of corruption show in other work in the same political context that voter preferences regarding ethnic identity are malleable and responsive to information about the severity of allegations of transgression (Banerjee et al. 2014; Banerjee et al. 2009). This is consistent with a large literature finding evidence of responsiveness of voters in poor countries to the availability of information, despite theoretical predictions in a long-standing political science literature that voters in these contexts are unlikely to be swayed by information (World Bank, 2016; Keefer and Khemani, 2014).

Yet, the way forward for reforms is far from clear. The solution to the political economy of reforms does not appear to be as simple as giving people more information about the costs of the status quo and the benefits of reform. The problem of communication to persuade changes in beliefs and preferences requires as much serious and scientific study as has been afforded to the body of work on economic reforms and political constraints to those reforms. The problem of information and communication is in fact inter-twined with the issues of credibility and legitimacy of leaders that has been part of the economics literature, and it requires the tools of the economics discipline to tackle.

For example, Glaeser and Sunstein (2013) find that communication by leaders matters in ways that go well beyond the underlying information being communicated. They provide the following example from the United States to show how whether citizens are persuaded or not depends upon their perceptions about the agent communicating the information: “ _When liberals and conservatives are asked for their private views about a generous welfare policy and a more stringent one, they react in the predictable ways, with liberals favoring the former and conservatives the latter. But things change dramatically when they are informed of the distribution of views within the House of Representatives. More specifically, conservatives end up disapproving of the more stringent policy, and favor the generous one, when they are told that 90 percent of House Republicans favor the generous policy. Liberals show the same willingness to abandon their private opinions, and thus end up favoring the stringent policy, when told that this is the position of 90 percent of House Democrats. Notably, the effect of learning about party views is as strong among those who are knowledgeable about welfare policy as it is among people who were not. Also notably, both conservatives and liberals believe that their judgments are driven largely by the merits, and not by what they learn about the views of their preferred party—but in that belief, they are wrong._ ” (Glaeser and Sunstein 2013, 23) The body of research in the United States on how political polarization impedes reforms also examines how even the existence of free and balanced media markets is unable to overcome the problem. For example, Glaeser and Sunstein (2013) show that in the presence of preexisting beliefs that polarize citizens, media-provided information is not only unlikely to shift beliefs but might in fact cause previous beliefs to become even more entrenched. The same information can activate completely different memories of personal experiences and associated convictions, thus producing polarized responses to that information.

Campante and Hojman (2013) provide evidence from the US that the intersection of media and political markets influences ideological polarization among politicians and citizens. They find 13