Deliberation and Public Good Provision: A Behavioral Lab Experiment in Kenya

• In Event: Experimental Work on Citizen Engagement & Participation in the Developing World

Abstract

Citizen participation in decision-making has been widely lauded as a method for improving outcomes in international development. The World Bank alone has invested billions of dollars in the implementation of community-driven development, which emphasizes the participation of beneficiaries in decision-making around development projects, and public participation in decision-making is formally encouraged in Kenya’s national constitution, ratified by popular referendum in 2010. The idea that participation in decision-making processes may change people’s beliefs, preferences and behaviors has a long history in political theory. Deliberative discussion, in particular, is believed to be more transformative than a mere aggregation of individual preferences. One hypothesized effect of deliberative decision-making is that participants are more likely to value outcomes of the decision-making, and thereby more likely to invest in, maintain or comply with those outcomes. Yet despite widespread interest, empirical evidence in support of this effect of participatory decision-making remains weak. I report the results from a laboratory experiment with 570 subjects in Nairobi, directly testing the effect of participation in deliberative group decision-making on contributions to a related public good. This research follows a pre-analysis plan registered with EGAP. Participants are asked to engage in a group effort task to earn compensation toward a public good. Randomly assigned treatments vary according to whether decision-making over the task to be completed occurs through (1) external assignment, (2) a majority vote, or (3) consensus through deliberative discussion. Controlling for the task itself and initial preferences, I evaluate the effects of different decision-making processes on an individual’s willingness to invest in related public goods. The results will provide insights into the effect of different decision-making processes on an individual’s willingness to invest in related public goods, and supplementary exploratory analyses will begin to distinguish between distinct causal mechanisms.

Author

• Tara Grillos, Purdue University