A Policy Research Report on Governance

September 28, 2016

Development Research GroupThe World Bank

Making Politics Work forDevelopment:

Harnessing transparency & citizen engagement

The Problem of Politics and Government Failure: a story

Once upon a time, the city of Kanpur was regarded as the Manchester of the East.

Now it is without electricity and industry (http://www.powerless-film.com/)

The protagonists: citizens

Stealing electricity from the state is the norm

public officials

The reforming public official (head of the state electricity company) is transferred

Frontline service providers are alleged to collude in theft from the state

politicians

Won the election by fighting the reforms

Allegations of criminality and violence

The Problem of Politics

Government failure

Governments fail to provide public goods when leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical evidence or are unable to implement good policies

--Adverse political incentives

--Perverse behavioral norms in the public sector

--Eg. corruption, and lack of accountability, but also beyond accountability—distributive conflict and ideological beliefs that prevent citizens from finding common ground

Political Engagement Transparency

Citizen participation in selecting and sanctioning the leaders who wield power in government, including by entering themselves as contenders for leadership

Political engagement happens in every institutional context, in different ways (not about democracies versus autocracies)

Citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions

Information generated by diverse actors: public disclosure, mass media, investigative journalism, civil society, researchers

Broadcast and communicated through new technologies

What the PRR is about: Harnessing two forces to address government failures

Political Engagement

Space for citizens to participate as voters and contenders has expanded

-10

-6

-2

2

6

10

Po

lity

IV S

core

Countries (ranked)

Global shift towards democratic institutions 1980-2013

Polity 1980Polity 1990Polity 2000Polity 2013

Political Engagement

Poor citizens report voting in large numbers

76%79%

76%

95%

91%

63%

85%

69%72%

66%

89%86%

69%

87%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

All Africa(Afrobarometer)

EAP (Gallup) SAR (Gallup) ECA (WVS) LAC (WVS) MENA (WVS) OECD (WVS)

Self-Reported Voter Turnout Rates in National Elections by Education and Region

Primary education More than primary education

Political Engagement

Citizens feel that their vote matters

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

OECD SSA MENA SAR LAC ECA EAP

per

cen

t

Percentage of respondents who answer that having honest elections is “very” or “rather” important for whether their country develops

economically:

World Values Survey, 2010-2014

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

allrespondents

loweducation

food insecure allrespondents

loweducation

food insecure

No more A little more A lot more

In order to decide how to vote in the upcoming elections, how much more information would you like to have?

Uganda, 2011

Nigeria

Transparency

Citizens want information to decide how to vote

Transparency

Citizens use multiple media to access information

Transparency

Goes together with political engagement...

…And is happening across a variety of institutional contexts (“the dictator’s dilemma”)

Surprising variation in free press across the globe

Civil society and international development partners generate information

Correlation between Media and Corruption

Main messages

Political engagement—the selection and sanctioning of leaders who wield power in government—is the key to understanding and solving government failures

Transparency can support healthy political engagement in order to overcome government failures

o In contrast, transparency initiatives that do not improve political engagement are unlikely to be effective

Building effective government institutions requires changes in political behavior—investments in formal capacity and innovative technologies are not enough

o Political engagement and transparency can bring about the needed changes in political behavior

Political Engagement Casts a Long Shadow on Governance

Shapes incentives and behavior not only of political leaders, but also of mid-level bureaucrats, frontline providers and citizens themselves

1. Incentives and accountability of leaders

2. Selection of different types of leaders

3. Behavioral norms (legitimacy; cooperation)

Citizens

Political Leaders

Political

Leaders

Public

Officials

Public

Officials

Frontline Providers

Citizen engagement in service delivery

Principal

Agent

Transparency targeted at political engagement

Transparency can support political engagement in order to overcome government failures

Large body of evidence, drawn from a variety of contexts, that political engagement responds to transparency

Mass media can amplify the role of political engagement in holding leaders accountable, selecting better leaders

Media can also influence behavioral norms

Transparency targeted at non-political citizen engagement is not enough

Eg. Political debates in Sierra Leone

Changed voter behavior

Increased constituency service by MPs who were elected after participating in the debates

Organized Group Action

For the Public Good

Civil society solves collective action problems (typically

supported by external actors through transparency and

“social” accountability, outside the “political” realm)

Hope of Transparency and Citizen Engagement

Organized Group Action

For the Public Good

Well-intentioned, public-spirited, reform leaders in

the bureaucracy and/or politics can organize support

for reforms

Hope of Transparency and Citizen Engagement

Organized Group Action

For Private/Club Goods

Public-interest civil society and reform leaders thwarted by the collective action of powerful interest groups

For the Public Good

How politics is the problem which can undermine the hope

Individual ActionOrganized Group

Action

For Private/Club Goods

Reform leaders can lose office because citizens are mobilized to support non-reform-leaders on the basis of caste, vote buying, or other targeted benefits

Eg. Identity-based political machines that target benefits to political supporters at the expense of broader public goods

For the Public Good

How politics is the problem which can undermine the hope

Individual ActionOrganized Group

Action

For Private/Club Goods

Populist demands from “ordinary” citizens for private benefits

Leaders can nurture ideological constituencies, and polarize people rather than find common ground for public goods

For the Public Good

How politics is the problem which can undermine the hope

Individual ActionOrganized Group

Action

For Private/Club Goods

(UNHEALTHY)

For the Public Good(HEALTHY)

What to take away from the evidence: Understanding citizen behavior to craft policy strategies to shift it for the public good

How do transitions towards the public good (healthy PE) come about?

INDIVIDUAL ACTION ORGANIZED GROUP ACTION

Clear evidence that individual actions respond to information, such

as voters acting to remove from office those candidates who have

been revealed to be corrupt

Potential for targeting transparency initiatives to influence

individual citizen action and to serve as a coordination device, such

as through focusing voter demand on good-quality candidates who

compete on platforms of providing public goods

Little theory or evidence that organized group action will

respond to information. Group organization is shaped by the

concentration of benefits for group members, and the group's

ability to exclude non-members from these benefits.

Impact of civil society organizations who want to promote the

public good depends on whether they can sufficiently influence

individual actions such as voting that are aggregated by

political markets. Well intentioned civil society can undercut

the power of special interests by mobilizing and coordinating

the actions of individual voters on the basis of public goods

Transitions toward the public good, when political engagement is unhealthy to begin with, come about:

Through political engagement

Growing experience with unhealthy aspects of political engagement and the learning that comes from it, such as through

frustration and indignation with bad outcomes, can contribute to endogenous changes towards healthy political behavior, over

time

Changing formal institutions is not sufficient: unhealthy behaviors can persist.

Technical capacity building is not sufficient when political engagement is unhealthy.

Through transparency that nurtures healthy political engagement

Political engagement, particularly by individuals, responds to transparency.

Information and mass media have to interact with political engagement to change incentives, political beliefs, and behavioral

norms.

Transparency initiatives targeted only at citizen action outside the political realm, is not sufficient.

Policy Implications: targeted transparency

Target transparency to improve the quality of political engagement: design matters

Information on performance and consequences of policy actions

“Infotainment” through persuasive mass media

Congruence of information content, media and political markets

Design non-political citizen engagement initiatives by taking political behavior into account

Consider local political engagement, supported by transparency, as a way to solve “last-mile” delivery problems, adapted to contexts across the political spectrum

No easy solutions

Unhealthy political engagement can persist despite transparency, but there’s no side-stepping it

Confluence of transparency and widespread political engagement can provide tipping points for homegrown institutional change

No easy solutions, but a suggested approach

Complement everything else that policy actors do with Communication to citizens, not only to leaders, to shift beliefs and

behaviors—not a soft option

Using research to overcome the fear of talking about politics—treat it as part of seeking technical solutions to development problems

Need more work on institutional design, in a world where power is becoming more diffusedo To constructively channel and aggregate individual actions for public

goods

Reduce the hubris of external actorso We don’t have all the answers, nor the oversight capacityo But we can do more to leverage our “big data” comparative advantage to

enable societies to grow their own institutions and solutions