Do Citizens Respond to Better Information on Local Public Finance? Evidence from a Field Experiment During the 2019 Colombian Municipal Elections

Last registered on October 28, 2019

Pre-Trial

General Information

Title

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0004951

Initial registration date

October 26, 2019

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

October 28, 2019, 11:19 AM EDT

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

Locations

Country

Colombia

Region

Primary Investigator

Name

Luis Reyes

Affiliation

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name

Angela Fonseca

PI Affiliation

Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status

On going

Start date

2019-10-11

End date

2022-05-15

Keywords

Electoral, Governance, Post-conflict

Additional Keywords

Public Finance

JEL code(s)

Secondary IDs

Abstract

We hypothesize that more transparency about the sources and use of public funds helps voters make better judgements about their elected officials, making them more likely to vote in order to effect political change. We examine the effect of information on voter behavior by randomizing whether we provide a municipality's journalists, community leaders, and the general public with simple and accessible information about local public finance collected by the central government.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Fonseca, Angela and Luis Reyes. 2019. "Do Citizens Respond to Better Information on Local Public Finance? Evidence from a Field Experiment During the 2019 Colombian Municipal Elections." AEA RCT Registry. October 28. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.4951-1.0

Sponsors & Partners

Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

We evaluate a program that disseminates information collected by the central government about public finance in Colombia.

Intervention Start Date

2019-10-11

Intervention End Date

2019-10-27

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

Voter turnout, change in incumbent party (for mayor and city council), blank/null voting.

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

We disseminate, in an easy-to-understand format, publicly available information about public finance to randomly chosen Colombian municipalities.

Experimental Design Details

We disseminate, in an easy-to-understand format, publicly available information about public finance to randomly chosen Colombian municipalities. We send the information to three groups of municipalities. In the first group, we contact local radio stations and send them an easy-to understand document about public finance, as well as a radio clips meant for broadcast. Moreover, we offer our assistance in analyzing regional and national public finance. We also contact community leaders, suggesting that they share the information with their communities. We distribute this information starting the week prior to the Colombian municipal elections of October 27, until the day after the Colombian presidential and congressional elections of 2022. In the second treatment group, we offer the same services to the municipalities, but we only start before the presidential and congressional elections of 2022, not before the regional elections of 2019. In the third treatment group, we post Facebook ads with the same information, for both the 2019 and the 2022 elections. We hypothesize that information about public finance in the context of the elections can have an impact on voting behavior. We record radio station broadcasts in the first treatment group and a subset of the control group to analyze the impact of the information on public discourse.

Randomization Method

We randomly chose municipalities using random numbers generated by Stata from a random seed obtained from random.org. We chose the municipalities from a list of all Colombian municipalities that excluded six major capital cities - Bogotá, Barranquilla, Cúcuta, Medellín, Cali, and Bucaramanga, as well as municipalities that as of 2017 (the latest available information) did not have their own radio stations.

Randomization Unit

We randomized at the municipality level. Outcomes are observed at the polling station level.

Was the treatment clustered?

Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

There is a total of 746 clusters (municipalities)

Sample size: planned number of observations

11826 polling stations.

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

104 clusters outreach during municipal and national elections; 104 clusters outreach during national elections only; 208 clusters information through Facebook ads.

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

For alpha=0.05 and power=0.8: For an effect size of .2 standard deviations, a balanced experiment requires 199 clusters/municipalities. If the effect size is allowed to be 0.31 standard deviations (to be able to detect effects greater than 5 percentage points in turnout), each treatment group requires 85 municipalities. For alpha=0.1 and power=0.8: Assuming rho=.29, for an effect size of .2 standard deviations, a balanced experiment requires 158 clusters/municipalities. If the effect size is allowed to be 0.31 standard deviations (to be able to detect effects greater than 5 percentage points in turnout), each treatment group requires 67 municipalities.

Supporting Documents and Materials

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