Leah Rosenzweig

Research Affiliate

Leah is a Research Affiliate at MIT GOV/LAB and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), France. At GOV/LAB, Leah collaborates with non-governmental organizations in East and West Africa on questions of citizen engagement and government accountability. Her book project investigates how social norms influence political participation in rural East Africa and urban West Africa. Developing a new theory of social voting, Leah implemented a lab-in-the-field experimental design to test the existence and influence of a social norm of voting in Tanzania and Uganda. She finds that citizens in Tanzania and Uganda are more likely to incur a cost to vote in a hypothetical election when their behavior is public to their fellow community members, than when they vote in secret. Her ongoing work in Lagos, Nigeria explores social norms of participation in informal settlements. Leah was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.