Alvaro Calderon

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year

Deliberation and Political Accountability

Polarization is thought to be the main threat to democracy across the world, but we still lack evidence of its consequences. This is especially troublesome for developing countries where improvements to democracy have shown a lot of promise to increase political accountability and public services provision. One of the main victims of the rising levels of polarization is the deliberative process that makes democracy work. This project uses field experiments and mayoral elections to study patterns of deliberation and assess whether political animosity worsens the transmission of information and the choice of political parties.

Alvaro Calderon, Department of Economics

Alvaro Calderon is a second year PhD student in economics. Calderon's works lies in the intersection between development economics, political economy, and economic history. He is particularly interested in how democracy can be improved in developing countries and whether that matters for development. Caldron is also interested in nation- and state-building and is working on a project about the Latin American experience. Prior to Stanford, he received his MA in economics at CEMFI.

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