When Does Information Increase Electoral Accountability? Lessons from a Field Experiment in Mexico (original) (raw)

2019, Information, Accountability, and Cumulative Learning

In this chapter we report the results of a randomized intervention conducted during the 2015 Mexican elections. We teamed up with a local, nonpartisan, and transparency-focused nongovernmental organization (NGO) – Borde Político1 – and conducted a large-scale informational campaign providing citizens with information from official audits revealing the way in which their municipal governments had spent funds intended for infrastructure projects benefiting impoverished localities. While official information on audits of government expenditures is publicly available in Mexico, citizens rarely have access to this information and when they do, the information is often not provided in a way that enables them to evaluate the performance of their politicians. The material presented in this chapter closely follows Arias et al. (n.d.), where we originally reported our research design and the main results for a larger sample. However, in order to facilitate a comparison between our study and t...

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