Participatory Accountability and Collective Action : Evidence from Field Experiments in Albanian Schools
There is general agreement that the existence of participatory institutions is a necessary condition for accountability, especially where top-down institutions are malfunctioning or missing. In education, the evidence on the effectiveness of partic...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2012/04/16205503/participatory-accountability-collective-action-evidence-field-experiments-albanian-schools http://hdl.handle.net/10986/6029 |
| Summary: | There is general agreement that the
existence of participatory institutions is a necessary
condition for accountability, especially where top-down
institutions are malfunctioning or missing. In education,
the evidence on the effectiveness of participatory
accountability is mixed. This paper argues that
participation is a social dilemma and therefore depends, at
least partly, on individuals' propensity to cooperate
with others for the common good. This being the case, the
mixed evidence could be owing to society-level
heterogeneities in individuals' willingness and ability
to overcome collective action problems. The authors
investigate whether individuals' propensity to
cooperate plays a role in parents' decisions to
participate in both a school accountability system -- a
"short route" to accountability -- and
parliamentary elections -- a "long route" to
accountability -- by combining survey data on 1,800
individuals' participation decisions with measures of
their willingness to contribute to a public good in the
context of a very simple, clearly defined laboratory
experiment. They conduct a study in a new democracy,
Albania, involving parents of children enrolled in primary
schools. The findings confirm that, both across individuals
within communities and across communities, the decision to
hold teachers and school directors accountable directly
through participation at the school level, and indirectly
through political participation correlates with
cooperativeness in a simple public goods game. |
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