Policing Politicians: Citizen Empowerment and Political Accountability in Uganda

Does greater transparency improve governmental performance and increase political accountability? In this paper, we use a simple model of political accountability to derive a set of hypotheses linking information to political behavior; we introduce a unique field experiment designed to test these hypotheses in the context of MP behavior in Uganda; and we provide findings from a preintervention experiment designed to search for early evidence on the effects of information on parliamentary activity. The field experiment focuses on three outcomes of interest (i) how members of parliament perform (ii) voter attitudes and behavior and (iii) electoral outcomes. The key strategy involves generating, together with the support of the Ugandan Parliament and the Africa Leadership Institute, an annual scorecard reporting on the performance of MPs which is then disseminated to a random sub-sample of constituencies, through extensive constituency-level workshops involving MPs and opposition candidates. The set of treatment communities is selected to provide balance on MP performance and party affiliation and was made public knowledge to MPs in December 2007, four years in advance of the next parliamentary