Accountability and Demand-Making in the Global South

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Scholars and policy innovators from divergent fields have converged in recent decades on the notion that increasing citizen involvement in politics will improve public service provision, prevent democratic backsliding, reduce the scope of government malfeasance, resulting in longer term political and economic development. Empirical work has returned mixed results, however, with numerous attempts to invite, incentivize and stimulate citizen engagement finding that citizens either participate below expected levels, fail to punish/reward performance as expected, or use participatory opportunities to engage in quid quo pro transactions for targeted goods rather than demand improvements for their locality as a whole (e.g. de Kadt and Lieberman Raffler et al. 2019; Olken 2007; Dunning 2019). Taken together, this research produces the puzzling finding that citizens seemingly do not always engage in ways that serve their own longer-term interests even when given the information and institutional tools to do so.

The papers in this panel explore these puzzles from various perspectives in an effort to understand what conditions may induce but also deter citizens from engaging in participatory or accountability initiatives, and what aims and ends they seek to advance when they do engage. The papers advance the state of the art by expanding the scope of analysis beyond the design of the specific participatory initiatives themselves to include characteristics of the larger political, policy and institutional environment. Moreover, several of the papers examine the choices and actions of associations and associational leaders rather than citizens more difusely. Civil society associations are in many cases created and operated to further the interests of their members or the locality, and the threshold for leaders’ political engagement is thus presumably lower. More importantly, the decisions of associational leaders on whether and how to engage and what to demand of government, will likely have a larger impact on political and economic developments than the engagement patterns of individual citizens. Taken together the papers will contribute to our understanding of the conditions – institutional, political or organizational – that may enhance, or conversely undermine, the potential of participatory initiatives.


De Kadt, Daniel, and Evan S. Lieberman. "Nuanced accountability: Voter responses to service delivery in southern Africa." British Journal of Political Science 50.1 (2020): 185-215.
Dunning, Thad, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, Susan D.Hyde, Craig McIntosh, and Gareth Nellis. (eds.) 2019. Information, Accountability, and Cumulative Learning: Lessons from Metaketa I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Olken, B. 2007. “Monitoring Corruption: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia.” Journal of Political Economy. 115(2): 200-249.
Raffler, Pia, Daniel N. Posner, and Doug Parkerson. 2018. “The Weakness of Bottom-up Accountability: Experimental Evidence from the Ugandan Health Sector.” Unpublished manuscript.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• Determinants of Civil Society Demand-Making: Experimental Evidence from Peru - Agnes Cornell, University of Gothenburg; Marcia Grimes, University of Gothenburg; Paula Munoz-Chirinos, Universidad del Pacífico

• Industrial Policy in the Mexican Spirits Industry - Brian Palmer-Rubin, University of Southern California

• Information, Civil Society and Corruption in Public Procurement - Diego José Romero, Utah State University; Erik M. Wibbels, University of Pennsylvania

• Why Are Some Villages Better Served? Top-Down and Bottom-Up Determinants - Aditya Dasgupta, University of California, Merced

Chair

• Virginia Oliveros Tulane University

Discussant

• Jessica Rich Marquette University