The document discusses how political engagement and transparency can help address government failures to provide public goods. It provides examples from Kanpur, India where government failed to provide electricity, and citizens stole it from the state. Political leaders there won elections by fighting reforms and colluding in theft. The document argues that political engagement, where citizens participate in elections and government, combined with transparency around government actions, can help shift incentives and behaviors to prioritize public goods over private interests. However, change depends on targeting transparency to improve political engagement and taking political behaviors into account in reform efforts rather than relying only on technical solutions or non-political citizen actions.

1. A Policy Research Report on Governance
September 28, 2016
Development Research Group
The World Bank
Making Politics Work for
Development:
Harnessing transparency & citizen engagement

2. The Problem of Politics and
Government Failure: a story
 Once upon a time, the city of Kanpur was regarded as the
Manchester of the East.
 Now it is without electricity and industry
(http://www.powerless-film.com/)

3. The protagonists: citizens
 Stealing electricity from the state is the norm

4. public officials
 The reforming public official (head of the state electricity
company) is transferred
 Frontline service providers are alleged to collude in theft
from the state

5. politicians
 Won the election by fighting the reforms
 Allegations of criminality and violence

6. The Problem of Politics
Government failure
Governments fail to provide public goods when leaders
knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical evidence or
are unable to implement good policies
--Adverse political incentives
--Perverse behavioral norms in the public sector
--Eg. corruption, and lack of accountability, but also beyond
accountability—distributive conflict and ideological beliefs that
prevent citizens from finding common ground

7. Political Engagement Transparency
 Citizen participation in selecting
and sanctioning the leaders who
wield power in government,
including by entering themselves
as contenders for leadership
 Political engagement happens
in every institutional context,
in different ways (not about
democracies versus
autocracies)
 Citizen access to publicly
available information about the
actions of those in government,
and the consequences of these
actions
 Information generated by
diverse actors: public
disclosure, mass media,
investigative journalism, civil
society, researchers
 Broadcast and communicated
through new technologies
What the PRR is about:
Harnessing two forces to address government failures

8. Political
Engagement
Space for
citizens to
participate as
voters and
contenders
has expanded
-10
-6
-2
2
6
10
PolityIVScore Countries (ranked)
Global shift towards democratic institutions 1980-2013
Polity 1980
Polity 1990
Polity 2000
Polity 2013

9. Political
Engagement
Poor
citizens
report
voting in
large
numbers
76%
79%
76%
95%
91%
63%
85%
69%
72%
66%
89%
86%
69%
87%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
All Africa
(Afrobarometer)
EAP (Gallup) SAR (Gallup) ECA (WVS) LAC (WVS) MENA (WVS) OECD (WVS)
Self-Reported Voter Turnout Rates in National Elections by Education and Region
Primary education More than primary education

10. Political
Engagement
Citizens feel
that their
vote matters
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
OECD SSA MENA SAR LAC ECA EAP
percent
Percentage of respondents who answer that having honest elections is
“very” or “rather” important for whether their country develops
economically:
World Values Survey, 2010-2014

11. 0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
all
respondents
low
education
food insecure all
respondents
low
education
food insecure
No more A little more A lot more
In order to decide how to vote in the upcoming elections, how much
more information would you like to have?
Uganda,
2011
Nigeria
Transparency
Citizens want
information
to decide how
to vote

12. Transparency
Citizens use
multiple
media to
access
information

13. Transparency
Goes together
with political
engagement...
…And is
happening
across a variety
of institutional
contexts
(“the dictator’s
dilemma”)

14. Surprising variation in free press across the globe

15. Civil society and international
development partners generate information

16. Correlation between Media and Corruption

17. Main messages
 Political engagement—the selection and sanctioning of leaders who
wield power in government—is the key to understanding and solving
government failures
 Transparency can support healthy political engagement in order to
overcome government failures
o In contrast, transparency initiatives that do not improve political
engagement are unlikely to be effective
 Building effective government institutions requires changes in political
behavior—investments in formal capacity and innovative technologies
are not enough
o Political engagement and transparency can bring about the needed
changes in political behavior

18. Political Engagement Casts a Long Shadow on Governance
Shapes incentives and behavior not only of political leaders, but also
of mid-level bureaucrats, frontline providers and citizens themselves
1. Incentives and accountability of leaders
2. Selection of different types of leaders
3. Behavioral norms (legitimacy; cooperation)
Citizens
Political
Leaders
Political
Leaders
Public
Officials
Public
Officials
Frontline
Providers
Citizen
engagement in
service delivery
Principal
Agent

19. Transparency targeted at political engagement
 Transparency can support political engagement in order
to overcome government failures
 Large body of evidence, drawn from a variety of contexts, that
political engagement responds to transparency
 Mass media can amplify the role of political engagement in holding
leaders accountable, selecting better leaders
 Media can also influence behavioral norms
 Transparency targeted at non-political citizen engagement is not
enough

20. Eg. Political debates in Sierra Leone
Changed voter behavior
Increased constituency service
by MPs who were elected after
participating in the debates

21. Organized Group Action
For the
Public Good
Civil society solves collective
action problems (typically
supported by external actors
through transparency and
“social” accountability,
outside the “political” realm)
Hope of Transparency and Citizen Engagement

22. Organized Group Action
For the
Public Good
Well-intentioned, public-
spirited, reform leaders in
the bureaucracy and/or
politics can organize support
for reforms
Hope of Transparency and Citizen Engagement

23. Organized Group
Action
For Private/Club
Goods
Public-interest civil
society and reform
leaders thwarted by the
collective action of
powerful interest
groups
For the
Public Good
How politics is the problem which can undermine the hope

24. Individual Action
Organized Group
Action
For Private/Club
Goods
Reform leaders can lose
office because citizens are
mobilized to support non-
reform-leaders on the basis
of caste, vote buying, or
other targeted benefits
Eg. Identity-based
political machines that
target benefits to
political supporters at
the expense of broader
public goods
For the
Public Good
How politics is the problem which can undermine the hope

25. Individual Action
Organized Group
Action
For Private/Club
Goods
Populist demands from
“ordinary” citizens for
private benefits
Leaders can nurture
ideological
constituencies, and
polarize people rather
than find common
ground for public goods
For the
Public Good
How politics is the problem which can undermine the hope

26. Individual Action
Organized Group
Action
For Private/Club
Goods
(UNHEALTHY)
For the
Public Good
(HEALTHY)
What to take away from the evidence: Understanding citizen
behavior to craft policy strategies to shift it for the public good

27. How do transitions towards the public good (healthy PE) come about?
INDIVIDUAL ACTION ORGANIZED GROUP ACTION
Clear evidence that individual actions respond to information, such
as voters acting to remove from office those candidates who have
been revealed to be corrupt
Potential for targeting transparency initiatives to influence
individual citizen action and to serve as a coordination device, such
as through focusing voter demand on good-quality candidates who
compete on platforms of providing public goods
Little theory or evidence that organized group action will
respond to information. Group organization is shaped by the
concentration of benefits for group members, and the group's
ability to exclude non-members from these benefits.
Impact of civil society organizations who want to promote the
public good depends on whether they can sufficiently influence
individual actions such as voting that are aggregated by
political markets. Well intentioned civil society can undercut
the power of special interests by mobilizing and coordinating
the actions of individual voters on the basis of public goods
Transitions toward the public good, when political engagement is unhealthy to begin with, come about:
Through political engagement
 Growing experience with unhealthy aspects of political engagement and the learning that comes from it, such as through
frustration and indignation with bad outcomes, can contribute to endogenous changes towards healthy political behavior, over
time
 Changing formal institutions is not sufficient: unhealthy behaviors can persist.
 Technical capacity building is not sufficient when political engagement is unhealthy.
Through transparency that nurtures healthy political engagement
 Political engagement, particularly by individuals, responds to transparency.
 Information and mass media have to interact with political engagement to change incentives, political beliefs, and behavioral
norms.
 Transparency initiatives targeted only at citizen action outside the political realm, is not sufficient.

28. Policy Implications: targeted transparency
 Target transparency to improve the quality of political engagement:
design matters
 Information on performance and consequences of policy actions
 “Infotainment” through persuasive mass media
 Congruence of information content, media and political markets
 Design non-political citizen engagement initiatives by taking political
behavior into account
 Consider local political engagement, supported by transparency, as a
way to solve “last-mile” delivery problems, adapted to contexts across
the political spectrum

29. No easy solutions
 Unhealthy political engagement can persist despite
transparency, but there’s no side-stepping it
 Confluence of transparency and widespread political
engagement can provide tipping points for homegrown
institutional change

30. No easy solutions, but a suggested approach
 Complement everything else that policy actors do with
 Communication to citizens, not only to leaders, to shift beliefs and
behaviors—not a soft option
 Using research to overcome the fear of talking about politics—treat it as
part of seeking technical solutions to development problems
 Need more work on institutional design, in a world where power is
becoming more diffused
o To constructively channel and aggregate individual actions for public
goods
 Reduce the hubris of external actors
o We don’t have all the answers, nor the oversight capacity
o But we can do more to leverage our “big data” comparative advantage to
enable societies to grow their own institutions and solutions