Does Development Aid Undermine Political Accountability in Bangladesh?

2011-01-01

2013-12-31

Satisfaction with UP providing sanitation, Interactions with UP chair, Citizen satisfaction and politician response by lottery outcome, Round 2, Heterogeneity by Union, Round 2, Impact of information treatment on perception of local politicians.

An implicit assumption in the argument that aid undermines political accountability is that constituents are systematically and consistently fooled: that they mistakenly believe that their local leaders are responsible for the aid program, and give them undeserved credit. This project tested this assumption in the context of a large-scale randomized intervention in rural Bangladesh using two sanitation interventions and two information treatments.

The sanitation intervention consisted of two main components. The first component, called the Latrine Promotion Program, consisted of a multi-day community exercise designed to raise awareness of the problems caused by open defecation and non-hygienic latrines. For the second component, eligible households received sanitation subsidies which covered part of the cost of building a hygienic latrine.

For the information treatments, households were informed about the source of the sanitation intervention. One group of households were treated using the "implicit" script, which informed them that the intervention had been part of a research project, but did not explicitly say anything about the role of local leaders. A second group of households were treated using the "explicit" script, which explicitly stated that villages had received benefits on the basis of a lottery and that the government had not played any role in funding the intervention nor in selecting villages.

Sanitation Intervention:

The treatments (Control, LPP Only, and LPP + Subsidy), were randomized at the village
level. The sample of 97 villages was allocated in the following proportions: 0.21 to Control;
0.13 to LPP Only; 0.66 to LPP + Subsidy. LPP + Subsidy was over-weighted because it
contained several sub-treatments of interest to the demand study. To avoid imbalance in the
number of neighborhoods, villages were stratified by the number of neighborhoods, below
median (1-2 neighborhoods) vs. above median (3 or more neighborhoods).


Information Treatments:

The randomization of the Information Treatments was conducted at two levels, first at the
neighborhood level and then within neighborhood at the household level. At the neighborhood
level, we allocated 60% of first-round Treatment neighborhoods to IT Explicit, 20%
to IT Implicit and 20% to IT Control.


(Detailed information about randomization methods can be found in the paper cited at the end of this registry entry)

Treatments were randomized at the village level and implemented at the neighborhood level.

Yes

97 villages, 346 neighborhoods

16,603 households

(See section above on "Randomization Method")

We study political economy responses to a large scale intervention in Bangladesh, where
four sub-districts consisting of 100 villages (12,000 households) were randomly assigned
to control, information or subsidy treatments to encourage investments in improved
sanitation. In theory, leaders may endogenously respond to large interventions by
changing their allocation of effort, and their constituents’ views about the leader may
rationally change as a result. In one intervention where the leaders’ role in program
allocation was not clear to constituents, constituents appear to attribute credit to their
local leader for a randomly assigned program. However, when subsidy assignment
is clearly and transparently random, the lottery winners do not attribute any extra
credit to the politician relative to lottery losers. The theory can rationalize these
observations if we model leaders’ actions and constituent reactions under imperfect
information about leader ability. A third intervention returns to program villages to
inform a subset of subsidy recipients that the program was run by NGOs using external
funds. This eliminates the excess credit that leaders received from treated households
after the first intervention. These results suggest that while politicians may try to take
credit for development programs, it is not easy for them do so. Political accountability
is not easily undermined by development aid.

Guiteras, Raymond, and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak. “Does Development Aid Undermine Political Accountability? Leader and Constituent Responses to a Large-Scale Intervention.” Working Paper, March 2014.

https://www.povertyactionlab.org/sites/default/files/publications/875%20Development%20aid%20and%20political%20accountability%20Mar2014.pdf