Policing politicians: Citizen empowerment and political accountability in Uganda -Preliminary analysis (IGC Working Paper)

We use a simple model of political accountability to derive a set of hypotheses linking access to information to political behavior and provide results from a multi-level eld experiment designed to test these hypotheses in the context of parliamentary behavior in Uganda. Between 2006 and 2011, working with a Ugandan partner, we developed a scorecard with detailed information on the performance of Ugandan Members of Parliament (MPs), informed a randomly selected sample of MPs that the information would be disseminated in their constituencies, and provided random samples of voters with information about their MP’s performance through a variety of channels. Evidence from survey experiments indicates that Ugandan voters are strongly receptive to new information about MP performance. Evidence from the dissemination campaigns, however, provides no evidence that MPs respond to a higher level of transparency with improved performance or that their prospects for reelection are threatened by it. A plausible explanation is that while the type of transparency we consider might matter under controlled conditions, in a eld settings the scope for political interference is large enough

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