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Field
Abstract
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Before
When the political class is widely perceived to be corrupt, can citizens distinguish between the politicians who are prudent managers of public funds from the politicians who mismanage funds? This approach takes a different approach to most anti-corruption information campaigns, in positing that citizens may assume that their leaders are stealing public funds, even when they are not. A field experiment during the 2013 Kenyan national elections identifies if information about politician management of public funds can improve support for prudent fiscal managers, as well as reducing support for poorly performing ones. Moreover, it compares citizen perceptions of politician performance to audit data on politician performance in managing public funds, and examines the extent to which individuals can recall political and non-political information during elections.
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After
The chapter combines novel survey, audit, and experimental data to illustrate how voter pessimism can undermine electoral accountability. It reconciles mixed findings in the literature by highlighting two conditions under which anti-corruption information campaigns are likely to improve electoral accountability: (1) voters have sufficient information about politician performance and (2) voters are not too pessimistic about the quality of the political class. The treatment provided factual information from audits of incumbent performance on Constituency Development Fund spending. Before treatment, public opinion data from Afrobarometer and Ipsos Synovate indicate that Kenyan voters believe that almost all politicians are corrupt. The treatment has no impact on voter beliefs about their own incumbent, but improves perceptions of the political class for voters who find out that their incumbent is clean. The findings suggest that although voter judgments about incumbent performance tend to be fixed, voter pessimism towards the political class does update with factual information.
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