Round I:
Information & Accountability
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Overview
Civil society groups emphasize the need for high quality public information on the performance of politicians.
But, does information really make a difference in institutionally weak environments? Does it lead to the rewarding of good performance at the polls or are voting decisions going to be dominated by ethnic ties and clientelistic relations? The Information and Accountability Metaketa seeks to answer these questions by implementing a series of experimental projects that assess the role of information in promoting political accountability in developing countries.
This Metaketa round was launched in Fall 2013 and projects were completed by Fall 2018. This round awarded seven projects—one each in Benin, Brazil, Burkina Faso, India, and Mexico, and two in Uganda—ranging in funding from $175,000 to $300,000. All of the projects, used common informational interventions to assess the impact of providing voters with information about politician performance. In addition, each involved at least one complementary intervention. In this round, many projects compared the effects of providing information to individual voters (first arm) with the effects of providing information collectively to groups of voters (second arm).
Metaketa I Steering Committee:
Thad Dunning (Chair, University of California, Berkeley)
Guy Grossman (University of Pennsylvania)
Macartan Humphreys (Columbia University)
Susan Hyde (University of California, Berkeley)
Craig McIntosh (University of California, San Diego)