Under Review
The Effect of Government Intervention on the Operational Decisions of NGOs: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Three Countries
with Simon Hollerbauer, Graeme Robertson, Jeremy Springman, and Erik Wibbels.
Democratic backsliding has become a major global concern. In many countries, governments have shut down NGOs and CSOs, persecuted their members, and banned free speech. At the same time, repressive governments have attempted to co-opt NGOs and the services they provide. However, we know relatively little about how NGOs respond to various forms of government repression and facilitation. My co-authors and I argue that NGOs respond to government intervention by modifying their behavior to increase contact with facilitating government authorities and avoid contact with more repressive government authorities. We focus on three of the most common tools that governments utilize – operational, physical, and rhetorical repression – and how they affect NGOs’ operational decisions.
We test this argument using a survey of directors and managers from 425 NGOs in Cambodia, Uganda, and Serbia. Relying on traditional and survey experimental questions, we show that government interventions have a large impact on the operational decisions of NGOs, even relative to other important factors like the community's level of development and the amount of project funding. Importantly, facing repression, NGOs become less willing to collaborate with others but more willing to engage the public in civic action. Thus, while repression both reduces the willingness of NGOs to operate in certain communities and isolates them from other NGOs, repression can also drive civic engagement. Efforts to enhance NGO resilience to repressive governments need to take into account NGO strategies to circumvent such repression
Foreign Aid and the Performance of Bureaucrats
Foreign aid is an important source of funding for development projects in many countries. However, aid effectiveness remains uncertain. While a large body of scholarship has explored numerous reasons for this ambiguity, little work has examined the crucial impact of aid on bureaucrats – the individuals who implement aid projects and make states work. In this paper, I connect aid effectiveness and bureaucratic performance by providing the first experimental test of bureaucrats’ preferences for financial incentives and social preferences susceptible to aid induced changes and the resultant effect on performance on both aid projects and regular government work. I utilize survey experimental data collected from 559 bureaucrats across 6 primary central government ministries in Uganda. I show that bureaucrats prefer both higher financial incentives and favorable social dimensions of work – autonomy, equity, and coordination with peers. And while financial incentives do not displace bureaucrats’ social preferences, with increased financial incentives, bureaucrats are willing to divert effort away from their regular government duties to aid projects. The results suggest that increased donor oversight and selective allocation of aid funds and responsibilities undermine bureaucrats’ social preferences. Furthermore, even as international donors incentivize bureaucratic effort on their own short term projects, that may come at the expense of overall bureaucratic efficacy.
Chiefs, Political Participation, and Public Goods Provision in Ghana
Traditional leaders such as chiefs are an integral part of service delivery, particularly in areas with low state capacity. Traditional leaders utilize both their embeddedness in the communities they serve and proximity to political elites to secure basic services for their citizens and to extend the reach of the state. But, do traditional leaders enhance their constituents’ access to state governance structures? And how does enhanced access impact service delivery outcomes? I argue that strong traditional authorities, i.e., those who play a decisive role in local government institutions, can improve access to these institutions for their constituents. And, because their constituents, therefore, have greater say in governance decisions, they are more likely to be satisfied with basic services and with the performance of the state. This argument stands in sharp contrast to a long line of work in the social sciences that posits an inverse relationship between the strength of informal and formal forms of governance. It further diverges from literature that characterizes traditional authorities as gatekeepers who obscure the functions of the state.
I test my argument using household data collected from 3,889 households across 150 districts in rural Ghana. I leverage a causal design by utilizing a random intervention that provides citizens with audit information about the performance of their district administration. I determine whether the presence of a strong chief conditions the effect of the intervention on citizens’ participation in district government decision-making and on citizens’ perceptions of their district government’s performance. I find that citizens in treatment areas with strong chiefs are more likely to participate in district government decisions about development projects and to be satisfied with the performance of their district government and with the quality of services than citizens in treatment areas with weak chiefs. However, this is only true in districts that receive the government audit and not in districts that receive the community organizations audit. While mixed, the results underscore the importance of including traditional authorities in governance structures – their ability to enhance accountability, clarify state functions, and improve citizen satisfaction.
Work in Progress
Perceptions of Meritocratic Recruitment and Willingness to Pay Taxes
with Diego Romero
Refugee Perceptions of Resettlement Policy and Local Integration
with Manya Kagan, Guy Grossman, and Ibrahim Kasirye