Policing Politicians: Citizen Empowerment and Political Accountability in Africa

Does greater transparency improve governmental performance and increase political accountability? In this paper, we describe a unique field experiment designed to estimate the impact of increased access to information about what happens in the Ugandan Parliament on three outcome variables of interest (i) how members of parliament (MPs) perform (ii) voter attitudes and behavior and (iii) electoral outcomes. Our strategy involves generating, together with the support of the Ugandan Parliament and the Africa Leadership Institute, an annual scorecard reporting on the performance of MPs. In a random sub-sample of constituencies, the scorecard will be disseminated through extensive constituency-level workshops in which MPs are given the opportunity to defend their records and field questions from voters and opposition candidates. The selection of sites for dissemination will be public information; in particular, they will be known to MPs four years in advance of the next parliamentary elections in 2011. Mechanisms that work through the impact of the information on individual voter attitudes and through effects on politician and party political behavior are distinguished by combining a survey experiment with the randomizes dissemination strategy. In an early assessment of the plausibility of the strategy, we briefed a random set of Ugandan MPs on the scorecard design in March 2007. These briefings produced a 50% increase in the rate of participation in parliamentary debates among these MPs. 1 This paper was prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 2007. We thank our partners in the field at AFLI and Nathan Falck who played a central role in developing the Scorecard and implementing the early intervention described in this paper during the past year.