Citizens at the Council: A Field Experiment on Citizen Observers in Burkina Faso

• In Event: Linkages of the State: Brokers, Citizen Observers, and Political Connections

Abstract

We examine how the presence of volunteer ‘citizen observers’ at local council meetings affects councilors’ performance and the attitudes of invited citizens. We carried out a large-scale field experiment in Burkina Faso, in which mayors invited randomly selected citizens to volunteer as observers at a local council meeting, to ask questions to local councilors and to share their observations with others in their village. Thousands of citizens took up these invitations, at a turnout rate that was even greater than in the municipal elections.

The paper focuses on (1) how the presence of ordinary citizens at municipal council meetings affects the behavior of municipal decision makers, and (2) how personalized invitations to serve as ‘citizen observers’ affect other forms of voluntary civic participation and citizens’ attitudes towards municipal governance in the long run. Additionally, we compare the citizen observer interventions across two different institutional contexts: locally elected councils and externally appointed local councils. To do this, we took advantage of a unique opportunity: The temporary replacement of elected municipal councils with externally appointed special delegations in the aftermath of Burkina Faso’s 2014 revolution. We conducted the experiment in two phases: On special delegations in 2015-16 and on elected councils in 2016-17. Villages and individuals were randomly assigned to either the first or second phase, or both.

The results of the experiment provide insights into the efficacy of citizen observer approaches, and more generally the impacts of direct interaction between citizens and local decision makers. These insights are of particular importance in countries that have recently undergone decentralization reform and where citizens often feel alienated from local politics. Citizen observers are an innovative, low-cost approach to stimulating citizen engagement in local governance.

Authors

• Malte Lierl, German Institute of Global and Area Studies

• Marcus Holmlund, The World Bank