What politicians don’t know can hurt you: the effects of information on politicians’ spending decisions

Do well-informed politicians make more effective spending decisions? In experiments with 70% of all elected politicians in Malawi (N=460), we tested the effects of information on public spending. Specifically, we randomly provided information about school needs, foreign aid, and voting patterns prior to officials making real decisions about the allocation of spending. We show that these information interventions reduced inequalities in spending: treatment group politicians were more likely to spend in schools neglected by donors and in schools with greater need. Some information treatment effects were strongest in remote and less populated communities. These results suggest information gaps partially explain inequalities in spending allocation and imply social welfare benefits from improving politicians’ access to information about community needs

Effect of holding office on the behavior of politicians

Does being elected to political office change an individual’s behavior? Some scholars and policymakers assert that elected officials are inherently different from nonpoliticians, whereas others argue that political institutions or the culture of politics inculcate certain behaviors. We identify the effect of holding office on behavior. We recruit in-office and out-of-office politicians in Zambia to participate in behavioral games that measure reciprocity, a behavioral trait that underpins various interactions in the political arena from bribery to lobbying to legislative bargaining. We find that holding elected office causes an increase in reciprocity. The policy implication of this finding is that political institutions, culture, and incentive structures can be designed to shape the behavior and choices of society’s leaders

Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding

During the past decade, analyses drawing on several democracy measures have shown a global trend of democratic retrenchment. While these democracy measures use radically different methodologies, most partially or fully rely on subjective judgments to produce estimates of the level of democracy within states. Such projects continuously grapple with balancing conceptual coverage with the potential for bias (Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Przeworski et al. 2000). Little and Meng (L&M) (2023) reintroduce this debate, arguing that “objective” measures of democracy show little evidence of recent global democratic backsliding.1 By extension, they posit that time-varying expert bias drives the appearance of democratic retrenchment in measures that incorporate expert judgments. In this article, we engage with (1) broader debates on democracy measurement and democratic backsliding, and (2) L&M’s specific data and conclusions

An experiment on foreign aid and public spending changed our thinking on aid effectiveness

Foreign aid is often accused of promoting corruption and hurting development by encouraging recipient governments to reallocate budgets away from needed areas. A recent experiment in Malawi to test whether aid crowds out public spending found each project crowds out about 22%. Contrary to the claims of aid critics, this research finds no evidence that foreign aid undermines spending on the neediest or contributes to political patronage. Instead, politicians often claim to be motivated by fairness and equity

Replication Data for: Coethnicity and Corruption: Field Experimental Evidence from Public Officials in Malawi

Corruption is widespread in many developing countries, though public officials' discretion in the solicitation of bribes may expose some citizens to more corruption than others. We focus on how shared ethnicity between government officials and citizens influences the likelihood of bribe solicitation. We conducted a field experiment in which Malawian confederates seek electricity connections from real government offices -- an interaction that is often accompanied by bribe solicitation -- in which coethnicity between the official and the confederate was varied exogenously. We find that coethnicity increases the likelihood of expediting an electricity connection, both with and without a bribe. We interpret this as evidence of parochial corruption

Strategies of Validation: Assessing the Varieties of Democracy Corruption Data

Social scientists face the challenge of determining whether their data are valid, yet they lack prac- tical guidance about how to do so. Existing publications on data validation provide mostly abstract information for creating one’s own dataset or establishing that an existing one is adequate. Fur- ther, they tend to pit validation techniques against each other, rather than explain how to combine multiple approaches. By contrast, this paper provides a practical guide to data validation in which tools are used in a complementary fashion to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a dataset and thus reveal how it can most effectively be used. We advocate for three approaches, each incorporat- ing multiple tools: 1) assessing content validity through an examination of the resonance, domain, differentiation, fecundity, and consistency of the measure; 2) evaluating data generation validity through an investigation of dataset management structure, data sources, coding procedures, aggre- gation methods, and geographic and temporal coverage; and 3) assessing convergent validity using case studies and empirical comparisons among coders and among measures. We apply our method to corruption measures from a new dataset, Varieties of Democracy. We show that the data are generally valid and we emphasize that a particular strength of the dataset is its capacity for analysis across countries and over time. These corruption measures represent a significant contribution to the field because, although research questions have focused on geographic differences and temporal trends, other corruption datasets have not been designed for this type of analysis.The authors are grateful to Nancy Bermeo, Ellen Lust, Gerardo Munck, Andreas Schedler and V-Dem colleagues for their comments on an earlier version of this paper and to Talib Jabbar and Andrew Slivka for their research assistance. This research project was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, grant M13-0559:1, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; by the Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation to Wallenberg Academy Fellow Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; by the Swedish Research Council, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden & Jan Teorell, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden; and by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-1423944, PI: Daniel Pemstein. Jan Teorell also wishes to acknowledge support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. We performed simulations and other computational tasks using resources provided by the Notre Dame Center for Research Computing (CRC) through the High Performance Computing section, and by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden. We specifically acknowledge the assistance of In-Saeng Suh at CRC and Johan Raber at SNIC in facilitating our use of their respective systems

How information about foreign aid affects public spending decisions: evidence from a field experiment in Malawi

Does foreign aid shift public spending? Many worry that aid will be “fungible” in the sense that govern- ments reallocate public funds in response to aid. If so, this could undermine development, increase the poorest’s dependency on donors, and free resources for patronage. Yet, there is little agreement about the scale or consequences of such effects. We conducted an experiment with 460 elected politicians in Malawi. We provided information about foreign aid projects in local schools to these politicians. After- wards, politicians made real decisions about which schools to target with development goods. Politicians who received the aid information treatment were 18% less likely to target schools with existing aid. These effects increase to 22-29% when the information was plausibly novel. We find little evidence that aid information heightens targeting of political supporters or family members, or dampens support to the neediest. Instead the evidence indicates politicians allocate the development goods in line with equity concerns

Why Low Levels of Democracy Promote Corruption and High Levels Diminish It

Theory predicts democracy should reduce corruption. Yet, scholars have found that while corruption is low at high levels of democracy, it is high at modest levels, as well as low when democracy is absent. A weakness of studies that aim to explain this inverted curvilinear relationship is that they do not disaggregate the complex concepts of democracy and corruption. By contrast, this paper disaggregates both. We demonstrate that the curvilinear relationship results from the collective impact of different components of democracy on different types of corruption. Using Varieties of Democracy data, we examine 173 countries from 1900 to 2015, and we find freedom of expression and freedom of association each exhibit an inverted curvilinear relationship with corruption—both overall corruption and four different types. The introduction of elections and the quality of elections each act in a linear fashion—positively and negatively with corruption, respectively—but jointly form a curvilinear relationship with both overall corruption and many of its types. Judicial and legislative constraints exhibit a negative linear relationship with executive corruption. We offer a framework that suggests how these components affect costs and benefits of engaging in different types of corruption and, therefore, the level of corruption overall