Voter information campaigns and political accountability: Cumulative findings from a preregistered meta-analysis of coordinated trials
Name
eaaw2612.full.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
872.53 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
bc5e1fc2532d6bc00eef54357011df29
Author(s)
Hidalgo, Fernando Daniel
Date Issued
July 2019
Journal
Science Advances
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Dunning, Thad et al. "Voter information campaigns and political accountability: Cumulative findings from a preregistered meta-analysis of coordinated trials." Science Advances 5 (2019):eaaw2612 © 2019 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives’ performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevaant learning.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2612
