Participation in Development Programs: Evidence from a Field Experiment in India

• In Event: Trust, Solidarity, and Participation in South Asian Politics

Abstract

The successful implementation of government programs often requires citizens'
voluntary participation. However, scholars know little about how such participation can
be elicited. We integrate insights from past scholarship on elections and
decentralization with findings from behavioral science to argue that encouragements
from elected politicians should be more effective at eliciting participation than those
from ordinary citizens and that the impact of elected politicians’ messages should be
shaped by their tier of government. We examine these hypotheses using a field
experiment in North India to compare whether and how randomly assigned messages
associated with local and state-level elected politicians and ordinary citizens elicit
participation in a government health insurance program. We explore causal
mechanisms using rich survey data on citizen perceptions of and interactions with
politicians. The results will advance our understanding of whether and how elected
representatives’ influence can be harnessed to improve the implementation of key
development programs.

Authors

• Anjali Thomas, Georgia Institute of Technology

• Charles R. Hankla, Georgia State University

• Sayan Banerjee, Texas Tech University