Collaborative Research: Collective decision making & local public good provision: Experimental Evidence

Participation in decision making by citizens and stakeholders has been widely promoted as a means to improved and sustainable outcomes in both domestic governance and international development. For example, the World Bank has invested billions of dollars in community-driven development, which emphasizes the participation of beneficiaries in decision making around development projects.

Direct democracy, especially in the form of participatory budgeting, has spread across the globe. One motivation for promoting participation is the idea that by participating in decision making related to a local public good, participants will feel more compelled to invest in the maintenance of that good. In turn, public goods will provide more benefit to the community if they are well-maintained and last longer.

Political theorists, too, have posed the question: does participation “make better citizens?” An even more important question for policy makers is: which kinds of participation manage to do so? This research evaluates the influence of participatory mechanisms on behavioral outcomes in one county in a developing country. The results of the study inform the ongoing design of participatory institutions in that country, other countries on that continent, and around the world; there are more than 11,000 participatory budgeting programs and programs are expanding far more quickly than evidence can keep pace.

The results of this study thus are immediately useful to governments and advocates of participatory institutions as they design, adopt, and expand public participation in pursuit of development.

The research uses a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the impact of common participatory processes on individual willingness to invest in local public goods, such as a well, a health clinic, or solar array. The RCT takes place in 90 communities, where the researchers provide all villages with a local public good. The method of selecting a good for each community is randomly assigned to involve either: (a) preference aggregation through consultation, (b) preference aggregation through voting at a public meeting, or (c) consensus-building through deliberative discussion.The research team randomly recruits villagers to attend these meetings and surveys them on their attitudes and behaviors surrounding participation and development projects before and after the meetings.

The researchers return 1-year later to measure the state of the public good and the participants’ updated attitudes and behaviors. The researchers then leverage their strategy of random assignment of meeting rules and random selection of participants to compare villages across space and over time to identify the effects of the decision-making process on participants’ selection and maintenance of the public good.

This study thus provides rigorous evidence to inform future program design and investment in participatory institutions for development.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.