RESEARCH
Authors: Soledad Artiz Prillaman and Jonathan Phillips
Book Chapter Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
Insert a few lines that summarize the research.
Author: Soledad Artiz Prillaman
Working Paper Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
In India there persists a striking gender gap in political participation. Women's political participation is important both on normative grounds of inclusion and because when women do participate, politics changes. I present a theoretical model of women’s political behavior arguing that women's lack of political participation is the result of constraints on political coordination, particularly outside the household. I then evaluate the effects of expanding women’s social networks by leveraging a natural experiment that created as-if random variation in access to women’s credit collectives. Women who participated in this program were significantly more active in local politics - women's attendance at local public meetings doubles. I show evidence of three possible mechanisms underlying this network effect: (1) increased capacity for collective action, (2) information, and (3) civic skills. These findings contribute to our understanding of how social networks affect individual political behavior and underlie gendered inequalities in political participation.
Is Knowledge Power?: Civics Training, Women’s Political Representation, and Local Governance in India
Author: Soledad Artiz Prillaman
What Constrains Young Indian Women’s Labor Force Participation? Evidence from a Survey of Vocational Trainees
Authors: Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Rohini Pande, Vartika Singh, and Charity Troyer Moore
Working Paper Inclusive Development FLFP
How do young men and women fare under India’s vocational (skills) training and job placement programs, and what constrains their subsequent job take-up and retention? Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) partnered with a large, government-funded skills training and job placement program to survey 2,610 former vocational trainees in 2016. We find a large male-favored gender gap in job placement: at 85%, young men are 13% points more likely than young women to receive a job offer. Young men are also 26% points more likely to accept jobs (with rates at 70% for males and 56% for females). We also identify high drop-out rates after vocational training: 74% of respondents who accepted a job after training had left it by the time of the survey (on average, 9 months after completing training), and only 20% of this group that had left their jobs were employed. Furthermore, there are stark gender differences in the reasons trained youth refuse jobs and subsequently drop out of the labor force. For young women, family concerns are the primary reason , while compensation and personal preferences are the primary reasons young men cite for refusing and leaving jobs after vocational training. However, for both young men and women, access to post-migration support is correlated with longer post-placement job tenure.
Authors: Saad Gulzar, Muhammad Yasir Khan, and Luke Sonnet
Working Paper Inclusive Development FLFP
Why does women’s political participation continue to lag behind men’s in much of the world? Using primary census and network data from 37 communities in Pakistan, this letter documents that perceptions of norms around whether women should participate in politics are pessimistic: individuals underestimate actual support men and women hold for women’s political participation. Further, despite previous evidence that the household primarily structures women’s behavior in patriarchal societies, we show that women’s social networks have little overlap with those of men in their own households and, more importantly, that women’s pessimistic expectations about others’ beliefs are more strongly correlated with beliefs of socially proximate women than with men in their households. We conclude that efforts to reduce the gender gap in political participation may therefore benefit from targeting pessimistic expectations of norms, focusing particularly on women’s social neighbors.
Authors: Saad Gulzar and Muhammad Yasir Khan
Working Paper Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
How can we motivate ‘good’ politicians – those that will carry out policy that is responsive to citizens’ preferences – to enter politics? In a field experiment in Pakistan, we vary how political office is portrayed to ordinary citizens. We find that emphasizing pro-social motives for holding political office instead of personal returns – such as the ability to help others versus enhancing one’s own respect and status – raises the likelihood that individuals run for office and that voters elect them. It also better aligns subsequent policies with citizens’ preferences. The candidacy decisions are explained by social influence, and not information salience – we find that social versus personal messaging matters only when randomly delivered in a public setting but not in private. Results also show that changes in political supply, not citizen preferences or behavior, explain policy alignment. Taken together, the results demonstrate that non-financial motivations for political entry shape how politicians perform in office.
Authors: Saad Gulzar, Apoorva Lal, and Benjamin Pasquale
Working Paper Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
Can representative institutions improve environmental conservation? We study the impact of a 1996 law that created local government with electoral quotas for Scheduled Tribes, a historically marginalized and impoverished community of 100 million in India. Using difference-in-differences designs paired with remote sensing data on deforestation, we find that formal representation reduces the rate of deforestation by thirty percent. These effects are larger in villages close to mines, where representation likely lowered commercial extraction. Combining these findings with research that the same institutions improved economic outcomes, our results challenge the commonly held assumption that there must be a trade-off between development and protecting the environment. While conservation policy tends to comprise environmentally focused institutions, we suggest more attention be given to umbrella institutions, such as political representation, which can address conservation and development in tandem.
Authors: Saad Gulzar, Miriam Golden, and Luke Sonnet
Working Paper Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
Politicians face chronic problems collecting accurate information from voters about their policy preferences, a problem especially severe where interactions occur through face-to-face meetings that are potentially dominated by an unrepresentative subgroup of voters. We supplement existing interactions by experimentally providing Interactive Voice Response technology to Pakistani politicians, allowing them to script and record questions for voters and allowing voters to respond on cell phones. The new technology changes the initiator, scope, content, scale, personalism, and frequency of two-way political communication. Our results present mixed evidence on the efficacy of improving political communication when instigated by politicians: even though politicians and voters both exhibit eagerness to engage in this shift, politicians do not follow through with changes in policy-relevant behavior and voters’ downstream political attitudes and behavior remain unaltered. We discuss why this might be, emphasizing that face-to-face interactions are not always unrepresentative of voters or inadequate in collecting their preferences.
Authors: Saad Gulzar, Michael Callen, Ali Hasanain, Muhammad Yasir Khan, and Arman Rezaee
Working Paper Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
The paper examines how politics relates to public sector absenteeism, a chronic and intractable public service delivery problem in many developing countries. In Punjab, Pakistan, we document that political interference routinely protects doctors from sanction in the health bureaucracy, while personal connections between doctors and politicians and a lack of political competition are associated with more doctor absence. We then examine how politics impacts the success of an at-scale policy reform to combat absenteeism. We find that the reform was more effective at increasing doctor attendance in politically competitive constituencies, both through increased monitoring and through senior health officials more effectively responding to data on poor performing health facilities. Our results demonstrate that politics can block the success of reform; instead of lifting the poor performers up, the reform improved places that were already performing better than others. The evidence collectively points to the fundamental importance of accounting for political incentives for policy design and implementation.
Authors: Saad Gulzar, Michael Callen, Ali Hasanain, Muhammad Yasir Khan, & Arman Rezaee
Working Paper Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
This paper provides evidence that the personalities of policymakers matter for policy. Three results support the relevance of personalities for policy. First, doctors with higher Big Five and Perry Public Sector Motivation scores attend work more and falsify inspection reports less. Second, health inspectors who score higher on these measures exhibit larger treatment responses to increased monitoring. Last, senior health officials with higher personality scores respond more to data on staff absence by compelling better subsequent attendance. These results suggest that interpersonal differences matter are consequential for state performance.
Authors: Saad Gulzar and Muhammad Yasir Khan
Working Paper Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
Local governments are said to be susceptible to elite capture in the developing world. Reforms that aim to improve political competition may help reduce elite capture. We run a randomized control trial prior to elections for village councils in rural Pakistan to study three barriers to political entry: cost of running for office, lack of information on electability of candidates and lack of information on benefits from office. We find that the cost of running for office is the main barrier preventing political entry of citizens, while lack of information on electability and benefits from office are not binding constraints on average. We find they do matter for certain populations: citizens who have higher prior beliefs of winning the elections respond to provision of information with increased probability of running for office.
Authors: Saad Gulzar, Miguel R. Rueda, and Nelson A. Ruiz
Journal Article Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
Over 40% of countries around the world have adopted limits on campaign contributions to curb the influence of money in politics. Yet, we have limited knowledge of whether and how these limits achieve this goal. Using a regression discontinuity design that exploits institutional rules on contribution limits in Colombian municipalities, we show that looser limits increase the number of public contracts assigned to donors to the elected candidate. This is explained by looser limits increasing the influence of top donors over the elected candidate, rather than reducing electoral competition or changing who is elected to office. We further show that looser limits worsen the quality of public contracts given to the winner’s donors: These contracts are more likely to run over their stipulated costs. Overall, this article links looser campaign contribution limits, donor kickbacks, and worse performance of contracts awarded to donors.
Authors: Saad Gulzar, Zuhad Hai, and Binod Kumar Paudel
Journal Article Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
This article studies candidate selection by party leaders and asks whether poor information about public preferences can lead elite choices to diverge from mass opinion. Working with a political party in Nepal, we show that while elites value voter preferences, these preferences only explain one-third of elite candidate selection. Next, we embed an experiment in actual candidate selection deliberations for this party and find that party leaders not only select different candidates when polling data are presented to them, but that their updated decisions also improve the party’s vote share. By opening the black box of candidate selection, this article demonstrates that closing the information gap between elites and voters has the power to improve the quality of representation.
Who Enters Politics and Why?
Author: Saad Gulzar
Journal Article Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
Despite the importance of politicians, empirical work rarely examines who decides to enter politics and why. This survey presents conceptual issues in measuring political entry; reviews work on individual, organizational, and institutional determinants of political entry; and summarizes the main findings and puzzles related to the representation/competence trade-off in recent microcensus studies on who runs for office. Fruitful directions for future work are highlighted throughout the article.
Does Political Affirmative Action Work, and For Whom? Theory and Evidence on India’s Scheduled Areas
Authors: Saad Gulzar, Nicholas Haas, and Benjamin Pasquale
Journal Article Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
Does political affirmative action undermine or promote development? We present the first systematic analysis of Scheduled Areas in India, home to 100 million citizens, where local political office is reserved for the historically disadvantaged Scheduled Tribes. A newly constructed dataset of 217,000 villages allows us to probe conflicting hypotheses on the implementation of the world’s largest workfare program, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. We find that reservations deliver no worse overall outcomes, that there are large gains for targeted minorities, and that these gains come at the cost of the relatively privileged, not other minorities. We also find improvements in other pro-poor programs, including a rural roads program and general public goods. Reservations more closely align benefits to each group’s population share, allaying concerns of overcompensation for inequalities. Contrary to the expectations of skeptics, results indicate that affirmative action can redistribute both political and economic power without hindering overall development.
Data and Policy Decisions: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan
Authors: Saad Gulzar, Michael Callen, Ali Hasanain, Muhammad Yasir Khan, and Arman Rezaee
Journal Article Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
We evaluate a program in Pakistan that equips government health inspectors with a smartphone app which channels data on rural clinics to senior policy makers. The system led to rural clinics being inspected 104% more often after 6 months, but only 43.8% more often after a year, with the latter estimate not attaining significance at conventional levels. There is also no clear evidence that the increase in inspections led to increases in general staff attendance. In addition, we test whether senior officials act on the information provided by the system. Focusing only on districts where the app is deployed, we find that highlighting poorly performing facilities on a dashboard viewed by supervisors raises doctor attendance by 75%. Our results indicate that technology may be able to mobilize data to useful effect, even in low capacity settings.
Authors: Saad Gulzar, Michael Callen, and Arman Rezaee
Journal Article Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
Research on the benefits of political alignment suggests that voters who elect governing party politicians are better off than those who elect other politicians. We examine this claim with regression discontinuity designs that isolate the effect of electing a governing party politician on an important publicly provided service in Pakistan: health. Consistent with existing research, governing party constituents receive a higher quantity of services; more doctors are assigned to work in governing party areas. However, despite many more assigned doctors, there is no increase in doctor attendance. These findings contrast with the literature on political alignment by showing that alignment to the governing party affects voters’ welfare ambiguously: higher potential quantity of services may come at the cost of lower quality.
Authors: Saad Gulzar and Benjamin J. Pasquale
Journal Article Inclusive Democracy Political Participation
When do politicians prompt bureaucrats to provide effective services? Leveraging the uneven overlap of jurisdictions in India, we compare bureaucrats supervised by a single political principal with those supervised by multiple politicians. With an original dataset of nearly half a million villages, we find that implementation of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the largest employment program in the world, is substantially better where bureaucrats answer to a single politician. Regression discontinuity estimates help increase confidence that this result is causal. Our findings suggest that politicians face strong incentives to motivate bureaucrats as long as they internalize the benefits from doing so. In contrast to a large literature on the deleterious effects of political interventions, our results show that political influence may be more favorable to development than is commonly assumed.