Date:
Location:
Jessica Gottlieb (University of Houston), "When Will Civil Society Sanction the State? Evidence from Mali"
Abstract
Will civil society organizations (CSOs) check poor local governance, a problem pervasive in many new democracies? If so, under what conditions? These groups have overcome coordination problems, but little is known about what motivates them to sanction public corruption, especially when their coordinating capacity can also help extract rents from politicians. We develop a model about the conditions under which CSOs would be able and willing to sanction poor local government performance and test its predictions using a face-to-face survey experiment with leaders of 1,014 CSOs from 58 localities in Mali. Under the status quo, formal sanctioning is rare and informal payments to CSOs are common. However, policymakers are currently discussing the introduction of a performance-based monitoring program (PBF) that will provide a formal channel for sanctioning corruption and a credible cost to the mayor: no performance bonus. Our survey presents a vignette to each CSO leader describing the program, and then asks their likelihood of sanctioning in the case of hypothetical mayoral corruption. It also elicits the price of the organizations' expected transfer if they, instead, enter into a collusive bargain. We randomly manipulate anonymity of reporting and the duration of the monitoring role (one-year or long-term). We find that CSOs most embedded in the community are best able to extract informal transfers from the mayor (and thus least likely to sanction) in the absence of a PBF program, but that CSOs with existing technical and informational capacity are most likely to sanction a corrupt mayor under the new PBF regime. Short-term monitoring contracts under PBF are more likely to induce sanctioning for un-embedded CSOs, suggestive evidence that long-term contracts will enable groups to renegotiate a collusive bargain and thus disincentivize sanctioning in the short-term. These results offer both optimism and insight for how CSOs can be engaged to promote government accountability.
Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Program on Political Economy (PE) supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
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