“I wld like u WMP to extend electricity 2 our village”: On Information Technology and Interest Articulation

Abstract

H ow does access to information communication technology (ICT) affect who gets heard and what gets communicated to politicians? On the one hand, ICT can lower communication costs for poorer constituents; on the other, technological channels may be used disproportionately more by the already well connected. To assess the flattening effects of ICTs, we presented a representative sample of constituents in Uganda with an opportunity to send a text message to their representatives at one of three randomly assigned prices. Critically, and contrary to concerns that technological innovations benefit the privileged, we find evidence that ICT can lead to significant flattening: a greater share of marginalized populations use this channel compared to existing political communication channels. Price plays a more complex role. Subsidizing the full cost of messaging increases uptake by over 40%. Surprisingly however, subsidy-induced increases in uptake do not yield further flattening since free channels are not used at higher rates by more marginalized constituents.T he quality of democratic institutions as a tool of political representation depends on interest articulation: the opportunity and willingness of voters to communicate their needs and preferences to their representatives in government. What politicians think, how they vote, and what they prioritize depends in part on what they hear from constituents. But in many low-income countries, voters often have limited channels of communication with their representatives. Communication is often unidirectional and clustered around election periods. Moreover, there can be inequality in who can access politicians: men are often more likely to have access than women, wealthier constituents are more likely to have access than poor constituents and so on.We examine how the availability and cost of a new system of communication with politicians-one which is based on innovations in information communication technologies (ICTs)-affects who gets to be heard and what gets communicated. Generally assessing the efWe thank Heather Kashner and Simon Osborn at NDI for their support of this project, and Nicolas de Torrente, Ivan Tibemanya, Robert Sentamu, and Doug Parkerson for their support on the survey. We thank Joseph Kaizzi for his outstanding assistance in customizing the ICT platform to serve our needs. We thank the Democratic Governance Facility, the International Growth Centre, and Innovations in Poverty Action for support for data collection and the Trudeau Foundation for support during the analysis phase. We thank Don fects of technological innovations on political communication is rendered difficult because the existence and costs of new ICT platforms are likely to be correlated with features of a political system that may independently determine political participation. Though past research has demonstrated a positive correlation between an individual's access to ICTs and levels of political engagement (Boulianne 2009), the causal arrow has been left undetermined. To overcome th...

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