Horacio Larreguy

IEA – Could you walk us through the key moments that shaped your path from your earliest exposure to economic thinking to what sparked your interest in the field, and ultimately what drew you to academic research?

Horacio – I first chose economics almost out of rebellion. I loved physics—thanks to all the IB experiments and the math behind them—but I had also taken a high school economics class that intrigued me. The night before declaring my major, I asked my mom’s advice; she said physics, since economics was a “lesser science.” That was all the motivation I needed. I had always liked the idea of a PhD without knowing what it really meant, but I only discovered research late. At the University of Buenos Aires, most of my professors focused on teaching, and I was working in consulting at the same time, which left little space for research.

I went to CEMFI for my master’s mainly to follow someone I loved to Europe. My thesis there—a clumsy game-theoretic model of contracting institutions—was my first real research project, and I loved it. Arriving at MIT, I planned to be an applied theorist until Daron gently told me it wasn’t my comparative advantage. Though tough to hear, I remain grateful: that nudge pushed me into applied work, which has become one of the great passions of my life.

IEA – Your study shows that high-saturation, non-partisan Facebook ad campaigns in Mexico improved electoral accountability, with effects amplified in more socially connected areas. How does digital saturation interact with offline networks to shape political outcomes, and what can this tell us about designing effective information interventions?

Horacio – This is an excellent question. We concentrate on the relationship between saturation and social media connectedness because that is measurable; however, we anticipate that online and offline networks are highly correlated and equally significant. In our study, “Information Provision, Voter Coordination, and Electoral Accountability: Evidence from Mexican Social Networks” published at the APSR, we demonstrate the importance of family networks in shaping political outcomes in rural areas. At the municipal level—and even more so in urban areas—while these networks can be constructed, they often do not serve as meaningful measures of offline social connectedness. Nonetheless, this does not imply that offline networks are unimportant. To the extent that they can be measured, such as indirectly through social capital measures, these should definitely be taken into account since high offline social connectedness requires a lower saturation for campaigns to be effective.

IEA – Your work on Mexico’s land allocation program during the 1960s shows that clientelist incumbents may weaken state capacity when their political dominance is threatened. What does this suggest about the tension between political competition and state-building, and how might these dynamics play out in other countries today?

Horacio – Another excellent question. It is true that incumbents may face perverse incentives to underinvest in state capacity. Yet competing interests can still motivate them. For instance, in ongoing work (Breaking Clientelism or Rewarding Incumbents? Evidence from an Urban Titling Program in Mexico), we find that short-term electoral gains may encourage incumbents to support programmatic policies that reduce future opportunities for clientelism. Similarly, Anderson Frey’s Strategic Allocation of Irrevocable and Durable Benefits shows that higher-level incumbents may promote such programs to weaken the opposition’s clientelistic capacity in lower-level elections. These dynamics are common in many developing democracies where clientelism remains a central feature of politics.