Shelby Grossman, Ph.D.
shelbygrossman@gmail.com
Research Scholar
Stanford University
About Me:
I am a Research Scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory. My research focuses on disinformation and social media in Africa. Other research projects focus on informal trade in Nigeria, the politics of the polio vaccination campaign in Nigeria, and local government in Nigeria. Previously I was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Memphis. I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law from 2016-2017. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2016.
Research Interests
African Politics
Political Economy
Comparative Political Institutions
Development
Health Politics and Policy
Urban Politics
Informal Trade
Democratic Erosion
Public Health
Disinformation
Social Media
Misinformation
Fake News
Africa
Countries of Interest
Nigeria
Equatorial Guinea
Libya
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in many parts of the world, they are not publicly guaranteed. Private market associations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from group members. Under what circumstances do private associations provide a stable environment for economic activity? The author uses survey data collected from 1,179 randomly sampled traders across 199 markets in Lagos, Nigeria, and finds that markets maintain institutions to support trade not in the absence of government, but rather in response to active government interference. The author argues that associations develop protrade policies when threatened by politicians they perceive to be predatory and when the organizations can respond with threats of their own. The latter is easier when traders are not competing with one another. To maintain this balance of power, an association will not extort; it needs trader support to maintain the credibility of its threats to mobilize against predatory politicians.
How does learning about democratic erosion in other countries shape opinions about the state of democracy in the US today? We describe lessons learned from a collaborative course on democratic erosion taught at nearly two dozen universities over the 2017-18 academic year. We use survey data, student-written blog posts, exit questionnaires, and interviews with students who did and did not take the course to explore the effects of studying democratic erosion from a comparative perspective. Do comparisons foster optimism about the relative resilience of democracy in the US, or pessimism about its vulnerability to the same risk factors that have damaged other democracies around the world? Somewhat to our surprise, we find that the course increased optimism about US democracy, instilling greater confidence in the relative strength and longevity of American democratic norms and institutions. We also find, however, that the course did not increase civic engagement, and, if anything, appears to have exacerbated skepticism towards activities such as protest. Students who took the course became increasingly sensitive to the possibility that some forms of civic engagement reflect and intensify the same threats to democracy that the course emphasized—especially polarization.
Conflicting preferences between the state and society underpin most accountability mechanisms by providing a credible way for society to impose costs on the state. Adapting a classic bargaining framework, we argue that broader conditions can support state-society bargaining. Policies that both the state and society value can also enhance society’s negotiating power provided society has a lower valuation and is more patient than the state. By threatening to sabotage their own interests but hurt the impatient state even more, citizens can compel the state to deliver broader policy benefits. We illustrate this logic with the case of polio vaccination in northern Nigeria, where entire communities have resisted the vaccine as a strategy to bargain for more desired services. To resolve and preempt non-compliance, the Nigerian government has enhanced service delivery in other areas, demonstrating the opportunity for improved accountability in the presence of shared-interest policies.
This paper investigates the determinants of price discrimination in the rice market in one neighborhood of Lagos, Nigeria. There has been little empirical study of how ethnicity and class shape economic outcomes in informal market interactions. We conduct an audit experiment – one of the first audit experiments in Africa – seeking to address this gap. We experimentally manipulate class, with confederates presenting as different classes; this may be the first audit study to take this approach. This is also one of the first in-person audits to have multiple transactions for each buyer and seller, thus allowing for the use of buyer and seller fixed effects. We find little evidence that, all else equal, sharing an ethnicity on its own influences market treatment. Class, however, does have substantial effects, at least for non-coethnics. High class non-coethnics receive higher prices per unit than low class non-coethnics. Our findings suggest that the boundaries of group identity appear to be at least partially defined by class in the informal economy.
Other:
This White Paper analyzes 73 Facebook Pages tied to companies linked to Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin that targeted Africa.
This white paper analyzes GRU online operations between 2014 and 2019.