The ethnic and religious diversity of the population is often associated with worse state building outcomes, including lower levels of taxation. In this dissertation I investigate how diversity hinders state building and how it shapes the patterns of taxation. The dissertation is structured around two main questions. The first question is: What are the mechanisms through which diversity constrains state building? Building on the fact that periods of state building include increases in the amount of taxes levied on the populations follows the second question that concerns the distributional consequences of the increases in the amount of taxes: Which groups bear the increasing fiscal burdens of an expanding state during periods of state building? I argue that diversity impedes state building by increasing the costs of the state’s investment in fiscal capacity. This is because in more diverse places the different ethnic and religious identities of the population make them more illegible to the state’s agents, making it more difficult for the state to acquire knowledge about the population and its economic activities. This illegibility also increases the bargaining power of local intermediaries vis-à-vis the state, which makes investment in fiscal capacity even costlier as these groups often oppose state building. Because it is cheaper to invest in the fiscal capacity of less diverse places, I also argue that the tax burdens of the core/dominant groups in the society, even though they are in power, increase more than the tax burdens of the minorities during periods of state building. I test these arguments in the context of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Ottoman Empire. The main empirical evidence relies on statistical analyses of an original dataset based on my archival work in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. In addition to this, I use other original and secondary datasets, as well as a close reading and qualitative analysis of correspondences among Ottoman bureaucrats in the Ottoman archives. Using the local-level fiscal revenue data, I demonstrate that the increases in fiscal revenues during wartime were lower in more diverse areas in the empire, indicating diversity hinders state building. Using another dataset on the local-level expenses of the state, I find that the state had to invest more in more diverse provinces to be able to extract a unit revenue. This suggests that the costs of investment in fiscal capacity were higher under diversity. In order to provide evidence for the mechanisms I suggest in the argument, I show that the Ottoman State was less successful in successfully completing censuses in more diverse areas, which is consistent with the argument that diverse populations are more illegible to the state. I also utilize a dataset on governor assignments to provide evidence that diversity constrained possible government assignments, potentially decreasing bureaucratic capacity. I complement these quantitative analyses with qualitative analyses of archival documents and evidence from secondary sources. With these findings, I make three main contributions to the literatures on state building, the politics of taxation, and identity politics. First, I demonstrate that diversity impedes state building, and it does so by rendering populations illegible and making investment in fiscal capacity more costly. Hence, I propose and test a new theory that explains why diversity constrains state building, by bringing together insights from the state building and identity politics literatures. Second, I show that because the members of the core/dominant groups are more legible to the state and investment in fiscal capacity is cheaper where they live, they undergo higher tax burdens of the state building processes compared to the minorities. This indicates a distributive outcome that goes contrary to conventional wisdom where the ruling identity group taxes itself rather than other groups. Finally, finding that war can result in stronger states only under sufficient homogeneity of the population, I underline ethnic and religious diversity as factors that might condition the relationship where war leads to stronger states. This offers one possible explanation why the argument in the wider literature that warfare leads to stronger states is often challenged outside Early Modern Europe, where the populations were less diverse.

Climate change is an issue rife with economic risk. The physical impacts of global warming, allowed to intensify by halting international climate cooperation, threaten climate-vulnerable industries and communities. Global transitions away from fossil fuels endanger carbon-intensive economic assets. Whereas climate change is often framed as an issue of global collective action and public goods provision, I instead conceptualize it as one of economic risk and decline. How do workers, voters, and governments perceive and manage mounting "climate risks"? How do they cope with losses stemming from realizations of such risks? I interrogate these questions in reference to the political and economic divisions that exist within and across many of the world's most fossil fuel-intensive and ecologically vulnerable countries. The first two papers of the dissertation consider how ethnoracial divisions within states shape perceptions of climate risks and responses to their realization. In the first, I argue that the ascriptive makeup of an industry serves as a heuristic for evaluating its access to state subsidies and ability to weather climate change and decarbonization. Survey experiments on representative U.S. samples indicate that minority Americans see greater downside risk in industries that hire large numbers of Black workers, expecting those industries to be denied government support as climate risks manifest. Conversely, minorities see less risk in industries that mainly employ white workers, believing those industries to have more benefactors in government. In the second paper, I study how migrants, who have long featured prominently in fossil fuel workforces, politically assimilate amid industrial booms and busts. Whereas scholars often contend that industrial decay aggravates ethnocultural animosities and compounds existing group loyalties, I argue that the starkest intergroup divides can emerge in periods of growth, not decline. When an industry is growing, economic optimism and resources flow across ethnic groups concentrated in that industry, bolstering migrants’ confidence in the ability of coethnics to safeguard their welfare and suppressing investments in political assimilation. Gains from concentration in the industry dissipate amid decline, leading migrants to forge ties with outside groups promising access to political rents previously out of reach. I find support for this theory in the case of the early twentieth century U.S. coal industry. The third paper of the dissertation, coauthored with Richard Clark, explores why some international organizations have retrofit themselves to address climate change despite the intransigence of powerful member states on the issue. We link these pro-climate turns to bureaucrats' socialization in climate-vulnerable countries. As bureaucrats rotate between countries and are promoted, climate concerns then diffuse outwards and upwards, gradually sharpening the climate focus of the institution despite the skepticism of powerful principal states. We find support for this argument in the case of the International Monetary Fund, drawing on original data on bureaucrat career paths and Fund attention to climate change.

In many economic applications, a collective outcome experienced by a group of people is determined by individual decisions made by its constituents. Hence, understanding how individuals make decisions in group settings is important, but empirical and observational analyses are often complicated by confounding factors. This dissertation contains three essays that use controlled experiments designed to isolate, and measure the impact of, mechanisms predicted to affect behavior. Chapter 1 studies behavior under digital anonymity. A distinctive feature of the digital world is the ability to calibrate or withhold one's identifier: a person can be identified by a string of letters, an avatar, their real name, or even nothing at all. That digital identifiers allow a person to mask their physical identity also makes it difficult to attribute digital actions to a physical person, even when the actions are observed. I embed these features in an experiment where subjects play a finitely repeated, linear public goods game. Treated subjects are identified in one of three ways—by their photograph, by a random number, or by a self-designed cartoon avatar—and their individual choices are revealed and either attributed to, or decoupled from, their identifier. In line with the previous literature, identifying subjects and increasing the precision of attribution increases contributions relative to a baseline condition without identifiers or revealed individual choices. Remarkably, however, the largest impact on behavior comes from having an identifier in the first place: for a given level of attribution, the experimental data suggest that being identified by a number or by an avatar is as powerful as being identified by one's photograph. Chapter 2 studies whether and how individuals imbue digital avatars with self image and social image considerations. While digital avatars have become more commonplace and sophisticated, they need not resemble the physical appearance of the person using it. This inconsistency raises the question of how an avatar induces image considerations, relative to a person's physical appearance. I embed avatars into a dictator game and conduct two experiments, one addressing self image and the other social image. The direction of the treatment effect in the dictator game for both experiments suggests that individuals do attach image considerations to their avatars, though the effects are not statistically significant. Additionally, I find that subjects create significantly more positively perceived avatars when they know that their avatar will be shown to another subject who will decide how to allocate an endowment with them. Chapter 3, joint with Alessandra Casella and Michelle Jiang, studies the impact of an alternative voting system on the minority's turnout and resultant victories. We start from the observation that under majoritarian election systems, securing participation and representation of minorities remains an open problem, made salient in the US by its history of voter suppression. One remedy recommended by the courts is Cumulative Voting (CV): each voter has as many votes as open positions and can cumulate votes on as few candidates as desired. Theory predicts that CV encourages the minority to overcome obstacles to voting: although each voter is treated equally, CV increases minority's turnout relative to the majority, and the minority's share of seats won. A lab experiment based on a costly voting design strongly supports both predictions. Chapter 3 was published in Volume 141 of Games and Economic Behavior, pp. 133-155, September 2023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2023.05.012.

This dissertation examines three different subjects underpinned by one common approach— the survey experiment—and, broadly, one common aim: to better understand heterogeneity in public opinion in the United States and Canada. Specifically, it focuses heterogeneity as it relates to minorities and the cultural dynamics that emerge in multiracial and multiethnic countries. Contexts with diverse racial and ethnic compositions, diverse immigration and equity policies, and complex sociohistorical lineages are bound to be underpinned by deeply fragmented attitudinal dynamics. Yet only recently has research taken a deep dive into what the contours of this fragmentation might look like. As diversity increases in the West and cultural complexities deepen, understanding heterogeneity in public opinion toward and among different cultural, racial, and ethnic groups will become increasingly pressing. Luckily for the research community, the ability to study such heterogeneity is increasing as well. Fielding large-scale surveys has been facilitated by both the vast penetration of the Internet in the 21st century and the explosion of online marketplaces that allow researchers to buy survey respondents relatively cheaply and quickly. This dissertation exploits these contextual developments to field three online survey experiments among a total of 40,000 respondents in Canada and the United States.

This dissertation analyzes how redistricting, minority representation, and perceived polarization— three topics regularly studied at the national level—function at the level of local government. The first two chapters focus on city council redistricting. In the first chapter, I used a new approach, a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm, to simulate city council district plans. By simulating tens of thousands of plans for each city, I was able to compare the plans that are actually implemented to a representative sample of all plausible plans. This analysis represents the first large-N geospatial analysis of city council redistricting. I found that the city council maps that are actually implemented feature more majority-minority districts than the median simulation. This implies that somewhere in the redistricting process, a conscious effort is made to foster minority representation. In the second chapter, I merged city council map data with the results of city council elections. I then analyzed the relationship between the composition of districts and who runs and who wins in city council elections. I found that district-level demographic makeup continues to be the dominant factor in the supply of minority candidates. I also found that, comparing two cities that are otherwise demographically and politically similar, cities that fall under the Voting Rights Act (VRA) pre-clearance had more minorities run for office and win election on average. In the third chapter, I conducted an original survey experiment to determine if respondents’ perceptions of partisan polarization differed in local contexts relative to the national political landscape. I did not find measurable differences in the perceived prevalence of support for different issues. However, I did find that respondents were slightly less willing to endorse generic language about partisans’ issue support when cued to think about ordinary voters in their local area. All together, these studies probe three different aspects of local electoral politics. In doing so, they help reconcile our understanding of electoral politics nationally with areas of local politics that still have many open questions.