Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives’ performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.

Motivation: Budget support is the form of aid most commonly associated with recipient-country ownership. However, a number of scholars and practitioners have criticized the approach as masking new forms of conditionality. Was budget support simply a guise for increasing donor influence in recipient countries? How can we explain the rapid shift towards budget support, as well as the rapid decline in its popularity after only a few years? Purpose: We use a bargaining framework to explain the rise and fall of budget support. Contrary to explanations that suggest that budget support was a normative decision by donors designed to increase aid effectiveness by fostering ownership, a bargaining framework emphasizes that aid policy is the result of sustained negotiations between donors and recipients. These negotiations, however, are constrained by donors' inability to deliver aid as promised. Approach: We use a Nash bargaining framework to formalize the predictions of a bargaining model. From the model, two testable predictions emerge: (1) in exchange for more credible commitments, recipient governments are willing to selectively offer donor agencies greater access to and influence over domestic policy decision-making; and (2) in exchange for such influence, donor agencies are willing to exert less pressure on recipients to be politically inclusive. We then test the implications of the model using case-study evidence from Rwanda and Tanzania. Findings: The empirical data, based on over 80 interviews with practitioners over several periods of research in both countries, provide substantial evidence in support of the model's core assumptions and predictions. Contrary to claims that budget support increased recipient-country ownership, interviews (identified as personal communications) suggest that, in exchange for more credible commitments, recipient governments were willing to grant donors greater access and influence. In return, donor agencies reduced demands on the recipient government regarding political inclusivity, tacitly accepting arrangements that centralized decision-making and excluded civil society. When donor agencies could no longer provide budget support as promised, these negotiated arrangements broke down. Policy Implications: The findings challenge a common narrative that donors embraced budget support because of a normative commitment to ownership. They also demonstrate the value of a bargaining framework.

When public goods are co-produced by citizens and public authorities, problems of free riding and problems of provider accountability frequently coincide. How are voluntary contributions to a public good sustained when they are vulnerable to rent extraction by a third party? In a laboratory experiment, I test whether contributions in a public goods dilemma can be decentrally enforced through costly, mutual sanctioning capacity, even if the contributions can be misappropriated by a third party. I find that costly sanctioning capacity among the beneficiaries of a public good can substantially reduce free riding, without increasing the rate at which contributions are misappropriated by the provider. However, this effect can be undermined if mutual sanctioning capacity exists between the third-party provider and the beneficiaries. Contrary to existing predictions, social sanctioning relationships which both embed the provider and encompass the beneficiaries of a public good are not associated with greater, but partly with lower public goods provision than sanctioning relationships which are only embedding or encompassing.

No abstract