Mae MacDonald
PhD Candidate
Political Science
Stanford University
maemac@stanford.edu
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, and a Graduate Fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University.
I study the international politics of forced displacement. My research lies at the intersection of international security and international political economy, with a focus on refugees, foreign aid, and international institutions. I examine cooperation within the international refugee regime, asking how host governments, wealthy donors, and international organizations respond to and shape the cross-border movement of people displaced by war.
To answer these questions, I combine novel cross-national datasets with surveys, experiments, archival research, and interviews. My research draws on four years of fieldwork across East Africa and Southeast Asia, building on earlier work with Syrian and Afghan refugees as an aid worker in Europe. You can read more about my work in this profile from the Stanford King Center on Global Development.
At Stanford, I am a recipient of the Ric Weiland Award for excellence in the School of Humanities and Sciences and the Centennial Teaching Assistant Award for outstanding teaching. I am very grateful to the J-PAL/IPA Displaced Livelihoods Initiative, King Center on Global Development, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, among others, for supporting my research.
Before beginning my doctoral studies, I worked with refugee organizations in Greece and the UK and as a researcher at YouGov, conducting public opinion research for government and the public sector. I hold a B.A. (Double First Class) in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford.
Book Project
Research on the international refugee regime has focused largely on failures of cooperation, particularly wealthy states’ reluctance to admit refugees. Yet in the Global South, where 71% of the world’s refugees are hosted, the regime has achieved a striking degree of cooperation and expansion. Created in 1951 for a narrow group displaced by World War II, it now supports more than 40 million refugees through a global system of international protection and assistance.
The book asks why this system has endured and expanded despite conditions that make cooperation difficult. For host countries, refugees can impose economic, security, and political costs and often remain for decades, while enforcement of international refugee law is weak. For donor countries, the benefits of financing refugee protection are often distant and diffuse, and contributions to UNHCR remain largely voluntary. Why, then, have host and donor states sustained and expanded the refugee regime in the Global South?
I examine this question using new cross-national and historical data, micro-level evidence from refugee-hosting countries, and archival and interview evidence from donors and international organizations. I have constructed two original datasets from archival records: the Global Refugee Return Dataset, covering 293 origin-asylum dyads from 1980 to 2023, and a new dataset tracing UNHCR financing from the early years of the regime to the present. I combine these data with surveys, experiments, administrative data, interviews, and four years of fieldwork across East Africa.
More broadly, the book uses the refugee regime to study how international cooperation is built and sustained around global problems concentrated in poorer countries, and what happens to those arrangements as foreign aid and political support for international institutions decline.
Publications
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Lisa Blaydes, James D. Fearon, and Mae MacDonald. 2025.
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Understanding Intimate Partner Violence
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Annual Review of Political Science 28:351-374.
Violence against women occurs at high rates in societies across the world. The most common form is intimate partner violence, abuse perpetrated against a spouse or intimate relationship partner. We present a household bargaining model that seeks to clarify causal mechanisms and to identify key pathways by which economic, political, legal, and cultural factors external to households influence domestic abuse rates, gender equity within relationships, and rates of relationship dissolution. We relate key parameters to factors that differ across societies and over time, including economic opportunities for women, laws that criminalize domestic abuse, and social norms associated with gender equality. We review research associated with these topics to establish what we know and do not know about violence against women in households. While much of this literature is outside of the field of political science, we highlight opportunities for political scientists to contribute to our understanding of how and why domestic violence persists in the world today.
Working Papers
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Peace or Push? Understanding Global Patterns of Refugee Return
[Talk]
When do refugees return? A core premise of the refugee regime is that refugees remain abroad while home is unsafe and return as conditions improve. Yet using a novel global dataset, I show that most recorded returns occur during ongoing conflict, while many refugees remain abroad after wars end. I argue that existing research can miss these patterns because it focuses primarily on individual-level preferences measured through return intentions, while realized return is concentrated in episodes often shaped by population-level shocks. In particular, coercive policies and conflict in asylum can force large refugee populations to leave even while home remains unsafe, while UNHCR repatriation assistance can enable return by financing transport and rehabilitation. I introduce the Global Refugee Return Dataset, covering 293 origin--asylum dyads from 1980 to 2023, which improves measurement of realized return and provides new data on exclusion policies and UNHCR repatriation assistance. Within dyads, asylum-side shocks and repatriation assistance are associated with substantially higher return rates than in other years, while globally they coincide with far more return than war endings, largely because many more refugees are exposed to them.
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Aid Cuts and the Politics of Refugee Hosting
[Talk]
In 2025, U.S. aid cuts drove the fastest contraction of foreign aid on record. These cuts threaten the cooperative arrangement underpinning the refugee regime, in which low- and middle-income countries host most refugees while high-income countries finance assistance. As host communities lose aid-related jobs, services, and infrastructure, does citizens’ willingness to host refugees decline? I examine this question in Kenya using two nationwide surveys, a high-frequency panel and vignette experiment near Kakuma camp, and 52 interviews with local leaders, all conducted as the cuts unfolded. Support for hosting declined in refugee-hosting areas as economic losses and insecurity grew, driven by households that lost camp-based benefits. By contrast, national support remained stable, and exploratory evidence suggests that humanitarian concern limited backlash. Yet because refugee policy often responds to pressures in hosting regions, continued cuts may weaken the local foundations of asylum in the countries that host most of the world’s refugees.
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Does Building Business Networks Strengthen Refugee Economic and Social Integration?
[Info]
Does expanding business networks foster the economic and social integration of refugees in cities in low- and middle-income countries? We provide unconditional business grants and we randomize 8,000 refugees and hosts from 10 nationalities into weekly networking groups in Nairobi and Kampala. The groups vary in their nationality composition and meeting setup to induce ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ and same or mixed nationality ties. We find three main results in this Randomized Controlled Trial. First, cash grants improve business performance, economic outcomes, and life satisfaction. A novel finding is that cash alone improved business networks: recipients’ networks grow organically and become more diverse. Second, the networking intervention increases business engagement, collaboration, and learning, but none of the networking groups produce systematic additional gains in economic, social or psychological outcomes on average. Third, neither cash grants nor networking groups improve social cohesion, suggesting that livelihood interventions alone are insufficient to strengthen refugee-host relations.
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Beyond Encampment? Understanding Attitudes Toward Refugee Integration
Most of the world’s refugees live in low- and middle-income countries, where debates center on integrating those already present rather than admitting new arrivals. Yet existing research focuses largely on admission in high-income countries. We provide one of the first nationwide assessments of attitudes toward integration in the Global South, drawing on a survey of 3,326 Kenyans fielded after a reform was passed but before implementation, with embedded experiments varying policy dimension and refugee group. Support for integration is high, but citizens are less supportive of allowing refugees to leave camps than granting economic inclusion or creating integrated settlements, and support varies significantly by refugee nationality. Opposition is driven primarily by fears of crime, terrorism, and the spread of conflict. Ethnic kinship and close contact predict support, while economic factors matter little. These findings suggest that integration is politically feasible, but insecurity associated with free movement remains the largest concern.
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Partisanship and Blame Attribution for Foreign Aid Cuts in the Global South
[PAP]
Does foreign aid retrenchment reduce U.S. soft power in aid-dependent countries? Standard accounts of foreign aid imply that withdrawal should damage a donor’s reputation most where dependence on its assistance is greatest. Yet following the 2025 U.S. aid cuts, attitudes toward the United States remained comparatively resilient in Sub-Saharan Africa, the region most exposed to U.S. assistance. We argue that this pattern reflects misattribution: many citizens do not hold the United States solely responsible for the withdrawal, instead blaming their own governments and often believing that corruption or misuse of aid prompted donors to pull out. We test this argument using original surveys and pre-registered experiments in Kenya and Malawi. Across both countries, responsibility for the cuts is divided between the United States and domestic governments, and attribution varies systematically with partisanship. Supporters of the incumbent are more likely to blame the United States, while opposition supporters are more likely to blame their own government. The reputational consequences of aid withdrawal therefore depend not simply on exposure, but on how domestic politics shapes the attribution of blame.
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U.S. Foreign Policy Shocks and Attitudes Toward Great Powers
How does U.S. foreign-policy retrenchment affect geopolitical competition in the Global South? A common assumption is that policies that damage perceptions of the United States create opportunities for China, leading citizens to substitute away from one great power toward the other. I test this expectation using multiple research designs that exploit distinct U.S. foreign-policy shocks. I analyze panel surveys in Kenya conducted around the 2025 U.S. aid cuts and an increase in gas prices associated with the Iran war, cross-national survey data fielded around U.S. tariff announcements, and a nationwide survey experiment on U.S. aid withdrawal. Across these settings, negative U.S. foreign-policy shocks reduce favorable attitudes toward the United States but do not increase support for China. Instead, attitudes toward China also deteriorate. The findings suggest that foreign-policy shocks can generate a broader backlash against major powers rather than geopolitical substitution, complicating accounts in which U.S. retrenchment straightforwardly translates into gains for China.
Public Writing
Mae MacDonald, Adam Lichtenheld, and Tolossa Asrat. 2025. " Kenya Embraces Refugee Integration - and Citizens Are on Board ." The New Humanitarian. Reprinted in The EastAfrican.