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Information Technology and Political Engagement: Mixed Evidence from Uganda
Abstract
This study integrates three related field experiments to learn about how Information Communications Technology (ICT) innovations can affect who gets to communicate with politicians. We implemented a nationwide experiment in Uganda following a smaller-scale framed field experiment that showed that ICTs can lead to significant ``flattening'': a greater share of marginalized populations used SMS-based communication compared to existing political communication channels. We find no evidence for such flattening from the national experiment, however. Instead patterns of participation look like politics as usual: participation rates are low and marginalized populations engage at especially low rates. We examine possible reasons for these differences, and then present the design and analysis of a third mechanism experiment that helps parse rival explanations for these divergent patterns. The evidence suggests that even when citizens have issues they want to raise, technological fixes to communication deficits can be easily undercut by structural weaknesses in political systems.
... Our research is also aligned with work on the responsiveness of politicians to citizen needs and demands (Buntaine, Nielson, and Skaggs 2021;Golden, Gulzar, and Sonnet 2023;Grossman, Humphreys, and Sacramone-Lutz 2020;Hawkins, Wolferts, and Nielson 2018;Keefer and Khemani 2005;Liaqat 2020;Loewen, Rubenson, and McAndrews 2022;Todd et al. 2021). Much of this literature attempts to assess the conditions under which policy decisions respond to information about citizen demands. ...
... 43 See SM Section 5.1. rely on empowering citizens to communicate with politicians rather than providing information to politicians directly (see, e.g., Grossman, Humphreys, and Sacramone-Lutz [2020]; Gulzar, Hai, and Paudel [2021]). Such interventions may cause politicians to respond based on the status of voters rather than on the type of information (Grossman and Slough 2021). ...
... See alsoBussell (2019),Grossman, Humphreys, and Sacramone- Lutz (2020), andGulzar, Hai, and Paudel (2021) for evidence in other contexts.4 Malawian MPs estimate that they pay $1,256 for a single constituency visit: 12% of their official yearly income in 2020(Barkan et al. 2010). ...
Do well-informed politicians make more effective spending decisions? In experiments with 70% of all elected politicians in Malawi ( N=460 ), we tested the effects of information on public spending. Specifically, we randomly provided information about school needs, foreign aid, and voting patterns prior to officials making real decisions about the allocation of spending. We show that these information interventions reduced inequalities in spending: treatment group politicians were more likely to spend in schools neglected by donors and in schools with greater need. Some information treatment effects were strongest in remote and less populated communities. These results suggest that information gaps partially explain inequalities in spending allocation and imply social welfare benefits from improving politicians’ access to information about community needs.
... Second, NGOs capable of managing complex RCTs (designed to provide evidence of program effectiveness) are also likely to implement programs more effectively than the average implementer. Such "persistent productivity differentials," whereby organizations confronting seemingly similar circumstances sometimes perform at persistently different levels, have been documented in a number of other settings in organizational economics Although we do not necessarily focus on the same set of mechanisms and pathways that feature in this literature, our study is also related to the growing body of work on the role of implementer identity, which finds that NGO-led interventions are generally more effective than comparable efforts by other actors (Berge et al., 2012;Bold et al., 2018;Cameron, Olivia, and Shah, 2019;Grossman, Humphreys, and Sacramone-Lutz, 2020;Fischer et al., 2019;Fitch-Fleischmann and Kresch, 2021;Henderson and Lee, 2015;Vivalt, 2020). 4 By comparing NGOs to other types of implementers, this literature sheds light on differences in effectiveness that emerge due to what we refer to as the "overall NGO effect," i.e., the combination of various observed and unobserved implementer-specific factors that can influence program success, such as an implementer's location, organizational capacity, as well as an implementer's prior exposure to beneficiaries (the focus of our study). ...
... Finally, no study reports that NGOs perform worse than other types of implementers. If anything, we observe that some studies report extremely large, positive differences in effect sizes between NGO-and non-NGO-led programs (e.g., BenYishay and Mobarak, 2019;Grossman, Humphreys, and Sacramone-Lutz, 2020). While such large effect sizes-in excess of 1,500 percent-are not feasible in our setting, this does suggest that the prior literature points to the possibility of large differences in effectiveness between NGO and non-NGO implementers, depending on factors such as the nature of the intervention, baseline familiarity with or uptake of promoted development solutions, and local contexts. ...
Programs implemented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are often more effective than comparable efforts by other actors, yet relatively little is known about how implementer identity drives final outcomes. By combining a stratified field experiment in India with a tripledifferences estimation strategy, we show that a local development NGO's prior engagement with target communities increases the effectiveness of a technology-promotion program implemented in these areas by at least 30 percent. This “NGO reputation effect” has implications for the generalizability and scalability of evidence from experimental research conducted with local implementation partners.
... Bold et al. (2013) find that an educational intervention increased student test scores when implemented by an NGO in Western Kenya but failed to increase scores when replicated at scale by the government. Grossman, Humphreys and Sacramont-Lutz (2015) finds that the high take-up by marginalized populations of new low-cost technology that allows constituents to engage with their local politicians could not be replicated when scaled to comprehensively cover half the country. A more promising outcome is reported in Banerjee et al. (2017) and Banerjee et al. (2016) who build on knowledge gained through previous failed attempts to effectively scale up the "Teaching at the Right Level" program. ...
... Toilet construction requires a significant outlay of capital. In the endline 11 The categorization here draws from and augments Grossman et al. (2015) who attribute the lower uptake in the scaled up version of the political engagement technology they study to a design effect-invitations to participate were given over the radio, rather than in person during a survey and an implementation agent effect-scale up involved implementation by parliament and promotion by politicians which may have altered incentives. The lack of replicability found in the teaching intervention in Bold et al. (2013) is slated to a combination of general equilibrium effects arising from political economy forces associated with union resistance to the hiring of a large number of contract teachers, and implementation agent effects. ...
We investigate the impacts of a widely used sanitation intervention, Community-Led Total Sanitation, which was implemented at scale across rural areas of Indonesia with a randomized controlled trial to evaluate its effectiveness. The program resulted in modest increases in toilet construction, decreased community tolerance of open defecation and reduced roundworm infestations in children. However, there was no impact on anemia, height or weight. We find important heterogeneity along three dimensions: (1) poverty—poorer households are limited in their ability to improve sanitation; (2) implementer identity—scale up involves local governments taking over implementation from World Bank contractors yet no sanitation and health benefits accrue in villages with local government implementation; and (3) initial levels of social capital—villages with high initial social capital built toilets whereas the community-led approach was counterproductive in low social capital villages with fewer toilets being built.
... To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to provide at-scale experimental evidence on the impact of an actual private website dedicated to job-search assistance. This is an important contribution, given the growing evidence that interventions which are effective in a small, controlled setting may become unimpactful when they are scaled up (e.g., Banerjee, Duflo, and Glennerster 2008;Banerjee et al. 2017;Grossman, Humphreys, and Sacramone-Lutz 2020). ...
... Not only because the implementation rates of the projects covered in the reports are already very low, but also because reports repeatedly indicate how programme officers were not able to get a response from MPs, or even got threats from MPs that they would abandon the project altogether if not left alone (BudgIT, 2018b: 131). Similar to the Ugandan case (Grossman et al., 2020;Humphreys and Weinstein, 2012), the idea of being monitored did apparently not lead to more activism from lawmakers. ...
Political parties in Africa and other developing countries are known to forge clientelist rather than programmatic ties to voters. Yet this does not mean that parties reward strong legislator-voter ties. In this paper, I argue for the case of Nigeria that lawmakers seeking to advance their political careers are incentivized to direct public resources to party members and senior party elites rather than serve their constituents in general. I draw on interviews with 8th National Assembly (2015–2019) lawmakers as well as quantitative data on MP re-election, targeted bills and motions, and the use of constituency development funds to demonstrate the predominance of narrow clientelism in Nigeria. I also place the Nigerian case in comparative perspective to argue that the extent to which legislators devote attention to constituents is likely to exist on a continuum, with the causes and consequences of this variation requiring further attention from scholars.
... Treatments are rarely identical across contexts but, as argued above, they often have a similar mechanism underpinning the causal principles in play. Theorizing about a useful level of abstraction, and designing to check that abstraction, is key to understanding how the mechanisms travel to other contexts (Sartori 1970 The search for a useful level of abstraction gives rise to a related question of scale (Banerjee et al. 2017a, Bold et al. 2018, Grossman et al. 2020. Many studies are constrained by design, meaning that they focus only on partial equilibrium, 19 whereas a theoretical mechanism and context under investigation could usefully be analyzed at a higher, general equilibrium level (Acemoglu 2010, Deaton 2010. ...
External validity captures the extent to which inferences drawn from a given study's sample apply to a broader population or other target populations. Social scientists frequently invoke external validity as an ideal, but they rarely attempt to make rigorous, credible external validity inferences. In recent years, methodologically oriented scholars have advanced a flurry of work on various components of external validity, and this article reviews and systematizes many of those insights. We first clarify the core conceptual dimensions of external validity and introduce a simple formalization that demonstrates why external validity matters so critically. We then organize disparate arguments about how to address external validity by advancing three evaluative criteria: model utility, scope plausibility, and specification credibility. We conclude with a practical aspiration that scholars supplement existing reporting standards to include routine discussion of external validity. It is our hope that these evaluation and reporting standards help rebalance scientific inquiry, such that the current obsession with causal inference is complemented with an equal interest in generalized knowledge.
... The contexts in which these experiments took place also suggest optimism for efforts by individuals and organizations to implement the non-judgmental exchange of narratives at scale: None of the seven organizations we worked with had previously implemented such an intervention, nor had the canvassers had any such prior experience. Previous research has found smaller treatment effects of other interventions when they are implemented at larger scale and by new partner organizations (Allcott 2015;Grossman, Humphreys, and Sacramone-Lutz 2019), consistent with the smaller effects we found in this study than in Broockman and Kalla (2016), as shown in Table 1. 14 While future research should continue to test potential boundary conditions on these effects, our findings already suggest optimism for other practitioners seeking to implement our findings. ...
Exclusionary attitudes—prejudice toward outgroups and opposition to policies that promote their well-being—are presenting challenges to democratic societies worldwide. Drawing on insights from psychology, we argue that non-judgmentally exchanging narratives in interpersonal conversations can facilitate durable reductions in exclusionary attitudes. We support this argument with evidence from three pre-registered field experiments targeting exclusionary attitudes toward unauthorized immigrants and transgender people. In these experiments, 230 canvassers conversed with 6,869 voters across 7 US locations. In Experiment 1, face-to-face conversations deploying arguments alone had no effects on voters’ exclusionary immigration policy or prejudicial attitudes, but otherwise identical conversations also including the non-judgmental exchange of narratives durably reduced exclusionary attitudes for at least four months (d = 0.08). Experiments 2 and 3, targeting transphobia, replicate these findings and support the scalability of this strategy (ds = 0.08, 0.04). Non-judgmentally exchanging narratives can help overcome the resistance to persuasion often encountered in discussions of these contentious topics.
... In particular, we demonstrate how solutions from applied research that is tied to the places, populations, and programmes associated with specific NGOs may have very different impacts when implemented in alternative settings (Ravallion 2009). 3 Our study is also related to a growing literature on the role of implementer identity, which finds that NGO-led interventions are generally more effective than comparable efforts by other actors (Bold et al. 2016;Cameron and Shah 2017;Grossman et al. 2016;Henderson and Lee 2015). Yet such comparisons implicitly assume that there is something inherently different about NGOs that leads to implementation effectiveness. ...
... We did not collect extensive demographic data on the reporters in our study, which limits our ability to comment on who participated. Future research is needed to determine how responsiveness shapes the composition of reporters (Grossman, Humphreys and Sacramone-Lutz 2018), though existing work suggests it is equally important for crowdsourcing platforms (see Sjoberg, Mellon and Peixoto 2017;Trucco 2017). ...
To promote good governance, citizens can inform governments directly and routinely about the implementation of policies and the delivery of public services. Yet citizens lack incentives to provide information when they do not expect governments to be responsive, and citizen disengagement in turn often prevents governments from providing public goods effectively. In two field experiments, we studied potential remedies to this dilemma related to solid waste services in Uganda. We randomly assigned reporters to be recruited by community nomination and to be recognized by community leaders in an attempt to select for and motivate information sharing. We also randomly assigned reporters to hear from the government about how their reports were used to make real improvements to waste services. Community nominations and public announcements did not increase reporting. However, responsiveness boosted participation over several months for reporters who had been recruited earliest and had been reporting longest, highlighting the critical role of timely government responsiveness in sustaining information flows from citizens.
... Data culled from the U-Bridge system suggests high levels of adoption in comparison to similar ICT programs studied elsewhere (Belcher, Lopes, Sjoberg, & Mellon, 2016;Grossman, Humphreys, & Sacramone-Lutz, 2016). Between August 2014 and November 2015 over 10,000 messages were sent via the platform. ...
We examine the effect on service delivery outcomes of a new information communication technology (ICT) platform that allows citizens to send free and anonymous messages to local government officials, thus reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of communication about public services. In particular, we use a field experiment to assess the extent to which the introduction of this ICT platform improved monitoring by the district, effort by service providers, and inputs at service points in health, education and water in Arua District, Uganda. We find suggestive evidence of a short-term improvement in some education services, but these effects deteriorate by year two of the program, and we find little or no evidence of an effect on health and water services at any period. Despite relatively high levels of system uptake, enthusiasm of district officials, and anecdotal success stories, we find that relatively few messages from citizens provided specific, actionable information about service provision within the purview and resource constraints of district officials, and users were often discouraged by officials’ responses. Our findings suggest that for crowd-sourced ICT programs to move from isolated success stories to long-term accountability enhancement, the quality and specific content of reports and responses provided by users and officials is centrally important.
... In particular, we demonstrate how solutions from applied research that is tied to the places, populations, and programmes associated with specific NGOs may have very different impacts when implemented in alternative settings (Ravallion 2009). 3 Our study is also related to a growing literature on the role of implementer identity, which finds that NGO-led interventions are generally more effective than comparable efforts by other actors (Bold et al. 2016;Cameron and Shah 2017;Grossman et al. 2016;Henderson and Lee 2015). Yet such comparisons implicitly assume that there is something inherently different about NGOs that leads to implementation effectiveness. ...
When do unelected officials respond to citizen complaints, and what are the implications for service delivery? In the formal complaint system for Mumbai's water sector, bureaucrats addressed 44% of the roughly 20,000 complaints lodged from 2016 to 2018. In line with literature on distributive politics, responsiveness to marginalized citizens is lower. Yet in interviews, officials emphasize that programmatic goals and capacity constraints lead to prioritization by what the complaint is about. In fact, once controlling for complaint content, the relationship between complainant identity and responsiveness disappears. Initial patterns of differential responsiveness by complainant identity arise from the fact that citizens from marginalized groups experience lower levels of service provision, which leads them to make complaints that are more difficult to address. The paper sheds light on the role of bureaucracy in e‐governance and service delivery, showing administrative priorities in responding to complaints may perpetuate inequalities in service provision.
While some studies suggest mobile phone–based information programs change behavior; others find no effect. We evaluate six text message agricultural extension programs, collectively covering 128,000 farmers. A meta-analysis finds a 1.22-fold increase in the odds of adoption of recommended practices (95 percent CI: 1.16, 1.29). We cannot reject similar impacts across experiments. Impacts are increased by message repetition, but not by providing more granular information, using behavioral framings, or complementing texts with phone calls. There is little evidence of message fatigue or crowd-out. Despite modest absolute impacts detectable only with large samples or meta-analysis, texts are inexpensive enough to be cost-effective. (JEL D83, D91, L96, O13, Q12, Q16)
As social inclusion increasingly relies on technological drivers, digital government transformation (DGT) has been recognized as critical for promoting social inclusion. A growing body of literature has explored the relationship between DGT and the social and political participation of disadvantaged and marginalized groups within social inclusion. However, the impact of DGT on the economic participation of these groups remains unclear. Given that female entrepreneurship is an important representation of the economic participation of disadvantaged and marginalized groups, we utilize a quasi-natural experiment involving the adoption of the city brain and employ panel data from 281 Chinese cities from 2014 to 2020, using a time-varying difference-in-differences model to investigate the impact of DGT on female entrepreneurship. This study reveals that DGT promotes regional female entrepreneurship. Business environment optimization, digital inclusive finance development, and technical talent gathering mediate this effect. The positive impact is further strengthened by the government’s policy attention to entrepreneurship and digital technology. This study clarifies the impact of DGT on the economic participation of disadvantaged and marginalized groups from the perspective of female entrepreneurship, thereby advancing research on the beneficial effects of DGT on social inclusion.
E‐government services are often heralded as a silver bullet for governments willing to engage more meaningfully with citizens. Evidence on the effectiveness of these measures for improving citizen‐state relations is scarce, however. Most studies examining e‐government focus on efficiency considerations; few consider potential effects on citizen‐state relations. The present study analyses the effect of an information treatment about the availability of e‐government services on citizen perceptions of government responsiveness. We conducted an experiment in cooperation with the Botswana Unified Revenue Service that randomly assigned registered taxpayers to receive a short message on their mobile phones. Our results indicate that the treatment has a significant, positive effect on the perception that the government addresses citizen needs, and more so for respondents with lower income. The findings suggest that, by affecting how citizens assess political realities, e‐government can play an important role in shaping citizen‐state relations.
Early and forced marriage (EFM) is an increasing focus of international organizations and local non-government organizations. This study assesses the extent to which attitudes and norms related to EFM can be changed by locally tailored media campaigns. A two-hour radio drama set in rural Tanzania was presented to Tanzanian villagers as part of a placebo-controlled experiment randomized at the village level. A random sample of 1200 villagers was interviewed at baseline and invited to a presentation of the radio drama, 83% of whom attended. 95% of baseline respondents were re-interviewed two weeks later, and 97% 15 months after that. The radio drama produced sizable and statistically significant effects on attitudes and perceived norms concerning forced marriage, which was the focus of the radio drama, as well as more general attitudes about gender equality. Fifteen months later, treatment effects diminished, but we continue to see evidence of EFM-related attitude change.
When do politicians respond to individuals' public service complaints? Technological solutions—termed e‐governance—have been shown to help increase responsiveness in some developing nations where they serve to connect individuals, politicians, and bureaucrats for the first time. I argue that in country‐contexts like India, where personal connections to bureaucrats and politicians are common, politicians are less responsive to complaints registered with e‐governance systems than to complaints delivered via personal connections. Using data from public complaints, complaint responses, and field interviews in Delhi, I show that politicians are not responsive when complaints submitted to e‐governance systems increase, but that they are responsive to complaints submitted to them through personal connections. This result suggests that the introduction of an e‐governance system does not necessarily increase government performance. Politicians are incentivized to be more responsive to complaints registered directly with them because those complaints are more likely to generate electoral benefits.
When and how do governments deliver public goods and services in response to citizen preferences? We review the current literature on government responsiveness, with a focus on public goods and service delivery in developing countries. We identify three types of actors that are commonly present in these accounts: politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens. Much of this literature examines interactions between dyads of these actors. The study of electoral accountability and constituency services emphasizes relationships between citizens (or voters) and politicians. Studies of bureaucratic incentives and political oversight of bureaucrats emphasize interactions between politicians and bureaucrats. Finally, studies of bureaucratic embeddedness and citizen oversight of bureaucrats elaborate the interactions between bureaucrats and citizens. We argue that an emerging literature that considers interactions between all three types of actors provides rich theoretical and empirical terrain for developing our understanding of responsiveness and accountability in low- and middle-income countries and beyond.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Mobile communication technologies can provide citizens access to information that is tailored to their specific circumstances. Such technologies may therefore increase citizens’ ability to vote in line with their interests and hold politicians accountable. In a large-scale randomized controlled trial in Uganda (n=16,083), we investigated whether citizens who receive private, timely and individualized text messages by mobile phone about public services in their community punished or rewarded incumbents in local elections in line with the information. The majority of respondents claimed to find the messages valuable and there is evidence that they briefly updated their beliefs based on the messages; however, the treatment did not cause increased votes for incumbents where public services were better than expected nor decreased votes where public services were worse than anticipated. The considerable knowledge gaps among citizens identified in this study indicate potential for communication technologies to effectively share civic information. Yet the findings imply that when the attribution of public service outcomes is difficult, even individualized information is unlikely to affect voting behavior.
With the rapid technological changes occurring throughout the world, it is unsurprising that one area that has recently been the focus of discussion relates to the implications of digital and mobile technologies, social media platforms, and the Internet environment on Africa’s democratic process and governance. Against this backdrop, this chapter, drawing on examples from a number of African countries, explored and assessed the role of mobile technologies and other forms of social media platforms in a watchdog context to check government activities and help improve the governance, electoral and democratic processes. It also examined the relationship between digital and mobile technology access and citizen mobilization and the implications for governance and democratic process, political communication, political accountability and electoral integrity among African countries. The chapter argues that despite access to digital and disruptive mobile technologies improving governance, democratic and electoral processes, there are potential harmful effects and concerns with their use. The chapter therefore calls for better education of citizens in the use of digital technologies, as well as the establishment of strategies and policies, which will guide the use of digital and mobile technologies and social media in the political sphere.
Does political engagement depend on government responsiveness? Identifying the drivers of political action is challenging because it requires disentangling instrumental from expressive motives for engagement and because government responsiveness is likely endogenous. We overcome the first challenge by studying citizens’ reporting of street-problems—a form of participation arguably driven by instrumental considerations. We overcome the second challenge by taking advantage of variation in local elections timing in England’s district authorities. We report three key results. First, local governments address requests faster in the months leading to elections. Second, street-problem reporting increases in (pre)electoral periods. Third, the increase in requests sent in preelection periods is driven by districts in which government responsiveness is higher. These findings show that, individuals consider expected benefits when choosing to undertake at least some instrumental forms of participation. Our results also underscore the importance of temporal factors that increase the perceived benefits of one’s political engagement.
Social scientists have long sought to explain why people donate resources for the good of a community. Less attention has been paid to the difficult task of motivating the first adopters of these important behaviors. In a field experiment in Nigeria, we tested two campaigns that encouraged people to try reporting corruption by text message. Psychological theories about how to shift perceived norms and how to reduce barriers to action drove the design of each campaign. The first, a film featuring actors reporting corruption, and the second, a mass text message reducing the effort required to report, caused a total of 1181 people in 106 communities to text, including 241 people who sent concrete corruption reports. Psychological theories of social norms and behavior change can illuminate the early stages of the evolution of cooperation and collective action, when adoption is still relatively rare.
Cambridge Core - Political Economy - Decentralized Governance and Accountability - edited by Jonathan A. Rodden
Decentralized Governance and Accountability - edited by Jonathan A. Rodden February 2019
Over the last decade, there has been an increase in the number of impact evaluations and systematic reviews published on development interventions in low - and middle- income countries. This growth has created new challenges for ensuring that existing evidence is accessible to decision makers, that new studies avoid duplication, and that evidence gaps are addressed. In response, researchers, governments and NGOs are
increasingly investing in evidence mapping exercises. The International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), Sightsavers and the International Rescue Committee are some of many that have published evidence maps.
This report summarises the findings of a map of evidence maps designed to catalogue evidence maps relating to development interventions in low- and middle-income countries. It uses a modified version of the 3ie evidence gap map methodology to identify, categorise and display evidence maps within a framework of intervention sectors adapted from the World Bank’s categorisation and outcomes classified according to the
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report summarises the evidence gap map’s scope and methodology and describes the trends and characteristics of the body of evidence maps that we found. It also offers some recommendations for future directions in the production of evidence maps.
This report presents the findings of an evidence gap map that identifies the evidence on the effects of interventions that seek to improve state-society relations. An increasing number of systematic reviews and impact evaluations addressing this topic are being published. However, there remain some clear gaps in the evidence. The spread of studies across countries and geographic regions is uneven. There is limited or no evidence relating to many countries with large populations that face substantial governance challenges. Even where that evidence base is strongest, important policy questions remain. There are a number of interventions for which there is an extensive body of impact evaluations, but are yet to be the subject of a high-quality systematic review. This is particularly true for several interventions designed to enhance the transparency, effectiveness and inclusivity of political and electoral institutions and processes.
What effect does bureaucratic responsiveness have on citizen participation? Since the 1940s, attitudinal measures of perceived efficacy have been used to explain participation. The authors develop a "calculus of participation" that incorporates objective efficacy-the extent to which an individual's participation actually has an impact-and test the model against behavioral data from the online application Fix My Street (n = 399,364). A successful first experience using Fix My Street is associated with a 57 percent increase in the probability of an individual submitting a second report, and the experience of bureaucratic responsiveness to the first report submitted has predictive power over all future report submissions. The findings highlight the importance of responsiveness for fostering an active citizenry while demonstrating the value of incidentally collected data to examine participatory behavior at the individual level.
Poor public service provision and government accountability is commonplace in low-income countries. Although mobile phone?based platforms have emerged to allow constituents to report service deficiencies to government officials, they have been plagued by low citizen participation. We question whether low participation may root in low political efficacy to politically participate. In the context of a text message?reporting platform in Uganda, we investigate the impact of adding efficacy-boosting language to mobilization texts?(a) citizen name personalization and (b) politician encouragement?on citizens? willingness to report service deficiencies to politicians via text messages. Both treatments, designed to increase internal and external efficacy, respectively, have a large, positive effect on participation. The results are driven by traditionally less internally efficacious constituents (females) and less externally efficacious constituents (those represented by opposition party members), respectively.
Poor-quality data about conflict events can hinder humanitarian responses and bias academic research. There is increasing recognition of the role that new information technologies can play in producing more reliable data faster. We piloted a novel data-gathering system in the Democratic Republic of Congo in which villagers in a set of randomly selected communities report on events in real time via short message service. We first describe the data and assess its reliability. We then examine the usefulness of such “crowdseeded” data in two ways. First, we implement a downstream experiment on aid and conflict and find evidence that aid can lead to fewer conflict events. Second, we examine conflict diffusion in Eastern Congo and find evidence that key dynamics operate at very micro levels. Both applications highlight the benefit of collecting conflict data via cell phones in real time.
We investigate the relationship between political networks, weak institutions, and election fraud during the 2010 parliamentary election in Afghanistan combining: (i) data on political connections between candidates and election officials; (ii) a nationwide controlled evaluation of a novel monitoring technology; and (iii) direct measurements of aggregation fraud. We find considerable evidence of aggregation fraud in favor of connected candidates and that the announcement of a new monitoring technology reduced theft of election materials by about 60 percent and vote counts for connected candidates by about 25 percent. The results have implications for electoral competition and are potentially actionable for policymakers.
Political efficacy has been studied extensively since the 1950s, but analysts have never been fully satisfied with its measurement. After considerable testing, four new questions tapping internal political efficacy were added to the 1988 National Election Study. Our investigation shows that inter-item correlations among these questions indicate high internal consistency, that by both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis the items measure a single concept distinct from external efficacy and political trust, that the measurement model is robust across major subgroups, and that the overall scale is externally valid and provides a good distribution of efficacy scores across the population. Further, the results of an order experiment in the survey suggest that responses are unaffected by mode of presentation. In short, the four new questions constitute the most satisfactory measure of internal political efficacy to date.
A large literature examining advanced and consolidating democracies suggests that ed-ucation increases political participation. However, in electoral authoritarian regimes, educated voters may instead deliberately disengage. If education increases critical capacities, political awareness, and support for democracy, educated citizens may believe that participation is futile or legitimates autocrats. We test this argument in Zimbabwe—a paradigmatic electoral authoritarian regime—by exploiting cross-cohort variation in access to education following a major educational reform. We find that education decreases political participation, substantially reducing the likelihood that better-educated citizens vote, contact local councilors, or attend community meet-ings. Consistent with deliberate disengagement, education's negative effect on par-ticipation dissipated following 2008's more competitive election, which (temporarily) initiated unprecedented power sharing. Supporting the mechanisms underpinning the disengagement hypothesis, educated citizens experience better economic outcomes, are more interested in politics, and are more supportive of democracy, but are also more likely to criticize the government and support opposition parties.
Field experiments documenting positive treatment effects have a strong policy message: scale up! However, such experiments
are typically implemented under close supervision of the research group in charge of the study. In contrast, scaling up would
typically imply relying on local organisation. It is not obvious that the positive treatment effects identified in the research-driven
intervention can be replicated locally. The present study explicitly addresses this challenge by analysing the local version
of a research-driven business training programme among microfinance entrepreneurs in Tanzania. Comparing the local programme
with the research-led programme in terms of attendance and subjective evaluation, we find that success in local implementation
cannot be taken for granted. Moreover, an analysis of long-term outcomes also demonstrates a weaker impact of the local programme.
We conclude that the estimated effect of research-led interventions should be interpreted as an upper bound of what can be
achieved when scaling up such interventions locally.
Political efficacy and trust—among the most frequently used survey measures of general political attitudes—are often maligned for their lack of reliability and validity. This paper reports results from the National Election Studies 1987 pilot study, which included more than thirty-five efficacy and trust items. Five attitudinal dimensions were hypothesized; four emerged clearly. One scale, internal efficacy, is especially robust; a four- to six-item scale represents a considerable improvement on existing NES measures. External efficacy is distinguished from political trust, at least when the former is measured in terms of the fairness of political procedures and outcomes rather than in terms of elite responsiveness to popular demands. Though less decisive, there also is support for dividing trust into incumbent- and regime-based components. The failure to find a similar incumbent- and regime-based distinction for external efficacy is in accord with theoretical perspectives.
Politicians shirk when their performance is obscure to constituents. We theorize that when politician performance information is disseminated early in the electoral term, politicians will subsequently improve their performance in anticipation of changes in citizens’ evaluative criteria and possible challenger entry in the next election. However, politicians may only respond in constituencies where opposition has previously mounted. We test these predictions in partnership with a Ugandan civil society organization in a multiyear field experiment conducted in 20 district governments between the 2011 and 2016 elections. While the organization published yearly job duty performance scorecards for all incumbents, it disseminated the scorecards to constituents for randomly selected politicians. These dissemination efforts induced politicians to improve performance across a range of measures, but only in competitive constituencies . Service delivery was unaffected. We conclude that, conditional on electoral pressure, transparency can improve politicians’ performance between elections but not outcomes outside of their control.
This book is comprised of one study and three field evaluations of civic tech initiatives in developing countries. The study reviews evidence on the use of twenty-three information and communication technology (ICT) platforms designed to amplify citizen voices to improve service delivery. Focusing on empirical studies of initiatives in the global south, the authors highlight both citizen uptake (yelp) and the degree to which public service providers respond to expressions of citizen voice (teeth). The first evaluation looks at U-report in Uganda, a mobile platform that runs weekly large-scale polls with young Ugandans on a number of issues, ranging from safety to access to education to inflation to early marriage. The following evaluation takes a closer look at MajiVoice, an initiative that allows Kenyan citizens to report, through multiple channels, complaints with regard to water services. The third evaluation examines the case of Rio Grande do Sul’s participatory budgeting - the world’s largest participatory budgeting system - which allows citizens to participate either online or offline in defining the state’s yearly spending priorities. While the comparative study has a clear focus on the dimension of government responsiveness, the evaluations examine civic technology initiatives using five distinct dimensions, or lenses. The choice of these lenses is the result of an effort bringing together researchers and practitioners to develop an evaluation framework suitable to civic technology initiatives.
In this paper we examine how policymakers and practitioners should interpret the impact evaluation literature when presented with conflicting experimental and non-experimental estimates of the same intervention across varying contexts. As is well known, non-experimental estimates of a treatment effect comprise a causal treatment effect and a bias term due to endogenous selection into treatment. When non-experimental estimates vary across contexts any claim for external validity of an experimental result must make the assumption that (a) treatment effects are constant across contexts, while (b) selection processes vary across contexts. This assumption is rarely stated or defended in systematic reviews of evidence. As an illustration of these issues, we examine two thoroughly researched literatures in the economics of education – class size effects and gains from private schooling – which provide experimental and non-experimental estimates of causal effects from the same context and across multiple contexts. We show that the range of “true” causal effects in these literatures implies non-experimental estimates from the right context are, at present, a better guide to policy than experimental estimates from a different context. We conclude with recommendations for research and policy, including the need to evaluate programs in context, and avoid simple analogies to clinical medicine in which “systematic reviews” attempt to identify best-practices by putting most (or all) weight on the most “rigorous” evidence with no allowance for context.
INTRODUCTION: Reproducibility is a defining feature of science, but the extent to which it characterizes current research is unknown. Scientific claims should not gain credence because of the status or authority of their originator but by the replicability of their supporting evidence. Even research of exemplary quality may have irreproducible empirical findings because of random or systematic error. RATIONALE: There is concern about the rate and predictors of reproducibility, but limited evidence. Potentially problematic practices include selective reporting, selective analysis, and insufficient specification of the conditions necessary or sufficient to obtain the results. Direct replication is the attempt to recreate the conditions believed sufficient for obtaining a previously observed finding and is the means of establishing reproducibility of a finding with new data. We conducted a large-scale, collaborative effort to obtain an initial estimate of the reproducibility of psychological science. RESULTS: We conducted replications of 100 experimental and correlational studies published in three psychology journals using high-powered designs and original materials when available. There is no single standard for evaluating replication success. Here, we evaluated reproducibility using significance and P values, effect sizes, subjective assessments of replication teams, and meta-analysis of effect sizes. The mean effect size (r) of the replication effects (Mr = 0.197, SD = 0.257) was half the magnitude of the mean effect size of the original effects (Mr = 0.403, SD = 0.188), representing a substantial decline. Ninety-seven percent of original studies had significant results (P < .05). Thirty-six percent of replications had significant results; 47% of original effect sizes were in the 95% confidence interval of the replication effect size; 39% of effects were subjectively rated to have replicated the original result; and if no bias in original results is assumed, combining original and replication results left 68% with statistically significant effects. Correlational tests suggest that replication success was better predicted by the strength of original evidence than by characteristics of the original and replication teams. CONCLUSION: No single indicator sufficiently describes replication success, and the five indicators examined here are not the only ways to evaluate reproducibility. Nonetheless, collectively these results offer a clear conclusion: A large portion of replications produced weaker evidence for the original findings despite using materials provided by the original authors, review in advance for methodological fidelity, and high statistical power to detect the original effect sizes. Moreover, correlational evidence is consistent with the conclusion that variation in the strength of initial evidence (such as original P value) was more predictive of replication success than variation in the characteristics of the teams conducting the research (such as experience and expertise). The latter factors certainly can influence replication success, but they did not appear to do so here. Reproducibility is not well understood because the incentives for individual scientists prioritize novelty over replication. Innovation is the engine of discovery and is vital for a productive, effective scientific enterprise. However, innovative ideas become old news fast. Journal reviewers and editors may dismiss a new test of a published idea as unoriginal. The claim that “we already know this” belies the uncertainty of scientific evidence. Innovation points out paths that are possible; replication points out paths that are likely; progress relies on both. Replication can increase certainty when findings are reproduced and promote innovation when they are not. This project provides accumulating evidence for many findings in psychological research and suggests that there is still more work to do to verify whether we know what we think we know.
A large literature examining advanced and consolidating democracies suggests that education increases political participation However, in electoral authoritarian regimes, educated voters may instead deliberately disengage. If education increases critical capacities, political awareness, and support for democracy, educated citizens may believe that participation is futile or legitimizes autocrats. We test this argument in Zimbabwe a paradigmatic electoral authoritarian regime-by exploiting cross-cohort variation in access to education following a major educational reform. We find that education decreases political participation, substantially reducing the likelihood that better-educated citizens vote, contact politicians, or attend community meetings. Consistent with deliberate disengagement, education's negative effect on participation dissipated following 2008' s more competitive election, which (temporarily) initiated unprecedented power sharing. Supporting the mechanisms underpinning our hypothesis, educated citizens experience better economic outcomes, are more interested in politics, and are more supportive of democracy, but are also more likely to criticize the government and support opposition parties.
Politicians regularly underperform in their job duties due to the obscurity of their actions to constituents. In this study, we investigate the effects of a local CSO's initiative to improve the transparency of politicians' performance in a multi-year field experiment involving 408 politicians in 20 Ugandan district governments between the 2011 and 2016 elections. The CSO assembled annual performance scorecards to rate how well politicians carried out their legally defined job duties, and presented them to all politicians in plenary sessions. For randomly-selected politicians, the scorecard was additionally disseminated to constituents for two mid-term years. We find that scorecard dissemination to citizens improved politicians' subsequent performance across a range of performance measures, but only in competitive constituencies. These findings suggest that, conditional on electoral pressure, performance transparency can improve politicians' performance between elections. Service delivery, affected by the performance of many diverse government actors other than politicians, was unaffected.
We test the claim that African leaders favor members of their own ethnic groups by studying ethnic favoritism in the education sector in Kenya. We use data on the educational attainment of more than fifty thousand Kenyans dating back to the colonial era, as well as information about the ethnic identities of Kenyan presidents, cabinet members, and highlevel education bureaucrats since the 1960s. Consistent with previous work, we find that having a coethnic as president during one's school-age years is associated with an increase in the schooling that children acquire. In contrast to recent studies, we find that multiparty political competition has no impact on the degree of ethnic favoritism in the education sector. We also go beyond prior work in three ways. First, we show that coethnics of the minister of education also acquire more schooling than children from other ethnic groups - evidence that ministerial appointments come with real power to impact distributive politics. Second, we investigate the effects of coethnicity using different definitions of the president's ethnic community and provide evidence that the beneficiaries of ethnic favoritism can shift with the introduction of democratic electoral competition. Third, we examine several mechanisms through which having a coethnic president might matter and find much greater support for mechanisms emphasizing the supply of inputs to coethnics than those emphasizing the demand by coethnics for greater educational opportunities.
Why have seemingly similar African countries developed very different forms of democratic party systems? Despite virtually ubiquitous conditions that are assumed to be challenging to democracy – low levels of economic development, high ethnic heterogeneity, and weak state capacity – nearly two dozen African countries have maintained democratic competition since the early 1990s. Yet the forms of party system competition vary greatly: from highly stable, nationally organized, well-institutionalized party systems to incredibly volatile, particularistic parties in systems with low institutionalization. To explain their divergent development, Rachel Beatty Riedl points to earlier authoritarian strategies to consolidate support and maintain power. The initial stages of democratic opening provides an opportunity for authoritarian incumbents to attempt to shape the rules of the new multiparty system in their own interests, but their power to do so depends on the extent of local support built up over time. The particular form of the party system that emerges from the democratic transition is sustained over time through isomorphic competitive pressures embodied in the new rules of the game, the forms of party organization and the structure of competition that shape party and voter behavior alike.
Why do strong opposition party organizations emerge in some democratizing countries, while those in others remain weak or quickly fragment on ethnic lines? This book offers an explanation for why opposition parties vary in organizational form, cohesion, and mobilizational reach. The book draws upon an in-depth analysis of three countries in Anglophone Africa: Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Kenya. Though these countries share similar institutional frameworks, including electoral rules, party development has taken a different route in each. The explanation emphasizes the ways in which historical legacies interact with strategic choices to produce different trajectories of party development. In terms of the role of history, the book argues that strong opposition parties are more likely where authoritarian states relied on alliances with corporate actors like labor. In these contexts, ruling parties armed their allies, providing them with mobilizing structures and political resources that could later be used to challenge the state. Secondly, opposition parties are more likely to maintain their organizational cohesion and the commitment of activists when they use strategies and appeals that escalate conflict and reorient social boundaries around the lines of partisan affiliation. Polarization forges stronger parties, but it also increases the likelihood of violence and authoritarian retrenchment. The book provides an explanation of why democratization in the hybrid regimes of the late Third Wave may prove more conflictual and more protracted than earlier transitions to democracy.
How do the media affect public support for democratic institutions in a fragile democracy? What role do they play in a dictatorial regime? We study these questions in the context of Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. During the democratic period, when the Weimar government introduced progovernment political news, the growth of Nazi popularity slowed down in areas with access to radio. This effect was reversed during the campaign for the last competitive election as a result of the pro-Nazi radio broadcast following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. During the consolidation of dictatorship, radio propaganda helped the Nazis enroll new party members. After the Nazis established their rule, radio propaganda incited anti-Semitic acts and denunciations of Jews to authorities by ordinary citizens. The effect of anti-Semitic propaganda varied depending on the listeners’ predispositions toward the message. Nazi radio was most effective in places where anti-Semitism was historically high and had a negative effect in places with historically low anti-Semitism.
Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963–2011 period. Guided by a model, it then examines whether the transition in and out of democracy under the same president constrains or exacerbates ethnic favoritism. Across the post-independence period, we find strong evidence of ethnic favoritism: districts that share the ethnicity of the president receive twice as much expenditure on roads and have five times the length of paved roads built. This favoritism disappears during periods of democracy.
“Site selection bias” can occur when the probability that a program is adopted or evaluated is correlated with its impacts.
I test for site selection bias in the context of the Opower energy conservation programs, using 111 randomized control trials
involving 8.6 million households across the United States. Predictions based on rich microdata from the first 10 replications
substantially overstate efficacy in the next 101 sites. Several mechanisms caused this positive selection. For example, utilities
in more environmentalist areas are more likely to adopt the program, and their customers are more responsive to the treatment.
Also, because utilities initially target treatment at higher-usage consumer subpopulations, efficacy drops as the program
is later expanded. The results illustrate how program evaluations can still give systematically biased out-of-sample predictions,
even after many replications. JEL Codes: C93, D12, L94, O12, Q41.
This article investigates the role of mass media in times of conflict and state-sponsored mass violence against civilians.
We use a unique village-level data set from the Rwandan genocide to estimate the impact of a popular radio station that encouraged
violence against the Tutsi minority population. The results show that the broadcasts had a significant effect on participation
in killings by both militia groups and ordinary civilians. An estimated 51,000 perpetrators, or approximately 10% of the overall
violence, can be attributed to the station. The broadcasts increased militia violence not only directly by influencing behavior
in villages with radio reception but also indirectly by increasing participation in neighboring villages. In fact, spillovers
are estimated to have caused more militia violence than the direct effects. Thus, the article provides evidence that mass
media can affect participation in violence directly due to exposure and indirectly due to social interactions. JEL Codes: D7, N4.
In this paper we examine how policymakers and practitioners should interpret the impact evaluation literature when presented with conflicting experimental and non-experimental estimates of the same intervention across varying contexts. As is well known, non-experimental estimates of a treatment effect comprise a causal treatment effect and a bias term due to endogenous selection into treatment. When non-experimental estimates vary across contexts any claim for external validity of an experimental result must make the assumption that (a) treatment effects are constant across contexts, while (b) selection processes vary across contexts. This assumption is rarely stated or defended in systematic reviews of evidence. As an illustration of these issues, we examine two thoroughly researched literatures in the economics of education – class size effects and gains from private schooling – which provide experimental and non-experimental estimates of causal effects from the same context and across multiple contexts. We show that the range of “true” causal effects in these literatures implies non-experimental estimates from the right context are, at present, a better guide to policy than experimental estimates from a different context. We conclude with recommendations for research and policy, including the need to evaluate programs in context, and avoid simple analogies to clinical medicine in which “systematic reviews” attempt to identify best-practices by putting most (or all) weight on the most “rigorous” evidence with no allowance for context.
Significance
Humans frequently act contrary to their self-interest and reject low offers in bargaining games. Some evidence suggests that elites, however, are much more rational and self-interested, but this hypothesis has never been directly tested in bargaining games. Using a unique sample of US policy and business elites, we find the opposite. Compared with typical convenience samples, elites are even more prone to act contrary to self-interest by rejecting low offers when bargaining. Appearing to anticipate this fact, elites also make higher offers. This may help to explain why policy elites, such as the diplomats who negotiate treaties on topics like global warming, pay close attention to distributional concerns even though such concerns have been a perennial source of policy gridlock.
Do women participate in and influence meetings equally with men? Does gender shape how a meeting is run and whose voices are heard? The Silent Sex shows how the gender composition and rules of a deliberative body dramatically affect who speaks, how the group interacts, the kinds of issues the group takes up, whose voices prevail, and what the group ultimately decides. It argues that efforts to improve the representation of women will fall short unless they address institutional rules that impede women's voices. Using groundbreaking experimental research supplemented with analysis of school boards, Christopher Karpowitz and Tali Mendelberg demonstrate how the effects of rules depend on women's numbers, so that small numbers are not fatal with a consensus process, but consensus is not always beneficial when there are large numbers of women. Men and women enter deliberative settings facing different expectations about their influence and authority. Karpowitz and Mendelberg reveal how the wrong institutional rules can exacerbate women's deficit of authority while the right rules can close it, and, in the process, establish more cooperative norms of group behavior and more generous policies for the disadvantaged. Rules and numbers have far-reaching implications for the representation of women and their interests. Bringing clarity and insight to one of today's most contentious debates, The Silent Sex provides important new findings on ways to bring women's voices into the conversation on matters of common concern.
The recent wave of randomized trials in development economics has provoked criticisms regarding external validity. We investigate two concerns — heterogeneity across beneficiaries and implementers — in a randomized trial of contract teachers in Kenyan schools. The intervention, previously shown to raise test scores in NGO-led trials in Western Kenya and parts of India, was replicated across all Kenyan provinces by an NGO and the government. Strong effects of short-term contracts produced in controlled experimental settings are lost in weak public institutions: NGO implementation produces a positive effect on test scores across diverse contexts, while government implementation yields zero effect. The data suggests that the stark contrast in success between the government and NGO arm can be traced back to implementation constraints and political economy forces put in motion as the program went to scale.
The conventional wisdom that the poor are less likely than the rich to vote is based upon research on voting behavior in advanced industrialized countries. However, in many places the relationship between turnout and socioeconomic status is reversed. We argue that the potential tax exposure of the rich explains the positive relationship between income and voting in some places and not others. Where the potential tax exposure of the rich is high, they have more of an incentive to participate in politics. Therefore, where states have the capacity to tax the rich, politicians use fiscal policy to gain support. Using survey data from a wide range of developed and developing countries, we demonstrate that the rich turn out to vote at higher rates than the poor where the state has the bureaucratic capacity ti tax the rich and where the political preferences of the rich and poor diverge.
How does access to information communication technology (ICT) affect who gets heard and what gets communicated to politicians? On one hand ICT can lower communication costs; on the other hand more technological channels may be used disproportionately by the already well connected. To address this question we presented a representative sample of constituents in Uganda with an opportunity to send a text-message to their representatives at one of three randomly assigned prices. Critically, and contrary to concerns that technological innovations benefit the privileged, we find evidence that ICT can lead to significant flattening: a greater share of marginalized populations use this channel compared to existing political communication channels. Price plays a more complex role. Subsidizing the full cost of messaging increases uptake by over 40%. Surprisingly however, subsidy-induced increases in uptake do not yield further flattening since free channels are not used at higher rates by more marginalized constituents.
Over two decades have passed since the ‘third wave’ of democratization began to roll across sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s. The introduction to this collection provides an overall assessment of the (lack of) progress made in democratization processes in Africa from 1990 to 2010. It highlights seven areas of progress and setbacks: increasingly illegitimate, but ongoing military intervention; regular elections and occasional transfers of power, but realities of democratic rollback and hybrid regimes; democratic institutionalization, but ongoing presidentialism and endemic corruption; the institutionalization of political parties, but widespread ethnic voting and the rise of an exclusionary (and often violent) politics of belonging; increasingly dense civil societies, but local realities of incivility, violence and insecurity; new political freedoms and economic growth, but extensive political controls and uneven development; and the donor community's mixed commitment to, and at times perverse impact on, democracy promotion. We conclude that steps forward remain greater than reversals and that typically, though not universally, sub-Saharan African countries are more democratic today than in the late 1980s. Simultaneously, we call for more meaningful processes of democratization that aim not only at securing civil and political rights, but also socio-economic rights and the physical security of African citizens.
Dale and Strauss’s (DS) noticeable reminder theory (NRT) of voter mobilization posits that mobilization efforts that are highly noticeable and salient to potential voters, even if impersonal, can be successful. In an innovative experimental design, DS show that text messages substantially boost turnout, challenging previous claims that social connectedness is the key to increasing participation. We replicate DS’s research design and extend it in two key ways. First, whereas the treatment in DS’s experiment was a “warm” text message combined with contact, we test NRT more cleanly by examining the effect of “cold” text messages that are completely devoid of auxiliary interaction. Second, we test an implication of NRT that habitual voters should exhibit the largest treatment effects in lower salience elections whereas casual voters should exhibit the largest treatment effects in higher salience elections. Via these two extensions, we find support for NRT.
We use a randomized experiment and a structural model to test whether monitoring and financial incentives can reduce teacher absence and increase learning in India. In treatment schools, teachers' attendance was monitored daily using cameras, and their salaries were made a nonlinear function of attendance. Teacher absenteeism in the treatment group fell by 21 percentage points relative to the control group, and the children's test scores increased by 0.17 standard deviations. We estimate a structural dynamic labor supply model and find that teachers respond strongly to financial incentives. Our model is used to compute cost-minimizing compensation policies. (JEL I21, J31, J45, O15)
The aim of this paper is to analyze the factors underlying the gender gap in African electoral and inter-electoral political participation. Drawing on new data covering over 27,000 respondents from 246 regions in 20 emerging African democracies, the empirical findings suggest that while there is a gender gap in both voting and inter-electoral participation, the latter is larger. Whereas several of the investigated individual and contextual characteristics are found to be important determinants of participation, they explain only a very modest share of the observed gender gaps. We do find, however, that gender gaps in education are negatively correlated with female inter-electoral participation and that gender gaps in employment are negatively related to female voting. Interestingly, and contrary to suggestions in previous research, there is no evidence that religiosity at the individual or community level increases the gender differences in political activity.
Competitive elections create a relationship of formal accountability between policy makers and citizens. Recent theoretical work suggests that there are limits on how well this formal accountability links policy decisions to citizen preferences. In particular, incumbents' incentives are driven not by the voters' evaluation of the normative desirability of outcomes but by the outcome's information about the incumbent's type (e.g., competence or ideology). This review surveys both this body of theory and the robust empirical literature it has spawned. It concludes with a short discussion of ongoing work that attempts to integrate this theoretical perspective with a richer view of policy-making institutions.
Current explanations of effective voter mobilization strategies maintain that turnout increases only when a potential voter is persuaded to participate through increased social connectedness. The connectedness explanation does not take into account, however, that registered voters, by registering, have already signaled their interest in voting. The theory presented in this article predicts that impersonal, noticeable messages can succeed in increasing the likelihood that a registered voter will turn out by reminding the recipient that Election Day is approaching. Text messaging is examined as an example of an impersonal, noticeable communication to potential voters. A nationwide field experiment (n = 8,053) in the 2006 election finds that text message reminders produce a statistically significant 3.0 percentage point increase in the likelihood of voting. While increasing social connectedness has been shown to positively affect voter turnout, the results of this study, in combination with empirical evidence from prior studies, suggest that connectedness is not a necessary condition for a successful mobilization campaign. For certain voters, a noticeable reminder is sufficient to drive them to the polls.
Previous analyses of African politics have mistaken parties'dearth of position taking on issues as an absence of substantive electoral debate. The authors demonstrate that political parties tackle substantive issues during African elections, but generally voice them through valence appeals rather than by staking out distinct positions. The authors theorize that uncertainty, coupled with the single-party heritage and the elite dominance of African electoral politics, leads parties to employ valence discourse in their national election campaigns. With evidence from 950 newspaper articles during seven election cycles in African countries, the authors show that politicians predominantly use valence discourse when discussing political issues in the period approaching elections. They find tentative evidence that opposition actors are more likely to take positions than incumbents, and that civil society is more likely to raise position issues than political parties. This contribution aims to enrich the debate on electoral issues in Africa, but also draw greater attention to the potential impact of valence discourse on party systems in a comparative context.
The game theoretic study of coalitions focuses on settings in which commitment technologies are available to allow groups to coordinate their actions. Analyses of such settings focus on two questions. First, what are the implications of the ability to make commitments and form coalitions for how games are played? Second, given that coalitions can form, which coalitions should we expect to see forming? I examine classic cooperative and new noncooperative game theoretic approaches to answering these questions. Classic approaches have focused especially on the first question and have produced powerful results. However, these approaches suffer from a number of weaknesses. New work attempts to address these shortcomings by modeling coalition formation as an explicitly noncooperative process. This new research reintroduces the problem of coalitional instability characteristic of cooperative approaches, but in a dynamic setting. Although in some settings, classic solutions are recovered, in others this new work shows that outcomes are highly sensitive, not only to bargaining protocols, but also to the forms of commitment that can be externally enforced. This point of variation is largely ignored in empirical research on coalition formation. I close by describing new agendas in coalitional analysis that are being opened up by this new approach.
Randomized experiments have become a popular tool in development economics research and have been the subject of a number of criticisms. This paper reviews the recent literature and discusses the strengths and limitations of this approach in theory and in practice. We argue that the main virtue of randomized experiments is that, owing to the close collaboration between researchers and implementers, they allow the estimation of parameters that would not otherwise be possible to evaluate. We discuss the concerns that have been raised regarding experiments and generally conclude that, although real, they are often not specific to experiments. We conclude by discussing the relationship between theory and experiments.
Despite a widespread trend toward the adoption of increasingly participatory approaches to political decision making in developing countries, there is little or no evidence that these practices in fact return the benefits attributed to them. This article investigates one specific worry—that participatory decision-making processes may be vulnerable to manipulation by elites. The authors report on a field experiment, drawing on a unique nationwide experiment in democratic deliberation in São Tomé and Príncipe in which the discussion leaders were randomly assigned across meetings. The randomization procedure provides a rare opportunity to identify the impact of leaders on the outcomes of group deliberations. They find that leader effects were extremely large, in many cases accounting for over one-third of all variation in the outcomes of the national discussions. These results have important implications for the design of such deliberative practices. While the total effect of leadership cannot be assessed, it may still be possible to observe when leader influence occurs and to correct for leader effects in comparisons of outcomes across deliberations.
There is currently much debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid and about what kind of projects can engender economic development. There is skepticism about the ability of econometric analysis to resolve these issues or of development agencies to learn from their own experience. In response, there is increasing use in development economics of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to accumulate credible knowledge of what works, without overreliance on questionable theory or statistical methods. When RCTs are not possible, the proponents of these methods advocate quasi-randomization through instrumental variable (IV) techniques or natural experiments. I argue that many of these applications are unlikely to recover quantities that are useful for policy or understanding: two key issues are the misunderstanding of exogeneity and the handling of heterogeneity. I illustrate from the literature on aid and growth. Actual randomization faces similar problems as does quasi-randomization, notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary. I argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods, and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statistical or epistemic superiority. I illustrate using prominent experiments in development and elsewhere. As with IV methods, RCT-based evaluation of projects, without guidance from an understanding of underlying mechanisms, is unlikely to lead to scientific progress in the understanding of economic development. I welcome recent trends in development experimentation away from the evaluation of projects and toward the evaluation of theoretical mechanisms. (JEL C21, F35, O19)
We investigate the problem of predicting the average effect of a new training program using experiences with previous implementations. There are two principal complications in doing so. First, the population in which the new program will be implemented may differ from the population in which the old program was implemented. Second, the two programs may differ in the mix of their components. With sufficient detail on characteristics of the two populations and sufficient overlap in their distributions, one may be able to adjust for differences due to the first complication. Dealing with the second difficulty requires data on the exact treatments the individuals received. However even in the presence of differences in the mix of components across training programs comparisons of controls in both populations who were excluded from participating in any of the programs should not be affected. To investigate the empirical importance of these issues, we compare four job training pro-grams implemented in the mid-eighties in different parts of the U.S. We find that adjusting for pre-training earnings and individual characteristics removes most of the differences between control units, but that even after such adjustments, post-training earnings for trainees are not comparable. We surmise that differences in treatment components across training programs are the likely cause, and that more details on the specific services provided by these programs are necessary to predict the effect of future programs. We also conclude that effect heterogeneity, it is essential, even in experimental evaluations of training programs record pre-training earnings and individual characteristics in order to render the extrapolation of the results to different locations more credible.
Can SMS-Mobilization Increase Citizen Reporting of Public Service Deficiencies to Politicians?
- Kristin Michelitch
- Marta Santamaria
, Kristin Michelitch, and Marta Santamaria-Monturiol, " Can SMS-Mobilization
Increase Citizen Reporting of Public Service Deficiencies to Politicians?, " Unpublished
manuscript, 2015.
How to Write a Constitution in the 21st Century
- Finnur Magnusson
Magnusson, Finnur, " How to Write a Constitution in the 21st Century, " in " Presented
at Right to Information and Transparency in the Digital Age Conference " Stanford
University Palo Alto, CA 2013.
2010 primary voter data research Center for the Study of the American Electorate, American University's School of Public Affairs
- Curtis Gans
Gans, Curtis, " 2010 primary voter data research, " Technical Report, Center for the Study
of the American Electorate, American University's School of Public Affairs 2010.
Two faces of power American political science review
- Peter Bachrach
- S Morton
- Baratz
Bachrach, Peter and Morton S Baratz, " Two faces of power, " American political
science review, 1962, 56 (04), 947–952.