Information Technology and Political Engagement: Mixed Evidence from Uganda

Abstract

Marginalized populations engage in politics at lower rates. Not only are their demands less likely to be addressed, they are also less likely to be articulated in the first place. This study uses a large-scale field experiment-implemented in partnership with the national Democratic Institute and the Parliament of Uganda-to learn about how technological change can effect who gets heard and what gets communicated to politicians. The nationwide field experiment was implemented following a national pilot undertaken under more controlled settings. The controlled experiment provided evidence that ICT can lead to significant "flattening": a greater share of marginalized populations used this SMS-based communication compared to existing political communication channels. Estimated relations from the scaled-up intervention, however, look a lot like politics as usual, where participation rates are low and marginalized populations engage at especially low rates. We examine possible reasons for these differences, and then present the design and analysis of a third "mechanism experiment" that helps parse rival explanations for these divergent patterns. * We thank the National Science Foundation for its generous support, as well as the Nationa Democratic Institute for a fruitful collaboration.

Reducing Exclusionary Attitudes through Interpersonal Conversation: Evidence from Three Field Experiments

“…The contexts in which these experiments took place also suggest optimism for efforts by individuals and organizations to implement the non-judgmental exchange of narratives at scale: None of the seven organizations we worked with had previously implemented such an intervention, nor had the canvassers had any such prior experience. Previous research has found smaller treatment effects of other interventions when they are implemented at larger scale and by new partner organizations (Allcott 2015; Grossman, Humphreys, and Sacramone-Lutz 2019), consistent with the smaller effects we found in this study than in Broockman and Kalla (2016), as shown in Table 1. 14 While future research should continue to test potential boundary conditions on these effects, our findings already suggest optimism for other practitioners seeking to implement our findings.…”

NGOs and the effectiveness of interventions

“…In particular, we demonstrate how solutions from applied research that is tied to the places, populations, and programmes associated with specific NGOs may have very different impacts when implemented in alternative settings (Ravallion 2009). 3 Our study is also related to a growing literature on the role of implementer identity, which finds that NGO-led interventions are generally more effective than comparable efforts by other actors (Bold et al 2016;Cameron and Shah 2017;Grossman et al 2016;Henderson and Lee 2015). Yet such comparisons implicitly assume that there is something inherently different about NGOs that leads to implementation effectiveness.…”

Impact pathways of a participatory local governance initiative in Uganda: a qualitative exploration

“…While the mobile technology and ICT revolution has not gone unnoticed in areas such as microfinance (Suri and Jack 2016) and agricultural extension information provision (Van Campenhout et al 2017), research on the use of these technologies to improve governance is relatively new. One ongoing study at a more aggregate level produced only mixed results up to now (Grossman et al 2016).…”