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Better together? Examining the effect of civic education for local officials and citizens in the Philippines

 Nina McMurry (Vanderbilt) and Lily Tsai (MIT)

 Many civic education interventions seek to inform citizens about government officials’ actions and duties in the hopes that citizens will reward and sanction officials to incentivize better performance. But in contexts where mechanisms for sanctioning poorly-performing officials are weak, empowering citizens through traditional civic education may instead create antagonism that leads officials to retreat and citizens then to disengage. Through a field experiment conducted in collaboration with civil society partners in 224 villages in the northern Philippines, we test whether another approach - training citizens and officials together to promote constructive engagement - is more effective than training citizens alone. Our findings indicate that training officials jointly with citizens does not make them more responsive to citizen engagement. On the contrary, eight months after the intervention, officials in the joint training condition were less likely to have included citizens in decision-making forums, and no more or less likely to express policy priorities consistent with citizen preferences. Furthermore, citizens trained jointly with officials were less satisfied with officials’ performance and responsiveness than their counterparts trained separately. This greater dissatisfaction is reflected in behavior during local elections held fourteen months after the intervention: citizens in the joint condition were less likely to report campaigning in support of incumbent politicians, but also no more likely to report campaigning in support of challengers. In clientelist democracies, interventions combining civic education and direct interactions with elected officials may have the unintended consequence of discouraging political engagement by creating more realistic citizen expectations about the (un)responsiveness of formal political institutions, with nuanced implications for government accountability.

 

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