Texting Bad Politicians Out of Office

We propose a project exploiting the existing capability of our partner organization, the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) in India, to target election-related text messages to large portions of the Indian population. We plan to run a large-scale SMS-based experiment in the week prior to the November 2015 state legislative assembly elections in the state of Bihar. The experiment will contain multiple treatment arms to allow us to separately identify the effects on voting behavior of: (i) a simple reminder, (ii) increased information about candidate characteristics, (iii) and a statement meant to support coordination on newly received information. Our findings will help improve our understanding of the relatively high persistence of seemingly low-quality candidates in India.