Voting or abstaining in "managed" elections? An RCT in Bangladesh

Last registered on December 20, 2018

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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title

Voting or abstaining in "managed" elections? An RCT in Bangladesh

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0003509

Initial registration date

December 14, 2018

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

December 20, 2018, 9:31 PM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country

Bangladesh

Region

Primary Investigator

Name

Asad Islam

Affiliation

Monash University

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name

Roland Hodler

PI Affiliation

University of St.Gallen

Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status

In development

Start date

2018-12-03

End date

2019-10-30

Keywords

Electoral

Additional Keywords

Authoritarian/managed elections, voting behavior, field experiment, Bangladesh

JEL code(s)

C93, D72.

Secondary IDs

Abstract

In many recent elections across the globe, the incumbent government has taken actions prior to or on election day to make its defeat very unlikely. We call such elections "managed" (or authoritarian) elections. We aim to understand the determinants of whether and how people vote in managed elections. In such elections, citizens who oppose the incumbent government have mainly two options: They can vote for an opposition candidate to signal their policy preferences to the regime; or they can abstain from voting to reduce the regime's post-election legitimacy. Our research questions are how the salience of these two options affect whether and how people vote in managed elections; and how this effect differs between areas in which the party of the current incumbent prime minister enjoyed strong support in the past and areas in which it did not. We study these questions in the general elections in Bangladesh that are scheduled for December 30, 2018. Given the current political climate, Bangladesh offers an ideal setting for studying voting behavior in managed elections.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Hodler, Roland and Asad Islam. 2018. "Voting or abstaining in "managed" elections? An RCT in Bangladesh." AEA RCT Registry. December 20. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.3509-1.0

Former Citation

Hodler, Roland and Asad Islam. 2018. "Voting or abstaining in "managed" elections? An RCT in Bangladesh." AEA RCT Registry. December 20. https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/3509/history/39290

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

There are two types of treatments. The first is the message that voting outcomes may affect policy-making (T-policy). The second is the message that high turnout may increase the political legitimacy of the government (T-legit).

Intervention Start Date

2018-12-23

Intervention End Date

2019-04-30

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

Individual voting participation coded based on the observation of an ink mark on the finger.
Official polling station-level data on turnout and the incumbent vote share.
Survey information about the voting participation of other voters within the respondents' family.

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Changes between pre-treatment and post-vote surveys in the respondents' view on the value of democracy and their opinion about the role of members of parliament.

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

We choose 150 villages that supported the party of the current incumbent government in past elections and 150 villages that supported the main opposition party. From within these two blocks of villages, we randomly choose 50 villages that receive treatment T-policy, 50 villages that receive treatment T-legit, and 50 control villages. We then randomly select 35-40 individuals per village, with roughly equal gender balance.

Experimental Design Details

The study area includes 4--5 constituencies containing around 800 polling stations (PS). Many of these PS consist of more than one village. Our sampling and randomization strategy contains the following stages:
1. We collect information on the vote share of the party of the current incumbent government (AL) and the main opposition party (BNP) at the PS-level in the general elections in 1996, 2001 and 2008. For PS consisting of multiple villages, we complement this information with local knowledge about the support for AL and BNP across villages within PS. We then choose 300 villages from the same number of PS such that we have 150 villages that supported AL in past elections and 150 villages that supported BNP.
2. We randomly divide both groups of 150 villages into 50 villages that receive treatment T-policy, 50 villages that receive treatment T-legit, and 50 control villages.
3. We randomly select 35-40 individuals per village, with roughly equal gender balance. These are the individuals we survey twice prior to the general elections and thereafter. In addition, we deliver the respective treatment messages to these 35-40 individuals in the treatment villages.

Randomization Method

Randomization done in office by a computer.

Randomization Unit

Village/polling station

Was the treatment clustered?

Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

300 villages

Sample size: planned number of observations

around 11,000 households/individuals

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

150 villages that supported AL in past elections and 150 villages that supported BNP. We randomly divide both groups of 150 villages into 50 villages that receive treatment T-policy, 50 villages that receive treatment T-legit, and 50 control villages.

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

Supporting Documents and Materials

IRB