Keynote address by Abhijit V. Banerjee on Information, voting and the quality of governance at the SITE Corruption Conference, 31 August 2015. Find more at: https://www.hhs.se/site

1. Information, voting and the quality of governance
AbhijitV. Banerjee

2. THE ROLE OF INFORMATION
A lot of how we think about decentralized economic and political
systems is posited on assumptions an informed and vigilant
citizenry
Voters need to make informed choices
Parents/patients need to complain about the right problems in
schools/hospitals
Citizens need to search out corruption in the provision of
public goods and report it
Communities need to assign benefits to the right people.

3. UNFORTUNATELY
Neither being informed nor being engaged enough to use it are
automatic
At least in a developing country context
People do not and often cannot read newspapers/notice boards
etc.
People are busy, stressed
Information is multi-dimensional: you have to know what is worth
knowing
Information has to be processed

4. THISTALK
I want to highlight
what we know about the use of information to get better
social outcomes
And equally importantly, some puzzles about what seems to
be coming out of that body of evidence

5. AN EXPERIMENT ON INFORMATION
PROVISION
Rema already talked about it this morning but couple points
worth making
Raskin is 17 year old program in Indonesia
It is a rice subsidy program for the poor:
Each eligible family is entitled to 15 Kgs of rice per month
At 1600 rupiahs per kilo
The price has been unchanged since 2007
Yet in baseline:
Only 30% of eligible households know their status
Beneficiaries believe that the co-pay is 25% higher than it is

6. PERHAPS FORTHIS REASON,WE
FIND..
Mistargeting: 84 percent of eligible bought some rice; 67 percent
of ineligible did so as well
Leakages: comparing surveys to administrative data suggests
about 23% of rice disappears
Markups: mean co-payment in our data is Rp. 2,276 per kg,
instead of Rp. 1,600
Eligible households buy 5.3 kg/month at Rp. 2,276: 32 percent of
value of intended subsidy

7. COULD IT BE JUST AN INFORMATION
PROBLEM?
It may be in the interest of the village leadership to keep the
information vague
Compounded by the fact there are some real distribution costs
not covered by the program (small though)
Nevertheless one would imagine beneficiaries would have the
incentive to find out and would have had ample chances to do
so..
One guess would be that this is just a reflection of power:“the
village head’s word is the law”

8. RESULTS FROM A FIELD EXPERIMENT
Field experiment in 572 villages, in
conjunction with the Indonesian
government
Will an increase in information to
eligible households increase their
subsidy received?
In 378 randomly chosen villages, eligible
households received a “Raskin id card”
Conveys information on eligibility and
entitled quantity

9. THE IMPACT
Subsidy increases by about ~26% for eligible
No overall reduction in quantity for ineligible
No evidence that the poorer ineligibles were hurt
Rice given out increases by 17%; 36% reduction in rice leakage
Bottom ten treatment only helped the bottom ten.

10. EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE ONTHE
SOURCE OFTHE IMPACT
Information seems to matter:
Printing the price of rice on the card doubles the subsidy
But so does the possession of a card.
When cards are only sent to the bottom 10% of the village,
they are the only ones who benefit
And the gain is no larger than where everyone gets a card
Suggests an important role for being able to demonstrate
eligibility/entitlement

11. CONSISTENT WITH
The fact that making information public had a very large impact
In this treatment the lists of the eligible and the terms of the
program were publicly announced
As against a list that the leader was supposed to post on his office
but often failed to do so
Doubled the increase in the subsidy
Too big to be the impact of the increase in individual knowledge
Why?
Coordination or
Higher order knowledge

12. A POTENTIAL CONNECTION
WITH
A quasi-experiment (Reinikka-Svensson) in Uganda where initially
the median school was getting 0% of central government grants
coming to it
Publishing that amount sent raises the amount to over 80%.
Schools probably did know that something like this was happening
But it was vague/conjectural
The intervention introduced higher order knowledge
Why does that matter?
People seem to have very high costs of publicly acting on vague
information
Why?

13. INFORMATION AND
COORDINATION
The previous examples were ones where acting alone was
possible
Does not make sense, for example, with schools, hospitals
Its hard to be credible when you complain about your own
child not doing well
An example of information effects on education

14. INFORMATION WITHOUT COORDINATION
CAN BE USELESS: RESULTS FROM AN RCT
Sarva Shiksha Aviyan (SSA) was the previous NDA governments
flagship education program in India
Created village education committees (VECs) to monitor state
of education in the village and intervene where necessary
On paper substantial powers, including the power to complain against
teachers and to request an additional teacher where needed
Five years after SSA was launched our survey in UP foundVECs
existed in every village
92% of the villagers do not know about them
A vast majority ofVEC members did not know their rights under SSA
25% ofVEC members did not know they wereVEC members

15. INTERVENTION
To informVEC members of their rights and responsibilities
Both general
And specific (this is the person to complain)
Informing villagers of the (dismal) state of education in these
villages to galvanize them
Training in the tools to test their children

16. RESULT
Villagers andVEC members were more informed
Had a precise zero effect on all measures of collective action and
test scores
Not because villagers did not react to the information
Volunteers started teaching classes and test scores went up
dramatically for those kids who attended those classes
Private rather than collective action

17. WHY?
Cost of acting together in a setting where there is uncertainty
about exactly whose fault it is, whether everyone else will step
up to the plate (and some risk of retaliation)?
Some experimental evidence from laboratory games of excess reaction to
small increases in costs in coordination games
One tentative piece of evidence
Very similar intervention in Uganda in the healthcare sector (Bjorkman-
Svensson)
Had massive positive effects
Main difference, the information campaign was carried out by a CBO that
also undertook to coordinate the reaction to the information

18. VOTING EXPERIMENTS
Is one place where individual action can have a big impact
without physical coordination
Information seems to have large effects
Farraz-Finan study audits of mayors in Brazil
Find that mayors whose audits were (randomly) chosen to be
published before the election get more votes if they are found
uncorrupt and massively less votes if they are found corrupt
Banerjee-Kumar-Pande find that even much softer information
has a substantial effect on voting
In Delhi distributing newspapers with report cards on legislator
performance reduces the vote share of low performing candidates
substantially

19. BUT DO PEOPLE USE ALLTHE
INFORMATIONTHEY HAVE?
A field experiment in Eastern Rajasthan
Villagers were shown a street play that reminded them that the
village panchayat head had important economic responsibilities
Especially with the new employment guarantee scheme
Just before the 2010 panchayat election
First-past the post elections, every five years
Anyone can self-nominate and run

20. THE CAMPAIGN
Consisted of a street-play
And distribution of calendars, some village meetings
No village specific information was given out
472 street-plays covering 119 Gram Panchayats chosen at
random out of the 382 in 3 districts.
130,00 calendars distributed

22. IMPACTS:ANTI-INCUMBENCY

23. IMPACTS: STRATEGIC RESPONSE

24. IMPACTS:ACCOUNTABILITY

25. IMPACTS:ACCOUNTABILITY

26. THEREFORE
Impact of the intervention was to reduce re-running among low
performing incumbents.
But villagers were not told who was low-performing
In other words, the villagers knew who were the bad incumbents
but till the play reminded that they should care, this information
was not being used…
Why?
Coordination (Myerson)?
Or cost of information processing. How to know what we know?

27. SOME EVIDENCE ON COST OF PURE
INFORMATION PROCESSING
In Indonesia we had the village community rank everyone in
terms of poverty in order to find the poor
We randomized the order in which the people were ranked
We see a big difference in ranking accuracy between beginning
and end
Perhaps not surprising since ranking 75 households, for example,
would need at least 363 comparisons
Having information is not the same thing as being willing to use
it.

28. A LOT OF HOPE
Is pinned on the effects of information exchange--twitter, text
messages, etc.--on improving governance
We need to think about how to make those interventions really
effective
In particular there is no reason why good governance would
emerge from the “free market in ideas”
The most important things may not get said or heard or
discussed or emphasized or acted upon

29. A RESEARCH AGENDA
Understanding
The role of higher-order knowledge
The role of coordination
The role of knowing what you know
And how to design information campaigns to leverage these