Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Accountability in Developing Democracies -- Within-Country Evidence from Mali

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

While the new wave of democratization in developing countries is often lauded as an achievement, there is a deficit of knowledge about how well new democracies are working. What distinguishes these new multi-party electoral systems from the autocratic regimes that preceded them is the ability of citizens to hold their representatives to account. Hence, to understand whether and how democracies are succeeding in developing countries, this research seeks to address the following two questions: whether and how accountability is being achieved; and what underlying social or economic conditions might facilitate accountability. These questions will be studied in the context of Mali, a poor African nation recognized for nearly two decades of stable democratic governance. A recent policy of decentralization created 703 democratically elected local governments. This project will compare successes and failures in governance across communities to better understand the mechanisms that generate accountability, and why elected leaders are performing better in some places than others. Preliminary analyses suggest that information plays an important role in fostering local government accountability. When voters have low expectations of their government (as they do in Mali), they fail to sanction elected leaders for making bad decisions. In such a context, a little information can go a long way. Informing voters of their local government's responsibilities and of their fiscal capacity allows voters to form more appropriate expectations. This, the project posits, should generate better accountability. This dissertation project will employ a multi-method approach that is both qualitative and quantitative. First, it will exploit within-country data on the impact of social and political forces on local government performance in Mali to test existing theories of governance. Second, the researcher will conduct qualitative interviews and surveys with voters and politicians to generate new hypotheses about political behavior in Mali. Third, the researcher will conduct a field experiment to test how information affects accountability in developing democracies characterized by voters with low expectations. The intellectual merit of this project lies in its ability to advance our knowledge of how democratic institutions work in contexts that are currently little understood. Much research has been done on democratic practices in developed country settings. Less is known about whether the same institutions work in similar ways and have comparable outcomes in a developing country context. To the extent that Malian society is similar to other developing democracies with strong kin-based networks, high information asymmetries, and low expectations of government, findings from this within-country analysis can have important implications for improving democratic performance elsewhere. The results of this project promise new insights into the ways in which citizens behave in poor democracies, a necessary step to improving governance. It will generate both theoretical and practical knowledge about how democracy works in poor countries. The research will be able to answer questions such as how informal kinship networks affect governance, how Malians decide for whom to vote, and how information improves accountability. The interdisciplinary nature of the project not only allows the questions to be addressed more successfully, but will also make the answers accessible to a wider audience. That audience includes developing country governments such as Mali's and development organizations such as the World Bank and USAID that spend billions of dollars each year in the interest of promoting democracy around the world.