Publication: Participatory Accountability and Collective Action : Experimental Evidence from Albania
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Published
2014-02-06
ISSN
0014-2921
Date
2014-05-07
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Abstract
It has been argued that accountability is a public good that only citizens can provide. Governments can put institutions in place that allow citizens to hold public servants to account, but citizens must participate in those institutions if accountability is to be achieved. Thus, citizens face a social dilemma — participate in holding public servants to account at a cost in terms of time and effort or free ride, i.e. do not participate, while benefiting from the efforts of those who do. If this characterization of accountability is valid, we would expect more cooperatively inclined citizens to participate in accountability institutions, while the less cooperatively inclined do not. We test the validity of this characterization by investigating the correlation between individual behavior in a simple public goods game and their participation in local and national accountability institutions in Albania. We involve a nationally representative sample of 1800 adults with children in primary school. We find significant correlations between cooperativeness and participation in school accountability institutions and national elections, both at the individual level and the district level. These correlations are robust to the introduction of many controls in the analysis and, in the case of national elections, to the use of official election turn-out statistics in place of self-reported turn-out.
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Publication Participatory Accountability and Collective Action : Evidence from Field Experiments in Albanian Schools(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-04)There is general agreement that the existence of participatory institutions is a necessary condition for accountability, especially where top-down institutions are malfunctioning or missing. In education, the evidence on the effectiveness of participatory accountability is mixed. This paper argues that participation is a social dilemma and therefore depends, at least partly, on individuals' propensity to cooperate with others for the common good. This being the case, the mixed evidence could be owing to society-level heterogeneities in individuals' willingness and ability to overcome collective action problems. 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The findings confirm that, both across individuals within communities and across communities, the decision to hold teachers and school directors accountable directly through participation at the school level, and indirectly through political participation correlates with cooperativeness in a simple public goods game.Publication Education Outcomes, School Governance and Parents' Demand for Accountability : Evidence from Albania(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-04)The extent to which teachers and school directors are held to account may play a central role in determining education outcomes, particularly in developing and transition countries where institutional deficiencies can distort incentives. This paper investigates the relationship between an expanded set of school inputs, including proxies for the functionality of "top-down" and "bottom-up" accountability systems, and education outputs in Albanian primary schools. 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It argues on this basis that the most important domain for improving accountability is through the political relations between citizens, civil society, and state leadership. The evidence broadly suggests that when higher-level political leadership provides sufficient or appropriate powers for citizen participation in holding within-state agencies or frontline providers accountable, there is frequently positive impact on outcomes. However, the big question remaining for such types of interventions is how to improve the incentives of higher-level leadership to pursue appropriate policy design and implementation. The paper argues that there is substantial scope for greater efforts in this domain, including through the support of external aid agencies. 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The authors present the results of a field experiment, designed to produce an empirical measure of risk aversion, and time preferences of selected groups in Chile, which in 1981 pioneered social security reform with a transition to individual retirement accounts. The experiment was designed primarily to establish whether the time, and risk preferences of the self-employed differ significantly from those of wage, and salaried workers. They find no significant differences in mean risk, and time preferences between the self-employed, and employees, or between the contributing, and non-contributing employees. But they find significant differences in these preferences between the contributing, and non-contributing self-employed. Among the self-employed, those who are more patient choose to contribute to the pension system. However, the contributing self-employed are significantly more tolerant of risk than the non-contributing self-employed, a finding that conflicts with the assumption that the formal pension system is the only source of insurance against poverty in old age. The Chilean pension system may be viewed with some trepidation by its pool of potential clients. Since risk aversion declines with education, the participation of the economically active who are free to choose, could be enhanced by a campaign carefully designed to raise awareness, allay fears, and inform people of the benefits of saving for retirement in the formal pension system.Publication The Nexus between Gender, Collective Action for Public Goods, and Agriculture : Evidence from Malawi(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-03)Across the developing world, public goods exert significant impacts on the local rural economy in general and agricultural productivity and welfare outcomes in particular. Economic and social-cultural heterogeneity have, however, long been documented as detrimental to collective capacity to provide public goods. In particular, women are often under-represented in local leadership and decision-making processes, as are young adults and minority ethnic groups. While democratic principles dictate that broad civic engagement by women and other groups could improve the efficiency and effectiveness of local governance and increase public goods provision, the empirical evidence on these hypotheses is scant. This paper develops a theoretical model highlighting the complexity of constructing a "fair" schedule of individual contributions, given heterogeneity in costs and benefits that accrue to people depending, for instance, on their gender, age, ethnicity, and education. The model demonstrates that representative leadership and broad participation in community organizations can mitigate the negative impacts of heterogeneity on collective capacity to provide public goods. Nationally-representative household survey data from Malawi, combined with geospatial and administrative information, are used to test this hypothesis and estimate the relationship between collective capacity for public goods provision and community median estimates of maize yields and household consumption expenditures per capita. The analysis shows that similarities between the leadership and the general population, in terms of gender and age, and active participation by women and young adults in community groups alleviate the negative effects of heterogeneity and increase collective capacity, which in turn improves agricultural productivity and welfare.
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