Governments around the world spend billions of dollars annually to provide basic services such as drivers’ licenses and policing, and typically undertake the subsidized (or free) provision of services such as health care and education for the poor. Further, international aid organizations often channel their development dollars through government-run programs. Increasingly, these governments are electorally accountable to their citizens.

But lack of information about the political process or the performance of their politicians can undermine citizens’ capacity to impact development policies, making them unable to use democratic channels to affect the quality of their institutions. And the effectiveness of such public spending is often compromised by a number of connected factors: technological constraints on implementing policies, the choice of policies that do not reflect the needs or wishes of the people, leakages due to corruption, lack of community participation, and poor oversight of public spending. 

Understanding the nature of citizen participation in politics and the influence of different political institutions that create policies and determine government priorities, as well the environmental factors that ensure that those policies are well implemented, is critical for improving service delivery in developing countries. Yet until recently, there was little quantitative evidence about the extent of leakage in service delivery and the nature of participation.

The Political Economy and Governance Program (PEG) will focus on field experiments in governance. The aim is to provide rigorous evidence on underlying economic theories of governance and identify how policy responses can improve governance outcomes in low-income countries. Topics of interest include:

• Understanding the determinants of citizen participation in the political process.
• The role of community participation and community ownership of shared resources to improve citizen control over policy.
• Understanding the impact on corruption and the efficiency of public services of compensation and incentives schemes for bureaucrats, and innovative improvements in program design.

As part of PEG, J-PAL has launched the Governance Initiative (GI) to encourage and fund randomized impact evaluations of programs designed to improve participation in the political and policy process, and reduce leakages in public programs. By providing targeted funding for rigorous evaluations of the most promising programs to improve governance, GI aims to provide guidance for organizations and governments in developing countries as well as the donors who provide support to these countries, so that policies can be guided by scientific evidence on what works (or does not work). Through dissemination of findings to policymakers and by providing support for the scale-up and replication of successful programs, GI will help translate this evidence into concrete policy change. More details about the GI can be found here.

PEG is co-chaired by Professor Benjamin Olken and Professor Rohini Pande. The Program Manager is Iqbal Dhaliwal, supported by Cristobal Marshall and Conner Brannen. For further inquiries, please contact cmarshal@mit.edu.