Better together? Examining the effect of civic education for local officials and citizens in the Philippines (joint work with Lily Tsai)

Principal-agent theories of political accountability point to information asymmetries between citizens and government officials as one of the most important obstacles to achieving better governance. Accordingly, many civic education interventions seek to inform citizens about government officials' performance and duties in the hopes that citizens will reward and sanction officials to incentivize better performance. But in contexts where mechanisms for sanctioning poorly-performing officials are weak, empowering citizens may instead create antagonism that leads officials to retreat and citizens to disengage. Through a field experiment conducted in 224 villages in the northern Philippines, we test whether another approach - training citizens and officials together as a means of promoting constructive engagement - is more effective than training citizens alone. Our findings indicate that training officials jointly with citizens still does not make them more responsive to citizen feedback. On the contrary, officials in the joint training condition were less likely to include citizens in decision-making fora and citizens trained joint with officials were less satisfied with officials’ performance and responsiveness. We suggest that accountability interventions that increase citizens’ monitoring capacity may have unintended consequences in the absence of credible sanctioning mechanisms.

SPEAKER

Nina McMurry is a postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institutions and Political Inequality unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. She studies accountability, representation, and state-society relations, with a focus on the relationship between non-state actors and state institutions and the representation of marginalized groups. Her current book project examines the effects of recognizing Indigenous self-determination rights on identity, voting behavior, and state consolidation, primarily in the Philippines. Other research areas and interests include civic education, colonial legacies, and the politics of state surveillance. Nina’s research has been published in outlets such as the American Political Science Review, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Nature Medicine. Nina received her PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds a BA in Political Science from Stanford University. Starting in the fall 2023 semester, she will join the Vanderbilt University Department of Political Science as an Assistant Professor.

Lily L. Tsai is the Director and Founder of the MIT Governance Lab (MIT GOV/LAB) and the Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as well as the current Chair of the MIT Faculty. Her research focuses on accountability, governance, and political participation in developing contexts, particularly in Asia and Africa.

CHAIR

Dean Dulay is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Singapore Management University. His main areas of specialisation are Political Economy of Development and Historical Political Economy. He has published in Comparative Political Studies, The Journal of Public Economics, and Asian Security.