Project Overview: With young democracies facing challenges across the developing world, efforts are underway to mobilize voters in order to make elected officials more accountable for delivering results. Unfortunately, we observe that in many places, voters do not seem to use candidates' performance or policy priorities as their key criteria. Beyond these observations, little rigorous evidence exists to explain individuals' voting behavior in low-income countries, or how voters' actions can improve government outcomes. Does voting behavior based on ethnicity, caste or gender outweigh voting based on issues and performance in poor, rural communities? Can voter mobilization or education campaigns lead to more accountable government? These questions are currently being addressed using experimental data that compares the behavior of voters in randomly selected villages exposed to a voter campaign with the behavior of voters in a comparable set of villages that were not included in the campaign. Several campaigns were carried out by a local NGO to test the influence of interventions such as entertainment, "dialoguing," community meetings, and posting materials on voting behavior.
To see whether campaigns could induce voters to hold corrupt officials accountable, one campaign provided an anti-corruption message along with publicly-available information about incumbents' performance in office. Another campaign focused on reducing caste-based voting, by helping communities identify issues of importance to them and encouraging people to vote based on those issues rather than for parties associated with their castes. Finally, a female voter mobilization campaign was designed to measure whether election outcomes would be more representative of women's priorities if more women voted.
Policy Relevance:
The results of this evaluation will provide valuable information about rural voters' behavior. In addition, the estimated impacts of various voter education/mobilization campaigns will suggest ways for governments and NGO's to increase communities' capacity to hold their elected leaders accountable for their performance.
Courtesy- JPAL (http://www.povertyactionlab.com/)
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