Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Causal Effects of Leaders' Selection Rules on Participation and Rent-Seeking Behavior in Ugandan Farmer Associations

许多发展中国家的国家退出和（相对）民主化鼓励了自愿、自助组织的扩散，例如小额信贷和农民协会。不幸的是，人们对影响这些群体向其成员提供服务的能力的因素所知甚少。推动这项研究的核心问题是，观察到的志愿协会提供服务的变化是否与管理其领导人选择的规则有关。更具体地说，研究了作为乌干达最大发展计划的一部分而创建的农民协会的表现，研究了选择领导人的不同规则对成员行为（如参与水平）和领导人在职行为（如努力水平和寻租水平）的因果影响。在自助协会中，挑选高管的规则通常围绕两种相反的类型。一个选择规则是直接投票，即所有协会成员直接投票给他们喜欢的候选人。或者，会员选举代表，这些代表被赋予了选择协会高级管理人员的权力。直接投票的支持者认为，这一规定增加了基层的参与和领导人的合法性。也有人认为，直接投票减少了管理层被狭隘的私利所俘获的可能性。相比之下，代表投票的支持者认为，代表更有能力选出有能力和诚实的候选人。他们认为，这是因为普通会员往往目光短浅，低估了执行复杂管理任务所需的资格，而且缺乏候选人的信息。显然，解决这一争论具有重要的理论和实践意义。唉，测试领导人选举规则的相对有效性在经验上是具有挑战性的，因为在几乎所有自然发生的环境中，选举规则都是通过一个复杂的政治过程内生选择的。为了克服选择偏差问题，本文提出的研究依赖于一种独特的情况，即领导者的选择规则是由项目促进者外部分配给新成立的农民协会的。在确定匹配良好的控制组的条件下，这种外部分配允许估计选择规则对成员和领导者行为的因果影响，并最终对向小组成员提供服务的影响。这项研究有几点贡献。首先，通过微观层面的研究和对成员利益紧密一致的小团体内部动态的考察，本研究可以很好地检验一些关于投票规则、选民信息和参与以及领导人责任和响应之间关系的核心政治学假设。此外，由于其强大的识别策略，本研究有助于社会选择、参与式民主、精英捕获、寻租和政治选择等主题的理论构建。第三，本研究在方法论上做出了一些贡献，例如将组织心理学和经济学的管理能力指标整合到政治经济学模型中，以及在集群层面使用IV来衡量个人层面的结果变化。

State withdrawal and the (relative) democratization of many developing countries have encouraged the proliferation of voluntary, self-help organizations, such as micro-finance and farmer associations. Unfortunately, only very little is known about the factors influencing those groups' ability to provide services to their members. The central question motivating this study is whether observed variation in voluntary associations' provision of services is a function of the rules governing their leaders' selection.More specifically, studying the performance of farmer associations that were created as part of Uganda's largest development program, the research examines the causal effect of different rules for selecting leaders on members' behavior (e.g. participation-level) and leaders' behavior in office (e.g. effort-level and rent-seeking). In self-help associations, rules for selecting senior executives are usually clustered around two opposing types. One selection rule is Direct Vote, i.e. all association members vote directly for their preferred candidate. Alternatively, members elect representatives who are imbued with the powers to select the association's senior executives. Proponents of direct vote argue that this rule increases grassroots participation and the legitimacy of leaders. It has also been argued that direct vote reduces the likelihood that the management be captured by narrow self-interests. By contrast, proponents of representatives' vote argue that representatives are better positioned to elect able and honest candidates. This, they argue, is because ordinary members tend to be myopic, under-appreciate the qualifications needed to perform complex managerial tasks, and lack information on candidates.Obviously, resolving this debate has important theoretical and practical implications. Alas, testing the relative effectiveness of leaders' selection rules is empirically challenging, since in almost all naturally occurring settings, electoral rules are chosen endogenously through a complex political process.To overcome the selection-bias problem, the proposed study relies on a unique situation in which leaders' selection rules were externally assignment to newly-formed farmer associations by project facilitators. Conditional upon identifying well-matched control groups, this external assignment, allows the estimation of the causal effects of selection rules on the behavior of both members and leaders, and ultimately on the provision of services to group members.The study makes several contributions. First, by using micro-level and by examining dynamics within small groups in which members' interests are closely aligned, this study is well positioned to test some core political science hypotheses regarding the relation between voting rules, voters' information and participation and leaders' accountability and responsiveness. In addition, due to its powerful identification strategy, this study contributes to theory-building in topics such as social choice, participatory democracy, elite capture, rent-seeking and political selection. Third, this study makes several methodological contributions, for example the integration of measures of managerial abilities from organizational psychology and economics into political economy models, and the use of IV at the cluster level to measure outcome variations at the individual level.