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This article introduces a new explanation for why citizens may fail to vote based on government performance. We argue that when politicians have limited capacity to control bureaucrats, citizens will not know whether government performance is a good signal of the incumbent's quality. We develop a selection model of elections in which policy is jointly determined by a politician and a bureaucrat. When politicians have incomplete power over policy, elections perform worse at separating good and bad types of incumbents. We test the theory's predictions using survey experiments conducted with nearly 9,000 citizens and local officials in Uganda. We find that citizens and officials allocate more responsibility to politicians when they are perceived as having more power relative to bureaucrats. The allocation of responsibility has electoral consequences: When respondents believe that bureaucrats are responsible for performance, they are less likely to expect that government performance will affect incumbent vote share.

Foreign aid may act much like oil money in reducing voters’ willingness to demand accountability from their government, enabling corruption, clientelism, and repression. This is an important causal mechanism connecting public budgets to quality of governance. Yet other scholarship counters that aid is more beneficial than oil, either indirectly because of donor oversight or directly because aid is more likely to produce citizen pressures on governments. Empirical work on the topic employs observational data at the national, macro level, and has left the question unresolved. At the micro level, in some countries citizens have experience with aid revenues and oil funds, thus possessing information about the political implications of these different revenue sources. This article provides the first experimental tests of the direct mechanism linking aid and oil revenues to demands from citizens for greater political accountability. We report the effects of randomly assigned treatments identifying aid funds compared to oil money on behavior of citizens in six survey and lab experiments in Ghana and Uganda. We find no differences in accountability pressures when subjects are randomly assigned to aid or oil conditions in any experiment, including a survey-based field experiment in Uganda that employed very strong information treatments on the extent of aid and oil funds. Though little evidence suggests that either windfall necessarily reduces accountability demands from baseline in a meaningful way, citizens’ actions for aid money were statistically indistinguishable from oil revenues across all experiments. Aid may well have governance effects through the indirect route of donor oversight, but the results presented here suggest no evidence that aid, compared to oil, directly induces greater accountability demands among citizens.

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Chapter 4 develops a theory of how and why governments will choose to tax when doing so increases the demands they face from citizens. It develops a formal model of taxation in which a rent-seeking government decides between not taxing, taxing coercively, and seeking a tax bargain. The first version of the model is an autocracy where citizens cannot remove the leader. The chapter then introduces elections to show how the model changes when citizens can vote a leader out of office. While taxation can lead to higher accountability, there are conditions under which governments prefer to extract rents even at the cost of losing office. Critically, while democracy can make taxation more sustainable under certain conditions, it can also have a negative effect on both coercive taxation and tax bargaining, leading to lower taxation overall.