Vincent Pons

Vincent Pons

Michael B. Kim Associate Professor of Business Administration

Michael B. Kim Associate Professor of Business Administration

Business, Government and the International Economy
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Vincent Pons
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TO LEARN MORE ABOUT VINCENT PONS, CONSULT HIS WEBSITE.

Vincent Pons is an associate professor at Harvard Business School, and he is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).

Vincent Pons's research examines the foundations of democracy: how democratic systems function, and how they can be improved. He decomposes the electoral cycle into four essential steps: the factors affecting voter participation, those shaping preferences, the representativeness of results, and the effects of election outcomes on policies and on countries’ economic performance. This work has appeared in journals such as Econometrica, the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the American Political Science Review. It has resulted in mentions and opinion pieces in media outlets including The New York Times, The Economist, The BBC, Les Echos, and Le Monde.

Professor Pons received his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also holds a master in economics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris (joint with the Paris School of Economics and ENSAE) and a master’s degree in political philosophy from Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne. 

Featured Work
Does Context Outweigh Individual Characteristics in Driving Voting Behavior? Evidence from Relocations within the U.S.
We measure the overall influence of contextual versus individual factors (e.g., voting rules and media as opposed to race and education) on voter behavior, and explore underlying mechanisms. Using a US-wide voter-level panel, 2008–2018, we examine voters who relocate across state and county lines, tracking changes in registration, turnout, and party affiliation to estimate location and individual fixed effects in a value-added model. Location explains 37 percent of the cross-state variation in turnout (to 63 percent for individual characteristics) and an only slightly smaller share of variation in party affiliation. Place effects are larger for young and White voters. (JEL D12, D72, I20, J15, L82, R23)
Strict ID Laws Don't Stop Voters: Evidence form a U.S. Nationwide Panel, 2008-2018

U.S. states increasingly require identification to vote—an ostensible attempt to deter fraud that prompts complaints of selective disenfranchisement. Using a difference-in-differences design on a panel data set with 1.6 billion observations, 2008–2018, we find that the laws have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation. These results hold through a large number of specifications. Our most demanding specification controls for state, year, and voter fixed effects, along with state and voter time-varying controls. Based on this specification, we obtain point estimates of −0.1 percentage points for effects both on overall registration and turnout (with 95% confidence intervals of [−2.3; 2.1 percentage points] and [−3.0; 2.8 percentage points], respectively), and +1.4 percentage points for the effect on the turnout of nonwhite voters relative to whites (with a 95% confidence interval of [−0.5; 3.2percentage points]). The lack of negative impact on voter turnout cannot be attributed to voters’ reaction against the laws, measured by campaign contributions and self-reported political engagement. However, the likelihood that nonwhite voters were contacted by a campaign increases by 4.7 percentage points, suggesting that parties’ mobilization might have offset modest effects of the laws on the participation of ethnic minorities. Finally, strict ID requirements have no effect on fraud, actual or perceived. Overall, our findings suggest that efforts to improve elections may be better directed at other reforms. JEL Codes: D72.


Expressive Voting and Its Cost: Evidence from Runoffs with Two or Three Candidates
In French parliamentary and local elections, candidates ranked first and second in the first round automatically qualify for the second round, while a third candidate qualifies only when selected by more than 12.5% of registered citizens. Using a fuzzy RDD around this threshold, we find that the third candidate attracts both “switchers,” who would have voted for one of the top two candidates if she were not present, and “loyal” voters, who would have abstained. Switchers vote for the third candidate even when she is very unlikely to win. This disproportionately harms the candidate ideologically closest to her and causes his defeat in one fifth of the races. These results suggest that a large fraction of voters value voting expressively over behaving strategically to ensure the victory of their second best. We rationalize our findings by a model in which different types of voters trade off expressive and strategic motives.
Will a Five-Minute Discussion Change Your Mind? A Countrywide Experiment on Voter Choice in France
This paper provides the first estimate of the effect of door-to-door canvassing on actual electoral outcomes, via a countrywide experiment embedded in Francois Hollande’s campaign in the 2012 French presidential election. While existing experiments randomized door-to-door visits at the individual level, the scale of this campaign (five million doors knocked) enabled randomization by precinct, the level at which vote shares are recorded administratively. Visits did not affect turnout, but increased Hollande’s vote share in the first round and accounted for one fourth of his victory margin in the second. Visits’ impact persisted in later elections, suggesting a lasting persuasion effect.
Journal Articles
Working Papers
Cases and Teaching Materials
Other Publications
Research Summary
Overview
Professor Pons studies questions in political economy and development with the goal of understanding how democratic systems function, and how they can be improved.

He decomposes the electoral cycle into four essential steps: the factors affecting voter participation, those shaping preferences, the representativeness of results, and the effects of election outcomes on policies and on countries’ economic performance. While his individual papers focus on just one or two of these steps at a time, his research as a whole seeks to paint a fresh and articulated picture of how democracy works, from the inputs of voter decisions to the output of elections.

The first strand of his research seeks to help solve the puzzle of voter abstention by identifying its causes and searching for remedies. Professor Pons and two friends convinced the incumbent president of the region including Paris to run an experiment during his 2010 bid for reelection. They organized a door-to-door effort and trained activists from the Socialist Party in exchange for being allowed to randomly select the addresses covered. The resulting study proved that voter outreach methods commonly used in the U.S. could also be effective in other countries. Professor Pons has shown in subsequent work that their effects often come from reducing voting costs, such as those created by voter registration requirements.

The second strand of his research asks how we form our vote choices and preferences. In 2012, he had the opportunity to work as one of the three national coordinators of François Hollande’s field campaign for president of France. Together with the same two friends, he organized a total of 80,000 canvassers who knocked on five million doors across all France. He showed that the door-to-door visits won over a large fraction of voters and significantly contributed to Hollande’s victory. In two later projects, he zoomed out: he used survey data from 10 countries since 1952, then data covering the universe of U.S. voters, to assess the overall effects of all campaign information (not just a unique contact) and of all contextual factors (not just campaigns).

The third strand of his research explores two challenges to fair and representative electoral outcomes: failed coordination and imbalance. The fact that failed coordination within one side of the political spectrum can generate an undesirable outcome was clear in the 2002 French presidential election: Jospin was eliminated in the first round though left-wing candidates obtained far more votes in total than far-right ones. Another example is the 2000 U.S. presidential election, in which the 3% of votes earned by third-party candidate Ralph Nader in Florida was sufficient to sway the entire election in favor of George W. Bush. Professor Pons has estimated how frequent such electoral failures are and identified devices facilitating the coordination of voters as well as parties. Imbalance across sides may further bias the democratic process and tilt the result towards the incumbent. He has tested whether coordination failures tend to be larger on one side or the other and whether campaign finance regulations help level the playing field between incumbents and their challengers. Identifying the conditions that make incumbents’ defeat possible is essential: as Przeworski (1991) observed, what differentiates democracy from autocracy is, ultimately, that it is “a system in which parties lose elections.”

A fourth strand of research looks at the consequences of elections bringing a new party to power. One might worry that democratic power transitions open periods of uncertainty and instability. However, using data on all presidential and parliamentary elections in the world since 1945, Professor Pons finds that electoral turnovers tend to improve countries’ economic indicators as well as their performance on many other dimensions. Interestingly, these effects are weaker when internal and external constraints limit leaders’ ability to enact change. He has complemented this research with case studies in Spain, Bolivia and Zambia that explore the different ways in which globalization and foreign powers influence and constrain domestic policymaking.
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