Many lament that weak accountability and poor governance impede economic development in Africa. Politicians rely on ethnic allegiances that deliver the vote irrespective of performance, dampening electoral incentives. Giving voters information about candidate competence counters ethnic loyalty and strengthens accountability. I extend a canonical electoral model to show how information provision flows through voter behavior and ultimately impacts the distribution of political spending. I test the theory on data from Sierra Leone using decentralization and differential radio coverage to identify information's effects. Estimates suggest that information increases voting across ethnic-party lines and induces a more equitable allocation of campaign spending.

Candidate debates have a rich history and remain integral to contemporary campaign strategy. There is, however, little evidence that they affect the behavior of voters or politicians. The scarcity of political information in the developing world offers an attractive testing ground. Using experimental variation in Sierra Leone, we find that public debate screenings build political knowledge that changes the way people vote, which induces a campaign expenditure response by candidates and fosters accountability pressure over the spending of elected officials. Results show how political communication can trigger a chain of events that begins with voters and ultimately influences policy.

Despite their importance, there is limited evidence on how institutions can be strengthened. Evaluating the effects of specific reforms is complicated by the lack of exogenous variation in institutions, the difficulty of measuring institutional performance, and the temptation to “cherry pick” estimates from among the large number of indicators required to capture this multifaceted subject. We evaluate one attempt to make local institutions more democratic and egalitarian by imposing participation requirements for marginalized groups (including women) and test for learning-by-doing effects. We exploit the random assignment of a governance program in Sierra Leone, develop innovative real-world outcome measures, and use a preanalysis plan (PAP) to bind our hands against data mining. The intervention studied is a “community-driven development” program, which has become a popular strategy for foreign aid donors. We find positive short-run effects on local public goods and economic outcomes, but no evidence for sustained impacts on collective action, decision making, or the involvement of marginalized groups, suggesting that the intervention did not durably reshape local institutions. We discuss the practical trade-offs faced in implementing a PAP and show how in its absence we could have generated two divergent, equally erroneous interpretations of program impacts on institutions.

Are ordinary citizens or political party leaders better positioned to select candidates? While the American primary system lets citizens choose, most democracies rely instead on party officials to appoint or nominate candidates. The consequences of these distinct design choices are unclear: while officials are often better informed about candidate qualifications, they may value traits, like party loyalty or willingness to pay for the nomination, at odds with identifying the best performer. We partnered with both major political parties in Sierra Leone to experimentally vary how much say voters have in selecting Parliamentary candidates. Estimates suggest that more democratic procedures increase the likelihood that parties select voters’ most preferred candidates and favor candidates with stronger records of public goods provision.

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 policymaking. 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 led to better outcomes than the default of chiefly control, whereas attempts to boost participation were largely ineffective.