Political Communication and Accountability in Uganda

该奖项符合SEC第五章B组的要求。543.在许多发展中经济体，社会和经济结果不佳的部分原因是政治决策不符合公民的需要和偏好。治理结构和社会福利的弱点反过来又与脆弱的安全结果和经济失败联系在一起，这反过来可能对美国的经济和安全利益产生影响。鉴于这些不利结果，美国提供了大量发展援助，以加强发展中地区的民主和治理干预。我们重点关注乌干达议会和国家民主研究所(NDI)在美国国家民主基金会(NED)的支持下实施的一项干预措施。这项干预旨在通过在国会议员和他们的选民之间开辟一条新的沟通渠道，允许公民通过议会的短信平台向议员发送信息，从而提高问责制。独特的是，干预的结构是随机分配国会议员接受治疗，并随机分配选民面临的沟通成本。这一实验结构为评估公民沟通的政治效果提供了前所未有的机会。智力价值：智力的价值在于有助于我们理解政治沟通渠道结构对政治行为的影响。这项研究有助于就技术在政治参与中的作用展开辩论，评估获取信息的渠道和价格如何影响政客收到的信息中的偏见类型；成本在政客从选民沟通中提取信号的能力中的作用；以及政治沟通的障碍。这项研究利用与国家民主研究所和乌干达议会的独特合作，将强有力的身份识别战略与非凡的数据获取结合在一起，包括对议会成员及其选民的面对面调查，以及政客和选民之间的所有直接沟通。这项研究是为数不多的在国家政治精英层面上操作的实地实验研究之一，推动了使用实验方法来解决精英层面政治的理论动机问题的前沿。此外，这项研究通过在贝叶斯框架内试验使用一种方法，正式将定性测试(来自密集分析)与定量测试(来自广泛分析)相结合，推动了使用混合方法的研究的前沿。广泛影响：这项研究的结果可能会影响乌干达的机构选择，也可能影响到其他地方。至关重要的是，这些结果与乌干达议会委员会有关，该委员会需要决定如何发展这一系统。更广泛地说，尽管人们对这种形式的干预热情很高，但乌干达迄今的经验表明，实际接受率可能很低。这项研究将提供有关有效性的证据，以及对成功障碍的分析，有助于指导美国和其他支持民主的干预措施。这项研究专门设计用来考察非中介和非个人化的信息技术传播渠道是否能够增加边缘人群的机会。虽然许多利益攸关方希望变化将是好的，但这项研究的一个关键动机恰恰是能够评估边缘人群对沟通的偏见和障碍。这项研究加强了美国和国际研究人员以及从业者的能力。这是通过与从业人员的持续互动、与发展中国家研究人员的合作以及哥伦比亚大学研究生参与实验设计和实施来实现的。

This award satisfies Division B, Title V, Sec. 543 of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013 (P.L. 113-6, enacted on March 26, 2013).In many developing economies, poor social and economic outcomes are attributed in part to political decision-making that is unresponsive to the needs and preferences of citizens. Weaknesses of governance structures and social welfare in turn are associated with fragile security outcomes and economic failures that may in turn have implications for US economic and security interests. In light of these adverse outcomes, large amounts of development aid has been provided by the United States to bolster democracy and governance interventions in developing areas. We focus on one such intervention implemented by the Parliament of Uganda and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) with support for the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The intervention seeks to improve accountability by opening a new channel of communication between Members of Parliament (MPs) and their constituents, allowing citizens to send messages to MPs via an SMS platform in parliament. Uniquely the intervention is structured with a random assignment of MPs into treatment and with a random assignment of the cost of communication facing voters. The experimental structure provides an unprecedented opportunity to assess the political effects of citizen communication. Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit lies in contributions to our understanding of the effects of the structure of channels of political communication on political behavior. The study contributes to debates on the role of technology in political participation, assessing how the channels and price of access affects the types of bias in the information politicians receive; the role of cost in the ability of politicians to extract signals from constituent communication; and the impediments to political communication. Taking advantage of a unique collaboration with the National Democratic Institute and the Ugandan Parliament, this study combines a strong identification strategy with extraordinary access to data, including face-to-face surveys with Members of Parliament and a sample of their constituents, and all direct communication between politicians and constituents. The study is one of the few field experimental studies to operate at the level of national political elites, pushing the frontiers on the use of experimental methods to address theoretically motivated questions of elite level politics. In addition, the study pushes the frontiers of research using mixed methods by piloting the use of an approach to formally integrate qualitative tests (from intensive analysis) with quantitative tests (from an extensive analysis) in a Bayesian framework.Broader Impact: The results of this research are likely to affect institutional choice in Uganda and possibly elsewhere. Critically, the results are relevant for the Ugandan Parliamentary Commission which needs to decide how to develop the system. More broadly, while there is much enthusiasm for interventions of this form, the Uganda experience to date suggests that actual take up can be low. This research will provide evidence on effectiveness as well as an analysis of the impediments to success that can help guide US and other democracy supporting interventions. The study is specifically designed to examine whether an unmediated and impersonal IT-based communication channel can increase the access of marginalized populations. While many stakeholders hope changes will be for the good, a key motivation of this study is precisely to be able to assess biases and impediments to communication from marginalized populations. The study strengthens capacity among US and international researchers as well as among practitioners. This is achieved through continuous interactions with practitioners, through collaboration with developing country researchers, and through the involvement of graduate students at Columbia University in experimental design and implementation.