TY - JOUR
T1 - When Does Information Influence Voters? The Joint Importance of Salience and Coordination
AU - Adida, Claire
AU - Gottlieb, Jessica
AU - Kramon, Eric
AU - McClendon, Gwyneth
N1 - Funding Information:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3493-5539 Adida Claire 1 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1204-8496 Gottlieb Jessica 2 Kramon Eric 3 McClendon Gwyneth 4 1 University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, USA 2 Texas A&M University, College Station, USA 3 George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA 4 New York University, New York City, USA Claire Adida, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. Email: [email protected] 10 2019 0010414019879945 © The Author(s) 2019 2019 SAGE Publications Scholars argue that access to information about a politician’s programmatic performance helps voters reward good performers and punish poor ones. But in places where resources are made conditional on collective electoral behavior, voters may not want to defect to vote for a strong legislative performer if they do not believe that others will. We argue that two conditions must hold for information about politician performance to affect voter behavior: Voters must care about the information and believe that others in their constituency care as well. In a field experiment around legislative elections in Benin, voters rewarded good programmatic performance only when information was both made relevant to voters and widely disseminated within the electoral district. Otherwise, access to positive legislative performance information actually lowered vote share for the incumbent’s party. These results demonstrate the joint importance of Salience and voter coordination in shaping information’s impact in clientelistic democracies. African politics elections public opinion voting behavior experimental research political economy EGAP Metaketa Regranting Initiative Round 1 edited-state corrected-proof The authors thank Metaketa leadership for support on the research design, Amanda Pinkston for sharing 2011 legislative election data, and Ana Quiroz for excellent research assistance. The authors further thank Adam Chabi Bouko for his leadership in executing the field experiment, along with the entire CEPRODE team. The authors are also grateful to participants at ASA 2015, the Princeton University Research in Experimental Social Science Workshop, the UToronto Comparative Politics Speaker Series, Columbia University’s Seminar for the Study of Development Strategies, Washington University in St. Louis’ Comparative Politics Annual Conference, the DIME seminar at the World Bank, and MIT’s Political Behavior of Development conference for helpful comments. Authors’ Note This research was conducted in collaboration with the Centre de Promotion de la Démocratie et du Développement (CEPRODE) and its Director, Adam Chabi Bouko. Our project received ethics approval from the authors’ home institutions. The authors also obtained permission to conduct the study from the President of the National Assembly of Benin. In each study village, permission to conduct research was obtained from the chief and consent was obtained from each surveyed participant in the study. This study is part of the larger Metaketa initiative to accumulate knowledge about the relationship between information and accountability across country contexts. The registered preanalysis plan for this study can be found at: http://egap.org/registration/735 . Declaration of Conflicting Interests The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by EGAP. ORCID iDs Claire Adida https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3493-5539 Jessica Gottlieb https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1204-8496 Supplemental Material Supplemental material for this article is available online at the CPS website http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0010414019879945 .
Funding Information:
The authors thank Metaketa leadership for support on the research design, Amanda Pinkston for sharing 2011 legislative election data, and Ana Quiroz for excellent research assistance. The authors further thank Adam Chabi Bouko for his leadership in executing the field experiment, along with the entire CEPRODE team. The authors are also grateful to participants at ASA 2015, the Princeton University Research in Experimental Social Science Workshop, the UToronto Comparative Politics Speaker Series, Columbia University?s Seminar for the Study of Development Strategies, Washington University in St. Louis? Comparative Politics Annual Conference, the DIME seminar at the World Bank, and MIT?s Political Behavior of Development conference for helpful comments. The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by EGAP.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2019.
PY - 2020/5/1
Y1 - 2020/5/1
N2 - Scholars argue that access to information about a politician’s programmatic performance helps voters reward good performers and punish poor ones. But in places where resources are made conditional on collective electoral behavior, voters may not want to defect to vote for a strong legislative performer if they do not believe that others will. We argue that two conditions must hold for information about politician performance to affect voter behavior: Voters must care about the information and believe that others in their constituency care as well. In a field experiment around legislative elections in Benin, voters rewarded good programmatic performance only when information was both made relevant to voters and widely disseminated within the electoral district. Otherwise, access to positive legislative performance information actually lowered vote share for the incumbent’s party. These results demonstrate the joint importance of Salience and voter coordination in shaping information’s impact in clientelistic democracies.
AB - Scholars argue that access to information about a politician’s programmatic performance helps voters reward good performers and punish poor ones. But in places where resources are made conditional on collective electoral behavior, voters may not want to defect to vote for a strong legislative performer if they do not believe that others will. We argue that two conditions must hold for information about politician performance to affect voter behavior: Voters must care about the information and believe that others in their constituency care as well. In a field experiment around legislative elections in Benin, voters rewarded good programmatic performance only when information was both made relevant to voters and widely disseminated within the electoral district. Otherwise, access to positive legislative performance information actually lowered vote share for the incumbent’s party. These results demonstrate the joint importance of Salience and voter coordination in shaping information’s impact in clientelistic democracies.
KW - African politics
KW - elections
KW - experimental research
KW - political economy
KW - public opinion
KW - voting behavior
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85074357630&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1177/0010414019879945
DO - 10.1177/0010414019879945
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85074357630
SN - 0010-4140
VL - 53
SP - 851
EP - 891
JO - Comparative Political Studies
JF - Comparative Political Studies
IS - 6
ER -