Skill versus Voice in Local Development

Katherine Casey, Rachel Glennerster, Edward Miguel, Maarten Voors

NBER Working Paper No. 25022
Issued in September 2018, Revised in January 2021
NBER Program(s):Development Economics, Political Economy

Where the state is weak, traditional authorities control the local provision of public goods. These leaders come from an older, less educated generation and often rule in an authoritarian and exclusionary fashion. This means the skills of community members may not be leveraged in policy making. We experimentally evaluate two solutions to this problem in Sierra Leone: one encourages delegation to higher skill individuals and a second fosters broader inclusion in decision-making. In a real-world infrastructure grants competition, a public nudge to delegate lead to better outcomes than the default of chiefly control, whereas attempts to boost participation were largely ineffective.

Supplementary materials for this paper:

• randomized controlled trials registry entry

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w25022