Information Effects on Local Governance in Developing Democracies: A Field Experiment in Mali

Date
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Event Sponsor
The Munro Lectureship Fund and The Lane Center
Speaker

Jessica Gottlieb, PhD Candidate, Stanford University

 

 

Biography

Jessica Gottlieb is a  PhD Candidate in her fifth year at Stanford.  She is conducting research on political development and government accountability in poor countries. Her dissertation focuses on one developing democracy, Mali. Variation across Mali's 703 democratically-run municipalities permits comparative analysis of the determinants of accountability at the local level. Preliminary studies show a widespread lack of information about local governance among citizens. This motivated an experiment she is running in a selection of Malian municipalities to assess the impact of civic education on voter behavior and local government performance. She received an MA in Economics from Stanford in 2011 and plans to complete the PhD in Political Science in 2013.