Democracy and cooperation in commons management: experimental evidence of representative and direct democracy from community forests in Ethiopia

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The authors use dynamic lab-in-the-field common pool resource experiments to investigate the role of two forms of democracy on the cooperation of forest users in Ethiopia. In this experimental setup, participants can either directly select a rule (direct democracy) or elect a leader who decides on the introduction of rules (representative democracy). These two treatments are compared with the imposition of rules and imposition of leaders. It is found that both endogenous leaders elected by the community members and endogenous rules selected by the direct involvement of the participants are more effective in promoting cooperation among the community members compared to exogenous leadership, exogenous rule imposition and the baseline scenario without any of these modifications. However, no significant difference is found between representative democracy in the election of leadership and direct democracy in the selection of rules. Leadership characteristics and behavior are further analyzed. The results underline the importance of democratic procedures.

If Possible, Incentivize Individuals Not Groups: Evidence from Lab‐in‐the‐Field Experiments on Forest Conservation in Rural Uganda

“…We are not arguing that leadership always leads to better outcomes as it may also lead to corruption and elite capture (e.g., Bardhan & Mookherjee 2000). Nonetheless, as the elected leaders became more cooperative after their election, there was no indication of strong elite capture in our study (e.g., Grossman & Baldassarri 2012;Gatiso & Vollan 2016). Our approach is novel from both methodological and policy perspectives.…”

Communication, observability and cooperation: A field experiment on collective water management in India

“…We also compare contributions of the first appointed leader (in round 11) with the player's first round contribution in baseline. This will provide an indication of whether leadership led to enhanced willingness to cooperate independent of other players' contributions (as in Gatiso and Vollan, 2017). We find only two players increase their contributions after being appointed leaders, whilst three leaders reduce their contributions and one registers no change.…”

“…There are also a few field experiments that have examined the impact of leaders with sanctioning powers on cooperation (e.g. Gatiso and Vollan, 2017;Grossman and Baldassari, 2012). Our study adds to this literature by using the leadership treatment to shed light on the relative influence of reputation concerns versus conformity on publicly observable behaviour.…”

Leadership in agricultural machinery circles: experimental evidence from Tajikistan

“…To understand the mechanisms and dynamics of leader‐follower processes in collective action situations, laboratory economic experiments have extensively investigated decision‐making in groups (see Moxnes and van der Heijden 2003, for one of the first studies). The framing of leadership varies largely across studies, including situations in which leaders can command group members’ contributions (Van Vugt et al 2004; Gatiso and Vollan 2017), suggest (Sahin et al 2015) or reallocate decisions (van der Heijden et al 2009; Hamman et al 2011), and sanction and exclude group insiders or outsiders (Güth et al 2007; Grossman and Baldassarri 2012). Leadership in many group processes is substantially different from these rather authoritarian types.…”