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Do informational interventions shape electoral choices and thereby promote political accountability? The chapters in Part II of this book provided answers to this question in particular contexts. The studies individually provide rich insights not only into the impact of interventions that were common to all studies, but also on the effects of alternative interventions that were specific to each one. In this chapter, we assess the larger lessons that we can glean from our coordinated studies. As outlined in Chapter 3, all studies seek to test common hypotheses about the impact of harmonized informational interventions, using consistent measurements of outcome variables. Our preregistered analysis allows us to evaluate whether, pooling data from the set of studies in the initiative, information about politician performance led voters to alter their electoral behavior. It also informs a discussion about the conditions under which they did or did not do so. We find that the overall effect of information is quite precisely estimated and not statistically distinguishable from zero. The analysis shows modest impacts of information on voters' knowledge of the information provided to them. However, the interventions did not appear to shape voters' evaluations of candidates, and, in particular, they did not discernibly influence vote choice. This slate of null results obtains in nearly all analyses for the individual country studies too.1 Nor is there strong evidence of impact on voter turnout, though under some specifications we find suggestive evidence that bad news may boost voter mobilization. Our results are robust to different analytic strategies and across a variety of modeling and dataset construction choices. The findings also suggest that the estimated effect in our missing study would have needed to be extremely large to alter our broader conclusions. The size of our meta-analysis reduces the chances that null estimated effects stem from low statistical power, and the fact that our results are so consistent across the individual studies limits the possibility that our mostly null effects are due to idiosyncrasies in implementation or study design. In the rest of this chapter, we first describe the prespecified approach that we use to analyze the pooled dataset. We then report our main findings, point out the consistency of results across studies, and report robustness checks. Next we consider several possible reasons for our null findings by testing the prespecified hypotheses. The most plausible reason for the null effects stems from the failure of the interventions to shape voters' perceptions of politicians; we do not find evidence, however, that this is due to partisan or ethnic attachments or other heuristic substitutes for information. It is critical to underscore the similarities of these interventions to previous treatments in the experimental research literature and to interventions for which donor organizations in the transparency space routinely advocate. Indeed, our interventions were crafted by researchers with substantial country-specific expertise, usually in collaboration with local NGOs. Our null results across wide array of contexts therefore provide an important baseline of evidence against which future studies can be weighed. This chapter could be profitably read in conjunction with Chapter 3, which discusses the common interventions and our measurement of key variables, but it can be read as a standalone chapter as well.

In the study of electoral politics and political behavior in the developing world, India is often considered to be an exemplar of the centrality of contingency in distributive politics, the role of ethnicity in shaping political behavior, and the organizational weakness of political parties. Whereas these axioms have some empirical basis, the massive changes in political practices, the vast variation in political patterns, and the burgeoning literature on subnational dynamics in India mean that such generalizations are not tenable. In this article, we consider research on India that compels us to rethink the contention that India neatly fits the prevailing wisdom in the comparative politics literature. Our objective is to elucidate how the many nuanced insights about Indian politics can improve our understanding of electoral behavior both across and within other countries, allowing us to question core assumptions in theories of comparative politics.

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives' performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives' performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives' performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives' performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives' performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.