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-relevaant learning.
Elections in the wake of transitions to democracy are often structured by formal and informal institutions that benefit anti-democratic elites and that reduce the potential of expanded suffrage to affect policy. While most of the writing on counter-majoritarian institutions focuses on formal rules, the political consequences of informal institutions that can distort elections' capacity to accurately represent the electorate is less well understood. Drawing upon historical and recent evidence from Brazil, this study analyzes the specific aspects of the mechanics of Brazilian elections that interacted with informal practices to over-represent rural conservative interests, increased the ability of conservative political machines to win elections, and de-facto dis-enfranchised large swaths of the Brazilian electorate. These informal practices had substantial consequences for the quality of representation both during Brazil's first experiment with mass democracy between 1945 and 1964, as well as its most recent experience with widespread suffrage. Furthermore, this analysis considers the conditions under which interventions--such as the provision of information--can improve the extent to which elections can induce accountability and representation. he first chapter examines a long standing anti-democratic practice in Brazil: the de-facto disenfranchisement of millions of Brazilian voters and widespread voting fraud caused by the interaction of a difficult paper ballot and permissive electoral rules. To provide such evidence, this analysis exploits the phased adoption of electronic voting in Brazil, a reform that increased the effective franchise in legislative elections by about 33 percent and eliminated fraud in the vote counting process. The research design relies on the fact that the reform was initially implemented in municipalities with an electorate over an arbitrary threshold and consequently allows for a regression discontinuity design. The two distinct effects of electronic voting--the enfranchisement of illiterates and other low information voters and the dramatic reduction of fraud--had consequences for the composition of the national legislature. Against the predictions of recent economic models of democratization, the data show that the enfranchisement of illiterates and other low information voters caused a small increase in the vote shares of right-wing candidates. More importantly, newly enfranchised voters were dramatically more likely to cast a "party list" or partisan ballot as opposed to a personal or candidate ballot, which benefitted Brazil's more programmatic and ideologically coherent parties. In states with hegemonic conservative parties, the introduction of electronic voting induced a roughly 20 percentage point swing against "political machine" candidates, which is attributable to a substantial reduction in fraud. Overall, the most important consequences of the reform was the strengthening of Brazil's major parties and a weakening of dominant subnational conservative political machines.The third chapter explores how interventions that increase the amount of information available to the electorate can affect political accountability. An underlying assumption of much of the literature on political corruption is that if voters are provided with information about the performance of politicians by actors in civil society such as the media and non-governmental organizations, then the election of corrupt politicians is less likely. Yet, heterogeneous views about the importance of corruption can determine whether increased information changes electoral outcomes. If partisan cleavages correlate with the importance voters place on corruption, then the consequences of information may vary by candidate, even when voters identify multiple candidates as corrupt. This chapter provides evidence of this mechanism from a field experiment in a mayoral election in São Paulo where a reputable interest group declared both candidates corrupt. Informing voters about the challenger's record reduced turnout by 1.9 percentage points and increased the opponent's vote by 2.6 percentage points. Informing voters about the incumbent's record had no effect on behavior. This divergent finding is attributable to differences in how each candidate's supporters view corruption. Survey data and a survey experiment show that the challengers' supporters are more willing to punish their candidate for corruption, while the incumbent's supporters lack this inclination.
One of the most robust findings on political institutions is that compulsory voting (CV) reduces the participation gap between poorer and wealthier voters. We present evidence that in Brazil, the largest country to use such a rule, CV increases inequality in turnout. We use individual-level data on 140 million Brazilian citizens and two age-based discontinuities to estimate the heterogeneous effects of CV by educational achievement, a strong proxy for socioeconomic status. Evidence from both thresholds shows that the causal effect of CV on turnout among the more educated is at least twice the size of the effect among those with less education. To explain this result, which is the opposite of what is predicted by the existing literature, we argue that nonmonetary penalties for abstention primarily affect middle- and upper-class voters and thus increase their turnout disproportionately. Survey evidence from a national sample provides evidence for the mechanism. Our results show that studies of CV should consider nonmonetary sanctions, as their effects can reverse standard predictions.
Studies of clientelism typically assume that political machines distribute rewards to persuade or mobilize the existing electorate. We argue that rewards not only influence actions of the electorate, but can also shape its composition. Across the world, machines employ "voter buying" to import outsiders into their districts. Voter buying demonstrates how clientelism can underpin electoral fraud, and it offers an explanation of why machines deliver rewards when they cannot monitor vote choices. Our analyses suggest that voter buying dramatically influences municipal elections in Brazil. A regression discontinuity design suggests that voter audits—which undermined voter buying—decreased the electorate by 12 percentage points and reduced the likelihood of mayoral reelection by 18 percentage points. Consistent with voter buying, these effects are significantly greater in municipalities with large voter inflows, and where neighboring municipalities had large voter outflows. Findings are robust to an alternative research design using a different data set.
What are the political consequences of democratization assistance to regimes transitioning from authoritarian rule? By exploiting the downstream effects of a field experiment designed to encourage citizen monitoring of Georgia's 2008 parliamentary elections, we evaluate the political consequences of one type of democracy promotion aid. The intervention increased citizen activism, but it also had the unanticipated effect of suppressing overall voter turnout by approximately 5%. We hypothesize that the civic education campaign was interpreted as a sign of increased political attention to a selected voting precinct, which suppressed opposition turnout. Two additional experiments provide additional evidence for the hypothesis.
Mosquito-borne illnesses present significant health challenges to the developing world. If citizens are informed about their government's efforts to combat these diseases, will they reward incumbents who have performed well and punish those who have done poorly at this task? Electoral sanctioning requires that combatting disease be a sufficiently salient concern, which, in turn, is likely to depend upon subjective perceptions of the risks posed by particular illnesses. Epidemics typically prompt stronger risk perceptions than endemic diseases, but where both types circulate jointly, the more familiar endemic disease may determine public reactions. The salience of health threats also varies among individuals; those with a self-interest in prevention or a personal connection to the effects of mosquito-borne illnesses may react more strongly. This study presents the results of a face-to-face survey experiment in Pernambuco, Brazil, informing subjects about their mayor's use of federal funds to combat mosquito-borne illnesses such as dengue (an endemic disease) and Zika and chikungunya (both epidemics). We examine the effect of this information on intended vote for the mayor's reelection. For the full sample, the treatment has no significant effect. However, we find a large and significant punishment effect among voters who know someone affected by microcephaly or the Zika virus. Drawing on survey and focus group evidence, we argue that most voters fail to act upon our treatment information because mosquito control is a low-salience concern primarily associated with endemic rather than epidemic diseases. Our study constitutes the first experimental evidence as to whether informing citizens about government public health efforts affects voting behavior. Our results suggests that, where similar epidemic and endemic diseases circulate together, informational campaigns aiming to induce electoral accountability should also seek to boost the salience of the information by educating the public about the difference between familiar and newer threats. Keywords: Latin America; Brazil; Elections; Accountability; Epidemic disease
To enhance government accountability, reformers have advocated strengthening institutions of "horizontal accountability," particularly auditing institutions that can punish lawbreaking elected officials. Yet, these institutions differ in their willingness to punish corrupt politicians, which is often attributed to variation in their degree of independence from the political branches. Taking advantage of a randomized natural experiment embedded in Brazil's State Audit Courts, we study how variation in the appointment mechanisms for choosing auditors affects political accountability. We show that auditors appointed under few constraints by elected officials punish lawbreaking politicians—particularly co-partisans—at lower rates than bureaucrats insulated from political influence. In addition, we find that even when executives are heavily constrained in their appointment of auditors by meritocratic and professional requirements, auditors still exhibit a pro-politician bias in decision making. Our results suggest that removing bias requires a level of insulation from politics rare among institutions of horizontal accountability. Keywords: Latin American politics, corruption, accountability
When firms give money to candidates for public office, what return can they expect on their investment? Prior studies have been inconclusive, due to both methodological challenges and unique features of the U.S. political context on which they have focused. Using data from Brazil, we employ a regression discontinuity design to identify the effect of an electoral victory on government contracts for a candidate's corporate donors. Firms specializing in public works projects can expect a substantial boost in contracts—at least 14 times the value of their contributions—when they donate to a federal deputy candidate from the ruling Workers' Party (PT) and that candidate wins office. We find no effects among allied parties, indicating that the PT prioritizes this form of state spending for party strengthening rather than coalition management.
