Public Information and Local Government's Electoral Returns, Evidence from an Information Dissemination Campaign in the Mexican 2009 Municipal Elections Alberto Chong IADB Ana L. De La O Yale Dean Karlan Yale Leonard Wantchekron NYU Dear EGAP members: We originally intended to have some results ready for you, but the outcome data we received so far came in the most inconvenient format and it will take several weeks to clean it. On top of that, in the states we worked there are still several contested elections, thus, the outcome data we have so far is not the official one. In this document you will read about our research design. By the time of the EGAP meeting, all our interventions will be done. We welcome any type of feedback. -------------Please do not circulate this document.----------------- Public Information and Local Government's Electoral Returns, Evidence from an Information Dissemination Campaign in the Mexican 2009 Municipal Elections Abstract Despite optimistic views about fiscal decentralization in Mexico, local government's performance has remained poor. Scholarship and policy circles have suggested that lack of mechanisms of accountability, particularly no access to public information, prevents voters from voting out of office inefficient incumbent parties. Yet we know relatively little about the causal effect of information. We conducted an experiment to test if public information on local government’s expenditure influences voting behavior in three Mexican states: Jalisco, Morelos, and Tabasco. The experiment consisted of three different interventions. For the first intervention, we distributed a flyer with information on the total amount of money granted to the municipality through the largest infrastructure transfer scheme and the amount of the fund spent by the end of the fiscal year. The second intervention consisted on the distribution of a flyer with the same information as the first flyer, as well as the percent of spending directed to improving services for the poor. And for the third intervention, we distributed a flyer with same information as the first flyer along with information on the percent of the fund that was spent with irregularities. 2. Introduction Despite optimistic views about fiscal decentralization in Mexico, local government's performance has remained poor. The problem is reflected in their spending patterns. In 2006, more than eighty percent of local government's resources were spent either on the bureaucracy or were unaccounted for. The bad performance of local governments is far from being just a Mexican phenomenon. While local governments are supposed to be better informed about local needs and are more likely to maximize productive efficiency due to electoral constraints, it is well documented that around the world local governments are often subject to elite capture, can engender unnecessary expenditure, and may fail to attract the active participation of the poor. 1 Scholarship and policy circles have suggested that lack of mechanisms of accountability and poor access to information are not only among the reasons why local governments spend in inefficient ways, but are an obstacle to democratic governance across the globe. Since transparent governments tend to be efficient, and opaque governments tend to be inefficient, the availability 1 (Azfar and Livingston 2007, Banerjee et al. 2001, Bardhan and Mookherjee 1999, Dasgupta and Beard 2007, Hoddinott 2002, Johnson, Deshingkar and Start 2005, Mansuri and Rao 2004, Reinikka and Svensson 2004, Besley and Rohini Pande 2008, Duflo and Chattopadhyay 2005, Humphreys and Sandbu 2006, Stokes 2007, Dahlberg et al. 2006, Hines and Thaler 1995, Agrawal and Gupta 2005). of information has been linked to bottom-up mechanism of accountability and good governance and the lack of information to corruption. Yet we know little about the causal effect of information. Just as information strengthens good governance and efficiency, efficient governments have more incentives to disclose information than inefficient governments. Moreover, the information dissemination mechanisms are often used by partisan and non-partisan organizations to bring the public’s attention to certain facts that advance their own agenda. Thus, the correlation between information and good governance may well be driven by a common third factor. Finally, recent evidence from experimental work shows that in certain contexts, dissemination of information is not enough to overcome voters’ apathy (Benerjee et al 2008). To test the effect of information, this study took advantage of a recent constitutional reform in Mexico that allows the Federal Auditor's Office (ASF) to audit local governments. ASF produced reliable information about local government's spending. With this information we designed an experiment around the July 5th elections with three different interventions. This study aims to test how the use of mass communication techniques can improve accountability and governance at the municipal level. More specifically, this study asks the question: does information on local government’s expenditure influences voting behavior in Mexico? This project has funding from an IADB (ICT) grant March-December 2009. Background Mexico is a federation integrated by 31 states and a Federal District. Each state elects its own governor and legislature. There are 2,400 municipal governments chosen at the local level. Local election dates are established by state legislation. Federal, State and local authorities are concurrent in only ten states. Elsewhere, there is great variation in terms of timing of local elections. Municipal authorities are elected to serve 3-year terms, and like the president and state governors, may not be reelected. The inability to be reelected in no small part contributes to the lack of accountability measures found at all levels of government in Mexico, since the immediate fate of politicians is determined not by voters but by the political parties. Although there are more than eight active political parties in Mexico, the parties that have dominated politics in Mexico historically and continue, for the most part, to do so today are the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which was in power from 1929 to 2000, the center-right conservative National Action Party (PAN), which wrested control from the PRI in the 2000 elections, and the center-left Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). Jalisco Electoral Context The experiment was run in four municipalities in Jalisco: Guadalajara (the state capital), Tonalá, Tlaquepaque, and Tlajomulco de Zuñiga. The governor of Jalisco, Emilio González Márquez, is a member of the PAN and was elected in 2007 to serve a six-year term. PAN gained control of the majority of municipalities in Jalisco, as well as the state, for the first time in 1994. In the 1997 elections, PAN also won a majority in Congress. In all four municipalities where we ran the experiment, the PAN was the incumbent party and the PRI the main contender, with the exception of Tlajomulco de Zuñiga where the two strongest candidates in the race were the PRI and the PRD. Predictions in Jalisco that the height of political power for the PAN had passed came true as preliminary results from the July 5th poll came in: PRI won control of several municipalities throughout Jalisco, including Guadalajara, Tonalá, Tlaquepaque, and the PRD won in Tlajomulco de Zuñiga. Morelos Electoral Context In Morelos, we ran the experiment in three municipalities: Cuernavaca (the state capital), Cuautla, and Jiutepec. As in Jalisco, the governor of Morelos, Marco Antonio Adame Castillo, is a member of the PAN. He was elected in 2006 to serve a six-year term. In Cuernavaca and Cuautla, the PAN was the incumbent party. In Jiutepec, a more rural municipality, the PRD was in power. Following the nationwide trend, the PAN lost control of several municipalities in Morelos, including Cuernavaca and Cuautla, which both went to the PRI in the 2009 elections. The PRD maintained control in Jiutepec. Tabasco Electoral Context--- ELECTIONS IN PROGRESS 3. Methods: eligibility criteria & settings During 2009, elections for congress and local governments were held concurrently in the states of Jalisco, Morelos, Estado de Mexico and Guanajuato in July, and Tabasco in October. Nine other states had concurrent elections for congress, local and state governments. Since gubernatorial elections introduce a different dynamic to local elections, and this study is focused on the latter, we first restricted the study to states with elections only for congress and local governments (Jalisco, Morelos, Estado de Mexico, Guanajuato and Tabasco). Among these states, for budgetary reasons, we picked Jalisco, Morelos and Tabasco. Since regional diversity is an important characteristic of Mexican politics, we chose these states in order to get variance in geographic location. We also picked these states because they give us variation in the state’s political makeup with Jalisco and Morelos being PAN-PRI territories and Tabasco being PRI- PRD territory. The unit of analysis of this project is the electoral precinct. The universe of eligible units was composed by precincts belonging to the three chosen states and belonging to municipalities with a report from the ASF. Together, these criteria restricted our sample to precincts in the following municipalities: Guadalajara, Tlaquepaque, Tonala and Tlajomulco de Zuñiga in Jalisco, Cuautla, Cuernavaca and Jiutepec in Morelos and Cardenas, Centro, Huimanguillo, Comalcalco