Elite behaviour and political participation: A survey experiment in Tanzania

This study builds and expands on on our earlier work on effects of elite behaviour on citizen political participation. In Kolstad and Wiig (2015) we use country-year panel data to test the effect of self-serving elite behaviour, proxied by portfolio investment in tax havens, on voter turnout. Using fixed effects estimation, we find that for well-functioning democracies there is a positive relation between the use of tax havens and voter turnout, suggesting that self-serving elite behaviour is associated with citizen political mobilization rather than voter apathy. While country fixed effects and further time-variant covariates are included to address endogeneity, it is difficult to fully allay such concerns using observational data. This pre-analysis plan therefore details an experimental study which will be performed to provide further evidence on the causal effect of self-serving elite behaviour on political participation. The experiment randomly assigns individuals to treatments (detailed below) where they are given information on elite behaviour and to a control group, in order to test the effect of giving such information on political behaviour, and to compare effects of giving information in different ways.