Collaborative Research: Collective decision making & local public good provision: Experimental Evidence

公民和利益攸关方参与决策已被广泛提倡，作为在国内治理和国际发展方面取得改善和可持续成果的手段。例如，世界银行在社区主导型发展项目上投入了数十亿美元，强调受益者参与发展项目的决策。直接民主，特别是参与式预算形式的直接民主，已遍及全球。促进参与的一个动机是，通过参与与当地公共利益有关的决策，参与者将感到更有必要为维护该利益而投资。反过来，公共产品如果保养得好，使用寿命长，就会给社会带来更多的好处。政治理论家也提出了这样一个问题：参与是否能“造就更好的公民”？对政策制定者来说，一个更重要的问题是：哪种参与能够做到这一点？本研究评估了参与机制对发展中国家某县行为结果的影响。这项研究的结果为该国、该大陆其他国家和世界各地正在进行的参与性机构设计提供了资料；目前有超过1.1万个参与式预算编制项目，这些项目的扩展速度远远超过了证据所能证明的速度。因此，这项研究的结果对政府和参与式机构的倡导者在设计、采用和扩大公众参与追求发展的过程中立即有用。该研究采用随机对照试验（RCT）来评估共同参与过程对个人投资当地公共产品（如水井、诊所或太阳能电池阵列）意愿的影响。这项随机对照试验在90个社区进行，研究人员向所有村庄提供当地公共产品。为每个社区选择一种商品的方法是随机分配的，包括：(a)通过协商收集偏好，(b)通过公开会议投票收集偏好，或(c)通过审议讨论建立共识。课题组随机招募村民参加这些会议，调查他们在会议前后对参与和发展项目的态度和行为。研究人员一年后再来测量公共产品的状态和参与者的最新态度和行为。然后，研究人员利用会议规则随机分配和参与者随机选择的策略，跨空间和时间比较村庄，以确定决策过程对参与者选择和维护公共产品的影响。因此，本研究为参与性发展机构的未来方案设计和投资提供了严谨的证据。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Participation in decision making by citizens and stakeholders has been widely promoted as a means to improved and sustainable outcomes in both domestic governance and international development. For example, the World Bank has invested billions of dollars in community-driven development, which emphasizes the participation of beneficiaries in decision making around development projects. Direct democracy, especially in the form of participatory budgeting, has spread across the globe. One motivation for promoting participation is the idea that by participating in decision making related to a local public good, participants will feel more compelled to invest in the maintenance of that good. In turn, public goods will provide more benefit to the community if they are well-maintained and last longer. Political theorists, too, have posed the question: does participation “make better citizens?” An even more important question for policy makers is: which kinds of participation manage to do so? This research evaluates the influence of participatory mechanisms on behavioral outcomes in one county in a developing country. The results of the study inform the ongoing design of participatory institutions in that country, other countries on that continent, and around the world; there are more than 11,000 participatory budgeting programs and programs are expanding far more quickly than evidence can keep pace. The results of this study thus are immediately useful to governments and advocates of participatory institutions as they design, adopt, and expand public participation in pursuit of development.The research uses a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the impact of common participatory processes on individual willingness to invest in local public goods, such as a well, a health clinic, or solar array. The RCT takes place in 90 communities, where the researchers provide all villages with a local public good. The method of selecting a good for each community is randomly assigned to involve either: (a) preference aggregation through consultation, (b) preference aggregation through voting at a public meeting, or (c) consensus-building through deliberative discussion.The research team randomly recruits villagers to attend these meetings and surveys them on their attitudes and behaviors surrounding participation and development projects before and after the meetings. The researchers return 1 year later to measure the state of the public good and the participants’ updated attitudes and behaviors. The researchers then leverage their strategy of random assignment of meeting rules and random selection of participants to compare villages across space and over time to identify the effects of the decision-making process on participants’ selection and maintenance of the public good. This study thus provides rigorous evidence to inform future program design and investment in participatory institutions for development.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.