When are citizens most likely to hold politicians to account for wrongdoing? In a crowded information environment, political accountability requires that credible information about politician ...behavior is available and that citizens are able to identify credible information as such. Focusing on this second requirement, we argue that the ability to discern more credible from less credible information is increasing in citizens’ cognitive and political sophistication. Using data from an original survey experiment in Brazil, we show that all citizens react negatively to corruption allegations but that more politically sophisticated respondents are themost likely to discern between sources of information that differ in their credibility. In particular, they are more skeptical of low-credibility sources than their less sophisticated counterparts. Our findings suggest a novel mechanism that may link increasing education with control of political corruption: educated citizens are better able to discern, and therefore act on, credible corruption accusations.
Foreign aid donors make themselves visible as the funders of development projects to improve citizen attitudes abroad. Do target populations receive these political communications in the intended ...fashion, and does the information succeed in changing attitudes? Despite the widespread use of various mechanisms to communicate information about foreign funding, little evidence exists about their effectiveness. We embed an informational experiment about a US-funded health project in a nationwide survey in Bangladesh. Although we find only limited recognition of the USAID brand, explicit information about US funding slightly improves general perceptions of the United States; it does not, however, change respondent’s opinions on substantive foreign policy issues. We also find that information increases confidence in local authorities. While our results suggest that information about foreign donors can effect attitudinal change, they also suggest that current mechanisms for information transmission might not be sufficient to do so.
•Equitable access to justice institutions is a pressing concern in many countries.•In Mali, there have been attempts to bolster formal justice institutions; most people use traditional ...institutions.•We conduct a survey experiment in rural Mali to measure attitudes about formal versus customary justice institutions.•Study participants demonstrated a preference for customary institutions, rating them as quicker, fairer, and less costly.•Findings hold regardless of former experience with the formal justice system, gender, or household income.
Access to justice is an important issue for people around the world. In many African countries, citizens most typically access justice through customary, community-level institutions. States and international actors, however, are attempting to extend the reach of the formal justice sector in many countries, under the logic that such institutions may provide more equitable access. In Mali, disputes requiring access to justice are common but use of the formal justice system is rare. We conduct a survey experiment among a sample of rural Malians to explore how people think about formal versus customary justice institutions in the context of a land dispute in terms of their responsiveness, fairness, and costliness. In general and in line with responses to descriptive questions, the evidence shows that the group of Malians in our study think that customary institutions, as compared to the formal court system, will be quicker, fairer, and less likely to require payment for the resolution of a land dispute. We find that these perceptions hold among individuals who report having used the formal justice system, who would consider using the formal justice system in the future, and who are most likely to be marginalized from customary justice institutions. Legal reform advocates need to consider these strong preferences for customary justice institutions when thinking about plausible reforms.
We hypothesize that selective donors will use types of aid over which they have more control when providing assistance to poorly governed countries. We use an original classification of project ...purpose codes in the AidData dataset to categorize aid flows from the period 2004 to 2010. Results from fixed effect and compositional data models provide evidence of selectivity in terms of overall aid flows, a tradeoff between technical assistance and programmatic lending, and a tradeoff between social sector and infrastructure projects.
•Entertainment-education media interventions are increasingly used for the goal of catalyzing behavior change in the context of international development.•These edutainment programs are more ...successful when they link proposed behaviors to audiences’ pre-existing goals and values.•Edutainment programs are less successful at persuading audiences to adopt altogether new goals and values.
As new information technologies facilitate the production and dissemination of broadcast media, entertainment-education interventions are increasingly used in attempts to influence audiences on issues such as political participation, support for democracy, violence against women, and tolerance of ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. What factors make these programs effective in catalyzing behavior change in their audiences? Insights from social learning theory and other theories that motivate entertainment-education media highlight that individuals (i) learn about behaviors by observing examples of behavior in their environment and (ii) adopt behaviors that they believe will help them achieve their goals. We review existing empirical literature on entertainment-education in light of this foundational theory and find that exposure to broadcast media can change behavior by linking desired behaviors to pre-existing goals. Conversely and as expected, the literature does not provide much evidence that media leads to behavior change by persuading individuals to adopt new goals. We conclude the review with a discussion of the prospects for successful broadcast media interventions in two domains: public health, a realm where most interventions focus on linking behavior with existing goals, and countering violent extremism (CVE), where most interventions focus on changing goals. We also provide a checklist of desirable components to assist designers of edutainment programming.
Local public goods and social services are delivered through a variety of funding and implementing channels in aid-dependent countries. Existing research proposes that international aid to ...governments undermines government legitimacy and the fiscal contract between citizens and their rulers. We outline how the implications of fiscal contract theory differ depending on whether aid takes the form of donors funding projects through the government, donors funding projects through NGOs, or the government outsourcing project implementation to NGOs. We test these predictions using an informational experiment among
N
= 2446 Ugandan adults in 18 communities with foreign-funded, NGO-implemented projects. We randomize the amount of information that we provide about these projects. Our results suggest that donor-to-government funding has limited effects on citizens’ opinions about their government. Only bypass aid (i.e., donor aid to NGOs) undermines citizens’ assessments of government performance, while only NGO implementation reduces the willingness of citizens to pay fees to the government or to donate to community funds. Government legitimacy, as measured by individuals’ willingness to comply with government instructions, is very low to begin with and is not influenced by information about different forms of aid.
•In reaction to human rights violations in other countries, foreign governments may publicly criticize or threaten economic sanctions.•Previous work suggests the success of these actions depends on ...their ability to generate public pressure in target countries.•We use survey experimental methods to study how publics react to foreign government pressure in Myanmar, Nepal, and Indonesia.•We find evidence that pressure leads to calls for policy change among regime opponents but backlash among regime supporters.•Our findings help explain why macro-level evidence on the ability of foreign pressure to bring about policy change is mixed.
To influence states’ treatment of their citizens, various foreign actors deploy a broad array of tools, including moral suasion and material assistance. The efficacy of international pressure is often contingent on how publics in target states respond. Employing survey experiments, we examine how two common tools of external influence employed by other countries —verbal condemnation and the threat of aid withdrawal—affect public opinion in three Asian states that have been criticized for their human rights practices: Myanmar, Nepal, and Indonesia. Overall, we find that, in the face of such pressure, preference for the status quo policy becomes stronger among the supporters of incumbent governments in target states. In contrast, those who are not government partisans are more likely to support policy change for better human rights conditions. The latter, however, is the constituency less likely to exert influence on the government to revise its policy. Together, these findings point to the possibility that criticism and aid sanction threats employed by foreign countries will be ineffective or even counterproductive at least in the short run.
If development projects are to be effective, a minimum requirement is that the funding reaches its intended destination. Yet the history of international development is replete with examples of this ...not happening. I argue that there will be fewer problems with corruption or other diversions of funding—which I jointly label capture—in more precisely targeted projects. More well-defined targeting results in superior accountability relationships because there is greater clarity of responsibility, clearer information about outcomes, and improved identifiability of stakeholders. I use an original crosscountry, cross-project data set on the incidence of capture in World Bank-funded investment projects to test the theory. The data show a negative relationship between targeting and capture, and I demonstrate that this relationship is robust to a variety of specifications. In addition, I find that there is a higher baseline likelihood of project capture in countries perceived as more corrupt according to commonly used survey-based measures from Transparency International and the Worldwide Governance Indicators, cross-validating those measures and my own.
Credit Claiming by Labeling Oliveros, Virginia; Weitz-Shapiro, Rebecca; Winters, Matthew S.
Comparative political studies,
11/2023, Letnik:
56, Številka:
13
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We examine a phenomenon we call “credit claiming by labeling” in which a sitting politician places her name on a project, program, or policy with the goal of claiming credit for it. While the ...prevalence of this practice suggests that many politicians believe that credit claiming by labeling will aid their careers, there is little existing evidence on this question. We examine the effects of credit claiming by labeling with a survey experiment in Argentina. We find that it has a negative, though small, effect on respondents’ attitudes. Descriptive data suggests that these results stem from the perceived pervasiveness of the practice. We then use evidence from an additional treatment on the (un)biased selection of program beneficiaries to show that respondents actually reward politicians who neither label nor manipulate programs. These results suggest substantial obstacles to overturning citizens’ negative baseline beliefs about the politicized implementation of government programs.
Indonesia drastically lags behind other countries in Southeast Asia and at similar levels of development in supplying urban wastewater sanitation. We use case studies from three cities in Indonesia ...to better understand why wastewater services are underprovided. We find strong demand-side constraints that interact with supply-side decision making. After comparing the urban wastewater sector in Indonesia to the health, education, and rural wastewater sectors in the country and to the urban wastewater sector in other Southeast Asian countries, we conclude by arguing for an increase in educational programs that will foment citizen demands on the government.
