Participatory Accountability and Collective Action : Experimental Evidence from Albania
It has been argued that accountability is a public good that only citizens can provide. Governments can put institutions in place that allow citizens to hold public servants to account, but citizens must participate in those institutions if accountability is to be achieved. Thus, citizens face a social dilemma — participate in holding public servants to account at a cost in terms of time and effort or free ride, i.e. do not participate, while benefiting from the efforts of those who do. If this characterization of accountability is valid, we would expect more cooperatively inclined citizens to participate in accountability institutions, while the less cooperatively inclined do not. We test the validity of this characterization by investigating the correlation between individual behavior in a simple public goods game and their participation in local and national accountability institutions in Albania. We involve a nationally representative sample of 1800 adults with children in primary school. We find significant correlations between cooperativeness and participation in school accountability institutions and national elections, both at the individual level and the district level. These correlations are robust to the introduction of many controls in the analysis and, in the case of national elections, to the use of official election turn-out statistics in place of self-reported turn-out.
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| Format: | Journal Article biblioteca |
| Language: | en_US |
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Elsevier
2014-02-06
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| Subjects: | accountability, participation, elections, collective action, public good game, |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10986/18196 |
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dig-okr-10986181962021-04-23T14:03:43Z Participatory Accountability and Collective Action : Experimental Evidence from Albania Barr, Abigail Packard, Truman Serra, Danila accountability participation elections collective action public good game It has been argued that accountability is a public good that only citizens can provide. Governments can put institutions in place that allow citizens to hold public servants to account, but citizens must participate in those institutions if accountability is to be achieved. Thus, citizens face a social dilemma — participate in holding public servants to account at a cost in terms of time and effort or free ride, i.e. do not participate, while benefiting from the efforts of those who do. If this characterization of accountability is valid, we would expect more cooperatively inclined citizens to participate in accountability institutions, while the less cooperatively inclined do not. We test the validity of this characterization by investigating the correlation between individual behavior in a simple public goods game and their participation in local and national accountability institutions in Albania. We involve a nationally representative sample of 1800 adults with children in primary school. We find significant correlations between cooperativeness and participation in school accountability institutions and national elections, both at the individual level and the district level. These correlations are robust to the introduction of many controls in the analysis and, in the case of national elections, to the use of official election turn-out statistics in place of self-reported turn-out. 2014-05-07T20:41:52Z 2014-05-07T20:41:52Z 2014-02-06 Journal Article European Economic Review 0014-2921 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2014.01.010 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/18196 en_US CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/ World Bank Elsevier Publications & Research :: Journal Article ALBANIA |
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biblioteca |
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| libraryname |
Biblioteca del Banco Mundial |
| language |
en_US |
| topic |
accountability participation elections collective action public good game accountability participation elections collective action public good game |
| spellingShingle |
accountability participation elections collective action public good game accountability participation elections collective action public good game Barr, Abigail Packard, Truman Serra, Danila Participatory Accountability and Collective Action : Experimental Evidence from Albania |
| description |
It has been argued that accountability is a public good that only citizens can provide. Governments can put institutions in place that allow citizens to hold public servants to account, but citizens must participate in those institutions if accountability is to be achieved. Thus, citizens face a social dilemma — participate in holding public servants to account at a cost in terms of time and effort or free ride, i.e. do not participate, while benefiting from the efforts of those who do. If this characterization of accountability is valid, we would expect more cooperatively inclined citizens to participate in accountability institutions, while the less cooperatively inclined do not. We test the validity of this characterization by investigating the correlation between individual behavior in a simple public goods game and their participation in local and national accountability institutions in Albania. We involve a nationally representative sample of 1800 adults with children in primary school. We find significant correlations between cooperativeness and participation in school accountability institutions and national elections, both at the individual level and the district level. These correlations are robust to the introduction of many controls in the analysis and, in the case of national elections, to the use of official election turn-out statistics in place of self-reported turn-out. |
| format |
Journal Article |
| topic_facet |
accountability participation elections collective action public good game |
| author |
Barr, Abigail Packard, Truman Serra, Danila |
| author_facet |
Barr, Abigail Packard, Truman Serra, Danila |
| author_sort |
Barr, Abigail |
| title |
Participatory Accountability and Collective Action : Experimental Evidence from Albania |
| title_short |
Participatory Accountability and Collective Action : Experimental Evidence from Albania |
| title_full |
Participatory Accountability and Collective Action : Experimental Evidence from Albania |
| title_fullStr |
Participatory Accountability and Collective Action : Experimental Evidence from Albania |
| title_full_unstemmed |
Participatory Accountability and Collective Action : Experimental Evidence from Albania |
| title_sort |
participatory accountability and collective action : experimental evidence from albania |
| publisher |
Elsevier |
| publishDate |
2014-02-06 |
| url |
http://hdl.handle.net/10986/18196 |
| work_keys_str_mv |
AT barrabigail participatoryaccountabilityandcollectiveactionexperimentalevidencefromalbania AT packardtruman participatoryaccountabilityandcollectiveactionexperimentalevidencefromalbania AT serradanila participatoryaccountabilityandcollectiveactionexperimentalevidencefromalbania |
| _version_ |
1756573476569743360 |