Validated Participation, Efficacy, and Citizenship: Evidence from a Phase I RCT

• In Event: Experiments on Voter Participation and Partisanship in Southern and East Africa

Abstract

Can the path to active citizenship be expedited for parents in rural Africa? Can this have tangible effects on schooling inputs and outputs? This paper will report on quantitative and qualitative analyses of a “phase I” randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a novel intervention that aims to boost parental efficacy with respect to their involvement in their children’s education. The motivation for the study is the observation that particularly in poor countries, poor people often lack self-efficacy, the perception that they can be influential agents of change. Prior scholarship demonstrated that merely informing parents about the quality of their children's education and their rights to take action has, at best, only mixed effects on parental efforts. We hypothesize that it may be possible to boost efficacy and, in turn, active citizenship through a short-term, meeting-based intervention, delivered to parents at school. The intervention affords parents a unique opportunity to discuss evidence, share inferences and arguments, make decisions, and to have those activities validated by an authority figure. The study, implemented with a partner NGO, Twaweza, was carried out between August 2016 – February 2017 in Tanzania. We will report findings, discuss implications and plans for scaled-up research. We also discuss the unique "phase I" approach to experimental research in political science, highlighting opportunities and challenges encountered.

Authors

• Evan S. Lieberman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Yang-Yang Zhou, University of British Columbia