To what extent does political leaders' rhetoric undermine support for democracy among bureaucrats? Some leaders, such as former Brazilian president Bolsonaro, cast doubt on democratic norms and processes through their rhetoric. While several recent survey experiments have probed factors that decrease public support for democracy, few have examined leader rhetoric and none has examined bureaucrats as actors. Can leaders bent on eroding democratic procedures sway individuals within an elite institution with a critical role in implementing executive directives? In a 2021-2022 survey experiment, we primed Brazilian bureaucrats with Bolsonaro's rhetoric alleging election fraud and attempting to cast doubt on a foundational democratic procedure. Our experiment also seeks to address ambiguity in the common survey questions regarding "support for democracy" by probing support for typical acts of executive overreach, including restrictions on political parties, the legislature and demonstrations. We find that the treatment decreased support for democracy as a system and for the autonomy of political parties only among bureaucrats who most strongly support Bolsonaro. These findings suggest that at least among public servants, anti-democratic rhetoric is unlikely to undermine the average bureaucrat's commitment to democracy but may undermine support for democracy among the executive's existing supporters.

International organizations (IOs) face growing resource constraints amid increasing scrutiny and legitimacy challenges from member states. In response, many IOs are seeking to diversify their funding sources by appealing to non-state actors, including individual donors. Yet, little is known about what motivates the public to contribute financially to IOs. This study investigates whether IOs’ efforts at self-legitimation influence donation behavior, distinguishing among three forms of legitimacy: (a) procedural, (b) performance-based, and (c) mandate-based. We examine the effects of legitimacy messaging on public donations to UNICEF through a series of pre-registered survey, field, and survey-based field experiments involving over 22 million Facebook users across five countries—Brazil, Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom. Our findings indicate that legitimacy appeals have limited impact on individuals’ willingness or actual decisions to donate. These results suggest a need for further research into the practical implications of legitimacy in global governance.

Are banks sensitive to risk and reward in following global corporate transparency rules? Using a worldwide field experiment, this study evaluates competing predictions from expected utility, behavioralist, and institutionalist accounts. We incorporated a dozen companies around the world to make over 15,000 email solicitations asking for corporate accounts from 5000 of the world's internationally connected banks. Treatments randomize the risk profiles of different companies-by their countries' association with corruption, terrorism, and tax evasion-and vary rewards by stating differing amounts of business revenues. The outcomes are the rates at which banks offer accounts and comply with rules on customer identification. The results suggest that banks are moderately responsive to risk-though not reward-but the magnitude of the effects is small, providing mixed evidence for conventional models and suggestive support for institutionalist accounts.

Many governments and international organizations call for more efforts to integrate scientifically rigorous impact evaluations into policy streams, though government officials frequently self-report that they rarely engage such evidence (Newman et al. 2017; Migone and Brock 2017). Previous research has found that small “nudges” in communications content, style, or source can affect behavior in a wide variety of contexts (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). To test how nudges might impact bureaucrats’ willingness to engage with policy-relevant academic evidence, researchers sent email invitations to 130,000 public officials in Latin American countries with easily available names or contact information. This study probes engagement with a website designed to provide academic evidence in a convenient and accessible format. The study tests the effects of four treatment arms: nudges, messenger nationality, direct relevance of an example study, and saturation (the percent of bureaucrats invited from a given ministry). Results indicate that greater saturation had the strongest positive effects. Findings for messenger nationality were mixed: the Chinese researcher significantly decreased uptake generally, the Colombian appreciably increased engagement in Colombia, and the others had null effects. Motivational nudges had generally negative effects, and the relevant example made no significant difference. Broadly, these results suggest that encouraging the use of impact evidence is a difficult problem that is insensitive to most behavioral nudges but may be receptive to leveraging group dynamics.

Behavioral nudges in Facebook ads reached nearly 15 million people across six diverse countries and, consequently, many thousands took the step of navigating to governments' vaccine signup sites. However, none of the treatment ads caused significantly more vaccine signup intent than placebo uniformly across all countries. Critically, reporting the descriptive norm that 87% of people worldwide had either been vaccinated or planned vaccination-social proof-did not meaningfully increase vaccine signup intent in any country and significantly backfired in Taiwan. This result contradicts prominent prior findings. A charge to "protect lives in your family" significantly outperformed placebo in Taiwan and Turkey but saw null effects elsewhere. A message noting that vaccination significantly reduces hospitalization risk decreased signup intent in Brazil and had no significant effects in any other country. Such heterogeneity was the hallmark of the study: some messages saw significant treatment effects in some countries but failed in others. No nudge outperformed the placebo in Russia, a location of high vaccine skepticism. In all, widely touted behavioral nudges often failed to promote vaccine signup intent and appear to be moderated by cultural context.

Taxation is fundamental to citizen-government relations. Seminal accounts attribute democratization to direct taxation’s rise, and recent evidence shows that direct taxes increase citizens’ accountability demands. However, today many governments rely heavily on indirect taxes; evidence is mixed on whether they have similar effects. We present cross-national data demonstrating that indirect taxes are associated with lower levels of government accountability than direct taxes. We argue that the visibility of taxes affects their accountability consequences. We further posit that, on average, indirect taxes become less visible than direct once citizens have acclimated to higher prices. We combine lab-in-the-field experiments with survey experiments in a developing country to demonstrate that less visible taxes provoke less willingness to punish leaders politically and that established indirect taxes are not highly visible to citizens. The findings suggest that the growing reliance on indirect taxes may limit taxation’s accountability dividends and impair democratic representation.

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We experimentally test the role of loss-aversion in savings decisions, framing interest as a lump-sum ``upfront bonus'' that is lost if a savings target is not reached. We partner with a mobile network operator and an NGO in rural Tanzania to study the savings behavior of 1,524 women receiving mobile-money-based cash transfers from the NGO. Participants were randomly assigned to a savings incentive with ``upfront'' interest vs. traditional interest vs. an information-only placebo. Using administrative data on mobile wallet balances, we find that the upfront treatment reduced endline wallet balances by 2 USD (net of the bonus) relative to placebo. The traditional interest treatment, despite offering an above-market interest rate, had no effect on wallet balances. Both savings incentives increased savings for the richest 10% of participants. Overall, our findings suggest that the savings decisions of the very poor may be unresponsive to savings rates or framing.

Mobile communication technologies can provide citizens access to information that is tailored to their specific circumstances. Such technologies may therefore increase citizens' ability to vote in line with their interests and hold politicians accountable. In a large-scale randomized controlled trial in Uganda (n = 16,083), we investigated whether citizens who receive private, timely, and individualized text messages by mobile phone about public services in their community punished or rewarded incumbents in local elections in line with the information. Respondents claimed to find the messages valuable and there is evidence that they briefly updated their beliefs based on the messages; however, the treatment did not cause increased votes for incumbents where public services were better than expected nor decreased votes where public services were worse than anticipated. The considerable knowledge gaps among citizens identified in this study indicate potential for communication technologies to effectively share civic information. Yet the findings imply that when the attribution of public service outcomes is difficult, even individualized information is unlikely to affect voting behavior.

Abstract Behavioral nudges in Facebook ads encouraged Covid-19 vaccine signup across six diverse countries. The ads reached nearly 14 million people and, consequently, many thousands took the concrete step of navigating to governments' vaccine signup sites. However, none of the treatment ads caused significantly more vaccine signup than placebo across all countries. Critically, reporting the descriptive norm that 87 percent of people worldwide had either been vaccinated or planned vaccination---social proof---did not meaningfully increase vaccine signup in any country and significantly backfired in South Africa and Taiwan. This result contradicts prominent prior findings. A charge to “protect lives in your family” significantly outperformed placebo in Brazil and Taiwan but saw mixed effects elsewhere. A message noting that vaccination significantly reduces hospitalization risk significantly increased signup in Brazil, Taiwan, and Turkey, had no significant effects in South Africa or Russia, and significantly backfired in the United States. Such heterogeneity was the the hallmark of the study: some messages saw significant treatment effects in some countries but failed in others. No nudge outperformed any other condition in Russia, a location of high vaccine skepticism. In all, widely touted behavioral nudges often fail to promote vaccine uptake and appear to be highly moderated by cultural context.

Despite the harmful consequences of the U.S-China trade war, only a handful of firms took collective action to oppose it. To understand why, we implemented a field experiment in which we randomly provided detailed estimates of the costs of the trade war to U.S. company managers and measured their willingness to take actions either opposing or supporting the trade war. While overall our treatment counter-intuitively reduced opposition to the trade war, these effects were highly conditional on respondents' prior beliefs and the number of tariffs in their industry. The treatment increased opposition the most among subjects in industries with substantial tariffs who also thought the trade war was harmful. However, it decreased opposition among subjects who held neutral beliefs about the trade war. Finally, we find that a company’s political culture strongly predicts their political activity, suggesting political ideology and not just a company’s business interests shape corporate behavior.

Government accountability is severely lacking in many developing countries, yet we know relatively little about the causal dynamics that produce citizen demands for greater responsiveness. We argue that a sense of ownership over public money heightens expectations for government services and induces expressive demands for accountability, and we apply the new theory in sub-Saharan Africa. Results from a series of lab-in-the-field experiments in Uganda and Ghana and from a nationally representative survey-based field experiment in Uganda all demonstrate that higher feelings of ownership over public revenues significantly increase citizens’ accountability pressures on leaders. Furthermore, simple interventions can significantly increase feelings of revenue ownership over oil and aid windfalls, producing demands for accountability indistinguishable from taxes.

A rancorous debate has centered on the environmental consequences of World Bank lending. To address the concerns of their critics, the Bank and the other multilateral development banks (MDBs) have launched an array of important institutional and procedural reforms. As the greatest beneficiaries among all regions of MDB lending, Latin America and the Caribbean have received nearly US $82 billion in loans from the World Bank since the institution's inception. This chapter examines the Bank's environment portfolio since 1980. It argues that both the lenders' and the borrowers' incentives produce the pattern of environmental lending that we observe. Agency loss is compounded by the "congenial environmental for opportunism" present in the principal-agent relationship. Regarding the incentives of bank staff members, it appears likely that established patterns of environmental lending will continue unless efforts are made to reshape the reward system for project managers.

Especially beginning in the mid-1980s, Latin American countries have become some of the key players in the formation and modification of major global environmental agreements and institutions, such as those dealing with ozone depletion, hazardous waste, climate change, and biodiversity. Although the increased importance of the environment to Latin American foreign-policy making may reflect growing global environmental activity, in other ways it demonstrates radically changed domestic priorities. However, power in the international environmental arena is perhaps more difficult to determine than in security and economics, and it stems from very different sources. Water, forests, and carbon emissions are only three of the environmental issues affected by Latin American countries that have gained importance to domestic policy makers and international negotiators. Although Brazil still remains an active voice for tempering environmental concerns development objectives, the bulk of the government's attention in recent years has focused internally on the pressing concerns of macroeconomic stability and the crisis of governance.

AbstractTo promote good governance, citizens can inform governments directly and routinely about the implementation of policies and the delivery of public services. Yet citizens lack incentives to provide information when they do not expect governments to be responsive, and citizen disengagement in turn often prevents governments from providing public goods effectively. In two field experiments, we studied potential remedies to this dilemma related to solid waste services in Uganda. We randomly assigned reporters to be recruited by community nomination and to be recognized by community leaders in an attempt to select for and motivate information sharing. We also randomly assigned reporters to hear from the government about how their reports were used to make real improvements to waste services. Community nominations and public announcements did not increase reporting. However, responsiveness boosted participation over several months for reporters who had been recruited earliest and had been reporting longest, highlighting the critical role of timely government responsiveness in sustaining information flows from citizens.

Foreign aid may act much like oil money in reducing voters’ willingness to demand accountability from their government, enabling corruption, clientelism, and repression. This is an important causal mechanism connecting public budgets to quality of governance. Yet other scholarship counters that aid is more beneficial than oil, either indirectly because of donor oversight or directly because aid is more likely to produce citizen pressures on governments. Empirical work on the topic employs observational data at the national, macro level, and has left the question unresolved. At the micro level, in some countries citizens have experience with aid revenues and oil funds, thus possessing information about the political implications of these different revenue sources. This article provides the first experimental tests of the direct mechanism linking aid and oil revenues to demands from citizens for greater political accountability. We report the effects of randomly assigned treatments identifying aid funds compared to oil money on behavior of citizens in six survey and lab experiments in Ghana and Uganda. We find no differences in accountability pressures when subjects are randomly assigned to aid or oil conditions in any experiment, including a survey-based field experiment in Uganda that employed very strong information treatments on the extent of aid and oil funds. Though little evidence suggests that either windfall necessarily reduces accountability demands from baseline in a meaningful way, citizens’ actions for aid money were statistically indistinguishable from oil revenues across all experiments. Aid may well have governance effects through the indirect route of donor oversight, but the results presented here suggest no evidence that aid, compared to oil, directly induces greater accountability demands among citizens.

Through a field experiment and audit study, we test how the electoral calendar affects the use of local economic development policies. We explore how electoral timing along with local political institutions and party composition affect local governments' offers of investment incentives to outside firms. We legally incorporated a consultancy and, on behalf of a real investor in manufacturing, approached roughly 3,000 U.S. municipalities with inquiries. The main experimental results show no greater tendency to offer incentives for investment anticipated prior to than after elections-a null result that is estimated with high precision. Limiting the sample to municipalities that specialize in manufacturing, the relevant subgroup, suggests that election timing matters in this most likely set of locales. Some observational findings include additional evidence on how direct elections of executives and partisanship correlate with incentive offers.