Information, voting and the quality of governance

Abhijit V. Banerjee

THE ROLE OF INFORMATION

A lot of how we think about decentralized economic and political systems is posited on assumptions an informed and vigilant citizenry

Voters need to make informed choicesParents/patients need to complain about the right problems in schools/hospitalsCitizens need to search out corruption in the provision of public goods and report itCommunities need to assign benefits to the right people.

UNFORTUNATELY

Neither being informed nor being engaged enough to use it are automaticAt least in a developing country contextPeople do not and often cannot read newspapers/notice boards etc.People are busy, stressedInformation is multi-dimensional: you have to know what is worth knowingInformation has to be processed

THIS TALK

I want to highlight

what we know about the use of information to get better social outcomes

And equally importantly, some puzzles about what seems to be coming out of that body of evidence

AN EXPERIMENT ON INFORMATION PROVISION

Rema already talked about it this morning but couple points worth makingRaskin is 17 year old program in IndonesiaIt is a rice subsidy program for the poor:

Each eligible family is entitled to 15 Kgs of rice per monthAt 1600 rupiahs per kiloThe price has been unchanged since 2007

Yet in baseline:Only 30% of eligible households know their statusBeneficiaries believe that the co-pay is 25% higher than it is

PERHAPS FOR THIS REASON, WE FIND..

Mistargeting: 84 percent of eligible bought some rice; 67 percent of ineligible did so as wellLeakages: comparing surveys to administrative data suggests about 23% of rice disappearsMarkups: mean co-payment in our data is Rp. 2,276 per kg, instead of Rp. 1,600

Eligible households buy 5.3 kg/month at Rp. 2,276: 32 percent of value of intended subsidy

COULD IT BE JUST AN INFORMATION PROBLEM?

It may be in the interest of the village leadership to keep the information vagueCompounded by the fact there are some real distribution costs not covered by the program (small though)Nevertheless one would imagine beneficiaries would have the incentive to find out and would have had ample chances to do so..One guess would be that this is just a reflection of power: “the village head’s word is the law”

RESULTS FROM A FIELD EXPERIMENT

Field experiment in 572 villages, in conjunction with the Indonesian government

Will an increase in information to eligible households increase their subsidy received?

In 378 randomly chosen villages, eligible households received a “Raskin id card”

Conveys information on eligibility and entitled quantity

THE IMPACT

Subsidy increases by about ~26% for eligible

No overall reduction in quantity for ineligibleNo evidence that the poorer ineligibles were hurt

Rice given out increases by 17%; 36% reduction in rice leakage

Bottom ten treatment only helped the bottom ten.

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE ON THE SOURCE OF THE IMPACT

Information seems to matter:Printing the price of rice on the card doubles the subsidy

But so does the possession of a card.When cards are only sent to the bottom 10% of the village, they are the only ones who benefitAnd the gain is no larger than where everyone gets a card

Suggests an important role for being able to demonstrate eligibility/entitlement

CONSISTENT WITH

The fact that making information public had a very large impactIn this treatment the lists of the eligible and the terms of the program were publicly announcedAs against a list that the leader was supposed to post on his office but often failed to do so

Doubled the increase in the subsidyToo big to be the impact of the increase in individual knowledge

Why?Coordination orHigher order knowledge

A POTENTIAL CONNECTION WITH

A quasi-experiment (Reinikka-Svensson) in Uganda where initially the median school was getting 0% of central government grants coming to itPublishing that amount sent raises the amount to over 80%.

Schools probably did know that something like this was happeningBut it was vague/conjecturalThe intervention introduced higher order knowledge

Why does that matter?People seem to have very high costs of publicly acting on vague informationWhy?

INFORMATION AND COORDINATION

The previous examples were ones where acting alone was possible

Does not make sense, for example, with schools, hospitalsIts hard to be credible when you complain about your own child not doing well

An example of information effects on education

INFORMATION WITHOUT COORDINATION CAN BE USELESS: RESULTS FROM AN RCT

Sarva Shiksha Aviyan (SSA) was the previous NDA governments flagship education program in IndiaCreated village education committees (VECs) to monitor state of education in the village and intervene where necessary

On paper substantial powers, including the power to complain against teachers and to request an additional teacher where needed

Five years after SSA was launched our survey in UP found VECs existed in every village

92% of the villagers do not know about them A vast majority of VEC members did not know their rights under SSA25% of VEC members did not know they were VEC members

INTERVENTION

To inform VEC members of their rights and responsibilitiesBoth generalAnd specific (this is the person to complain)

Informing villagers of the (dismal) state of education in these villages to galvanize them

Training in the tools to test their children

RESULT

Villagers and VEC members were more informedHad a precise zero effect on all measures of collective action and test scoresNot because villagers did not react to the information

Volunteers started teaching classes and test scores went up dramatically for those kids who attended those classesPrivate rather than collective action

WHY?

Cost of acting together in a setting where there is uncertainty about exactly whose fault it is, whether everyone else will step up to the plate (and some risk of retaliation)?

Some experimental evidence from laboratory games of excess reaction to small increases in costs in coordination games

One tentative piece of evidenceVery similar intervention in Uganda in the healthcare sector (Bjorkman-Svensson)Had massive positive effectsMain difference, the information campaign was carried out by a CBO that also undertook to coordinate the reaction to the information

VOTING EXPERIMENTS

Is one place where individual action can have a big impact without physical coordinationInformation seems to have large effectsFarraz-Finan study audits of mayors in Brazil

Find that mayors whose audits were (randomly) chosen to be published before the election get more votes if they are found uncorrupt and massively less votes if they are found corrupt

Banerjee-Kumar-Pande find that even much softer information has a substantial effect on voting

In Delhi distributing newspapers with report cards on legislator performance reduces the vote share of low performing candidates substantially

BUT DO PEOPLE USE ALL THE INFORMATION THEY HAVE?

A field experiment in Eastern Rajasthan

Villagers were shown a street play that reminded them that the village panchayat head had important economic responsibilities

Especially with the new employment guarantee scheme

Just before the 2010 panchayat electionFirst-past the post elections, every five yearsAnyone can self-nominate and run

THE CAMPAIGN

Consisted of a street-play

And distribution of calendars, some village meetings

No village specific information was given out

472 street-plays covering 119 Gram Panchayats chosen at random out of the 382 in 3 districts.

130,00 calendars distributed

IMPACTS: ANTI-INCUMBENCY

IMPACTS: STRATEGIC RESPONSE

IMPACTS: ACCOUNTABILITY

IMPACTS: ACCOUNTABILITY

THEREFORE

Impact of the intervention was to reduce re-running among low performing incumbents. But villagers were not told who was low-performing

In other words, the villagers knew who were the bad incumbents but till the play reminded that they should care, this information was not being used…

Why?Coordination (Myerson)?Or cost of information processing. How to know what we know?

SOME EVIDENCE ON COST OF PURE INFORMATION PROCESSING

In Indonesia we had the village community rank everyone in terms of poverty in order to find the poorWe randomized the order in which the people were rankedWe see a big difference in ranking accuracy between beginning and endPerhaps not surprising since ranking 75 households, for example, would need at least 363 comparisonsHaving information is not the same thing as being willing to use it.

A LOT OF HOPE

Is pinned on the effects of information exchange--twitter, text messages, etc.--on improving governanceWe need to think about how to make those interventions really effectiveIn particular there is no reason why good governance would emerge from the “free market in ideas” The most important things may not get said or heard or discussed or emphasized or acted upon

A RESEARCH AGENDA

UnderstandingThe role of higher-order knowledgeThe role of coordinationThe role of knowing what you know

And how to design information campaigns to leverage these