Information's Effect on Voter Efforts to Hold Politicians to Account in Senegal

ABLE AND MOSTLY WILLING:AN EMPIRICAL ANATOMY OF INFORMATION’S EFFECT ON VOTER EFFORTS TO HOLD POLITICIANS TO ACCOUNT IN SENEGAL ∗ ABHIT BHANDARIy HORACIO LARREGUYz JOHN MARSHALLx SEPTEMBER 2018 Political accountability may be constrained by the reach and relevance of information campaigns in developing democracies and—upon receiving information— voters’ ability and will to hold politicians to account. To illuminate voter-level constraints without dissemination constraints, we conducted a field experiment around Senegal’s 2017 parliamentary elections to examine the core theoretical steps linking personal delivery and explanation of different types of incumbent performance information to electoral and non-electoral accountability. Voters immediately processed information as Bayesians, found temporally benchmarked local performance most in- formative, and durably updated their beliefs for at least a month. However, information about incumbent duties had little independent or complementary effect. Learning that more projects than expected reached their department, voters durably increased non- electoral accountability—making costly requests of incumbents—but only increased incumbent vote choice among likely-voters and voters heavily weighting performance in their voting calculus. Voters are thus able and mostly willing to use relevant information to support political accountability. ∗We thank Fode´ Sarr and his team of enumerators for invaluable research assistance, and Elimane Kane, Thierno Niang, and LEGS-Africa for partnering with us to implement this project. We thank Antonella Bandiera, Nilesh Fernando, Matthew Gichohi, Lakshmi Iyer, Kate Orkin, Julia Payson, Amanda Robinson, Arturas Rozenas, Cyrus Samii, Moses Shayo, Jay Shon, Alberto Simpser, and participants at talks at APSA, MPSA, Notre Dame, NYU, NYU CESS Experimental Political Science Conference, and WGAPE-NYU Abu Dhabi for excellent comments. This project received financial support from the Spencer Foundation, and was approved by the Columbia Institutional Review Board (IRB-AAAR3724) and the Harvard Committee on the Use of Human Subjects (IRB17-0880). Our pre- analysis plan was registered with the Social Science Registry, and is available at socialscienceregistry.org/trials/2324. yDepartment of Political Science, Columbia University. Email: [email protected]. zDepartment of Government, Harvard University. Email: [email protected]. xDepartment of Political Science, Columbia University. Email: [email protected]. 1 1 Introduction As a cornerstone of effective democracy, political accountability has received substantial attention from scholars and policy-makers (Ashworth 2012). Indeed, it is often argued that providing voters with information about their incumbent’s performance in office helps them to retain high-quality politicians (Fearon 1999) and engage in non-electoral accountability-seeking behavior(Aker, Col- lier and Vicente 2017; Gottlieb 2016). Particularly in contexts where governance is weak, the distribution of goods reflects patronage, and politician opportunities for rent-seeking abound, effective accountability mechanisms are needed most. In practice, recent studies identifying the effects of informational campaigns on electoral accountability and community action yield mixed findings.1 Given the complex chain of conditions linking the provision of information to better governance (Dunning et al. forthcoming; Lieberman, Posner and Tsai 2014), it is often hard to know where accountability breaks down. For example, the Metaketa initiative that coordinated similar interventions across six countries found limited electoral effects of providing information that benchmarked incumbent performance against other comparable incumbents in office at the same time (Dunning et al. forthcoming). However, as in- dicated by low levels of information retention, these limited effects may reflect the difficulties of disseminating relevant information, rather than voters’ low capacity or willingness to elec- torally reward (punish) better(worse)-performing incumbents. Furthermore, while the effects of community-driven development and civic education programs on informed local participation have received significant attention (Casey 2018), little is known about whether incumbent performance information also influences non-electoral forms of political accountability. This article dissects voters’ ability and will to use different types of incumbent performance information to hold politicians to account. By personally distributing and explaining information, 1See Banerjee et al.(2011), Casey(2018), Chong et al.(2015), Dunning et al.(forthcoming), Ferraz and Finan(2008), Humphreys and Weinstein(2012), Lieberman, Posner and Tsai(2014), and Olken(2007). 2 we abstract from dissemination challenges to focus on three links between providing information about the performance of parliamentary deputies and voter attempts to engage in electoral and non- electoral accountability-seeking political engagement. First, we examine the extent to which information provision causes voters to both immediately and durably update their beliefs in a Bayesian manner. Second, we vary the information’s content to understand what information voters regard as relevant. Specifically, we inform voters about the responsibilities of their deputies and help voters to abstract from district-specific factors influencing the performance of all incumbents by temporally benchmarking current incumbent performance metrics against previous incumbents within the same district. Third, we study whether such beliefs translate into electoral and non-electoral accountability-seeking behavior, the latter in the form of making requests from politicians, and the extent to which this behavior varies with the information’s relevance to individual voters. We designed a field experiment in rural Senegal around the 2017 parliamentary elections to examine these voter-level mechanisms underpinning political accountability. Across 450 villages from five of Senegal’s 45 departments (which serve as parliamentary districts), we trained enumerators to personally distribute and explain informational leaflets to nine young registered voters (aged 20-38) in treated villages in the month preceding the election. Our 2 × 3 factorial design varied whether respondents were informed about: (1) parliamentary deputies’ duties; (2) their current deputy’s activity in the legislature and the number and value of projects and transfers received by their department; and/or (3) how such incumbent performance metrics compared with their department’s previous deputy. In our departments, incumbent performance generally exceeded voter expectations and previous incumbents’ performance. To separate immediate effects of treatment from equilibrium responses that could reflect subsequent interactions with voters and political op- erators, our panel survey measured voters’ beliefs and (intended and actual) behavioral responses immediately before and after treatment, and again after the election. Our findings first demonstrate that rural Senegalese citizens process incumbent performance information in a sophisticated manner. Immediately after receiving the information, voters updated 3 their beliefs in line with the Bayesian tenets that the direction of updating depends on voters’ prior beliefs, that the extent of updating varies with the signal’s content, and that voters with imprecise prior beliefs update more. The results show that voters care principally about local projects and transfers, rather than legislative activities within the Assemblee´ Nationale. Moreover, while information about deputy responsibilities did not affect beliefs, temporally benchmarked information substantially influenced the extent of voter updating and increased the precision of posterior beliefs. Perhaps most remarkably, we find similar—albeit somewhat smaller—effects around a month after leaflets were delivered. Furthermore, voters seek to hold politicians to account on the basis of the information provided. Immediately after receiving the information, the average treated voter—who updated favorably about their incumbent—became three percentage points more likely to intend to vote for the incumbent. Heterogeneity in such rewards reflected the extent to which voters updated their beliefs and to which performance information is the most important factor determining vote choices. Alongside electoral intentions, non-electoral accountability-seeking behaviors also increased: treated voters were more likely to request an incumbent visit and an opportunity to express their views to those candidates directly. While voters durably updated their beliefs and demonstrated an initial willingness to hold politicians to account, lasting political accountability proves feasible but more complex. In the case of electoral accountability, performance information’s effects on incumbent vote choice were diluted by lower propensities to turn out among the younger voters that we disproportionately sampled, while responses to the local component of incumbent performance intensified over time. Specifically, our treatments did not affect self-reported vote choices, on average. However, electoral accountability behavior did materialize among respondents that cared most about incumbents lobbying for local development projects or that turned out at the last election.When treated, such voters were more likely to support incumbents overseeing more local projects and transfers, and even penalize

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