field experiment on their persuasive power on issues, shedding light on the mechanisms underpinning—and limits on—both televised persuasion and interest group influence.

Religions seem to defy the law-of-demand, which suggests that all else equal, an increase in the cost of an activity will induce individuals to decrease the resources they spend on that activity. Rather than weakening religious organizations, evidence shows that the sacrifices exacted by religious practices are positively associated with the success of those organizations. We present the first strong evidence that this association is neither spurious nor endogenous. We use a natural experiment that rests on a peculiar time-shifting feature of Ramadan that makes the fasting duration—our measure of sacrifice—vary not just by latitude but from year-to-year. We find that a half-hour increase in fasting time during the median Ramadan day increases the vote shares of Islamist political parties by 11 percent in Turkey’s parliamentary elections between 1973 and 2018, and results in one additional attendee per 1,000 inhabitants for voluntary Quran courses. We further investigate two mechanisms, screening and commitment, that could explain the effects we find. By testing their divergent implications, we infer that commitment is the mechanism triggered by sacrifice, which drives up the intensity of religious beliefs and participation that in turn bolster the success of religious organizations.

How does armed conflict influence tropical forest loss? For Colombia, both enhancing and reducing effect estimates have been reported. However, a lack of causal methodology has prevented establishing clear causal links between these two variables. In this work, we propose a class of causal models for spatio-temporal stochastic processes which allows us to formally define and quantify the causal effect of a vector of covariates X on a real-valued response Y. We introduce a procedure for estimating causal effects and a nonparametric hypothesis test for these effects being zero. Our application is based on geospatial information on conflict events and remote-sensing-based data on forest loss between 2000 and 2018 in Colombia. Across the entire country, we estimate the effect to be slightly negative (conflict reduces forest loss) but insignificant (P = 0.578), while at the provincial level, we find both positive effects (e.g., La Guajira, P = 0.047) and negative effects (e.g., Magdalena, P = 0.004). The proposed methods do not make strong distributional assumptions, and allow for arbitrarily many latent confounders, given that these confounders do not vary across time. Our theoretical findings are supported by simulations, and code is available online.

Fieldwork is crucial to advancing knowledge in archaeology and anthropology, but previous works suggests that between 64 and 68 percent of respondents experience sexual misconduct during fieldwork. Going forward, fieldwork must be made safe and inclusive. To achieve this, we must understand why sexual misconduct takes place during fieldwork. We surveyed an international sample of archaeologists and anthropologists (n=300) about their most recent fieldwork experience. We examine evidence for risk factors predicting sexual misconduct in fieldsites, and our findings suggest that length of fieldwork, presence and communication of policies and protocols, and the gender and sexuality of the individual are all significant. In particular, we find evidence for increased risk to nonmale and nonheterosexual individuals. We also gathered qualitative evidence from our respondents, who reported that in some cases they were discouraged from reporting and faced retaliation, they were dissatisfied with the handling of complaints, and fieldsite policies and protocols were not consistently or effectively implemented. Fieldwork can be a high-risk environment for marginalized individuals to experience sexual misconduct, and when clear policies and procedures are lacking, it can also be a low-risk environment for perpetrators in terms of consequences. To make fieldwork a safe environment for all, policies and protocols that mitigate the risk of sexual misconduct must be consistently implemented and properly communicated.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of migrants from every corner of the earth spent weeks and sometimes months at sea. Yet these ubiquitous voyages appear as little more than blank pages in the annals of human migration. Maritime social history has grown considerably over the past thirty years, offering brilliant new insights into the lived experiences of sailors, pirates, and slaves. But the lowly emigrant has been largely ignored. At the same time, scholars carefully tracing the development of migrant communities at the local, national, and transnational levels have tended to reify the historiography’s traditional terracentrism. Using the letters, diaries, and printed guides of those who left Ireland during the Great Famine, this article seeks to understand how the journey itself shaped community building in the Irish diaspora. It argues that the hardships of life at sea encouraged disparate groups of people to expand their traditional ideas of belonging. Localism and ethnic identity did not dissolve at sea, they changed—making room for new and heterogeneous links of solidarity anchored in shared experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic and measures aimed at its mitigation, such as physical distancing, have been discussed as risk factors for loneliness, which increases the risk of premature mortality and mental and physical health conditions. To ascertain whether loneliness has increased since the start of the pandemic, this study aimed to narratively and statistically synthesize relevant high-quality primary studies. This systematic review with meta-analysis was registered at PROSPERO (ID CRD42021246771). Searched databases were PubMed, PsycINFO, Cochrane Library/Central Register of Controlled Trials/EMBASE/CINAHL, Web of Science, the World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 database, supplemented by Google Scholar and citation searching (cutoff date of the systematic search December 5, 2021). Summary data from prospective research including loneliness assessments before and during the pandemic were extracted. Of 6,850 retrieved records, 34 studies (23 longitudinal, 9 pseudolongitudinal, 2 reporting both designs) on 215,026 participants were included. Risk of bias (RoB) was estimated using the risk of bias in non-randomised studies—of interventions (ROBINS-I) tool. Standardized mean differences (SMD, Hedges’ g) for continuous loneliness values and logOR for loneliness prevalence rates were calculated as pooled effect size estimators in random-effects meta-analyses. Pooling studies with longitudinal designs only (overall N = 45,734), loneliness scores (19 studies, SMD = 0.27 [95% confidence interval = 0.14–0.40], Z = 4.02, p < .001, I 2 = 98%) and prevalence rates (8 studies, logOR = 0.33 [0.04–0.62], Z = 2.25, p = .02, I 2 = 96%) increased relative to prepandemic times with small effect sizes. Results were robust with respect to studies’ overall RoB, pseudolongitudinal designs, timing of prepandemic assessments, and clinical populations. The heterogeneity of effects indicates a need to further investigate risk and protective factors as the pandemic progresses to inform targeted interventions.