Ruben Enikolopov

Empowering Women: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan

In societies with widespread gender discrimination, development programs that encourage female participation in local governance can potentially redress gender imbalances in economic, political, and social outcomes. Using a randomized field experiment encompassing 500 Afghan villages, this study finds that a development program which incorporates mandated female participation increases female mobility and involvement in income generation, but does not change female roles in family decision-making or attitudes toward the general role of women in society.

Direct democracy and resource allocation experimental evidence from Afghanistan

Direct democracy is designed to better align public resource allocation decisions with citizen preferences. Using a randomized field experiment in 250 villages across Afghanistan, this paper compares outcomes of secret-ballot referenda with those of consultation meetings, which adhere to customary decision-making practices. Elites are found to exert influence over meeting outcomes, but not over referenda outcomes, which are driven primarily by citizen preferences. Referenda are also found to improve public satisfaction, whereas elite domination of allocation processes has a negative effect. The results indicate that the use of direct democracy in public resource allocation results in more legitimate outcomes than those produced by customary processes.

Politicians, bureaucrats and targeted redistribution

The paper argues that for political reasons elected politicians are more likely to be engaged in targeted redistribution than appointed bureaucrats. It uses the example of patronage jobs in the U.S. local governments to provide empirical support for this claim. It shows that the number of public employees is higher for elected chief executives. This difference is stronger in public services with bigger private–public wage differential and it increases during election years. It also finds that the number of public employees increases with the age of bureaucrats while there is no such relationship in the case of politicians, which is consistent with younger bureaucrats having stronger career concerns.

Do Elected Councils Improve Governance? Experimental Evidence on Local Institutions in Afghanistan

Using data from a field experiment in 500 villages, this paper studies how local institutions affect the quality of governance, as measured by aid distribution outcomes. In villages where elected councils exist and manage distributions, aid targeting improves. However, if the distribution is not clearly assigned to either the council or customary leaders, the creation of elected councils increases embezzlement and makes decision-making less inclusive. Requiring that women manage the distribution jointly with customary leaders also increases embezzlement. Thus, while elected councils can improve governance, overlapping mandates between new and existing institutions may result in increased rent-seeking.Using a randomized field experiment we look at the effect of the creation of democratically elected councils in rural Afghanistan on local governance quality, as measured by the outcomes of a food aid distribution. The results indicate that when the distribution is managed by democratic councils, rather than traditional leaders, the food aid targeting is improved and the level of embezzlement is not changed. However, in villages in which a council was created, but the responsibility for managing the aid distribution was not explicitly assigned to it, targeting was not improved and embezzlement increased. Requiring female participation in the distribution also increased embezzlement and did not improve targeting. Overall, the results show that the creation of democratic institutions can improve governance, but only if institutional responsibilities are clearly defined. But if democratic institutions are created in parallel with traditional ones and responsibilities are not clearly defined this may lead to an increase in corruption.

Social Media and Protest Participation: Evidence from Russia

Do new communication technologies, such as social media, reduce collective action problem? This paper provides evidence that penetration of VK, the dominant Russian online social network, affected protest activity during a wave of protests in Russia in 2011. As a source of exogenous variation in network penetration, we use information on the city of origin of the students who studied together with the founder of VK, controlling for the city of origin of the students who studied at the same university several years earlier or later. We find that a 10% increase in VK penetration increased the probability of a protest by 4.6%, and the number of protesters by 19%. Additional results suggest that social media has affected protest activity by reducing the costs of coordination, rather than by spreading information critical of the government. In particular, VK penetration increased pro-governmental support and reduced the number of people who were ready to participate in protests right before the protests took place. Also, cities with higher fractionalization of network users between VK and Facebook experienced fewer protests. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that municipalities with higher VK penetration received smaller transfers from the central government after the occurrence of protests.

The National Solidarity Program: Assessing the Effects of Community-Driven Development in Afghanistan

Over the past two decades, community-based approaches to project delivery have become a popular means for governments and development agencies to improve the alignment of projects with the needs of rural communities and to increase the participation of villagers in project design and implementation. This article briefly summarizes the results of an impact evaluation of the National Solidarity Programme (NSP), a community-driven development programme in Afghanistan that created democratically-elected community development councils and funded small-scale development projects. Using a randomized controlled trial across 500 villages, the evaluation finds that NSP had a positive effect on access to drinking water and electricity, acceptance of democratic processes, perceptions of economic well-being and attitudes towards women. Effects on perceptions of local and national government performance and material economic outcomes were, however, more limited or short-lived.

Electoral rules and political selection : theory and evidence from a field experiment in Afghanistan

United States. Army Research Office. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (Award W911NF-12-1-0509)

Politics, instability, and composition of international investment flows

We analyze the role of political instability for the composition of foreign investment, whether it takes the form of a majority- or minority-owned investment. We focus on the instability generated by the change of the party in power rather than on the risk of change of political regime or expropriation risk associated with this change. In majority-owned establishments, a foreign investor retains the control and enjoys fewer agency problems, while for minority-owned investments or joint ventures domestic partners of a foreign investor can lobby the government for preferential arrangements, such as firm-specific tax breaks. Political instability decreases the payoff of political connections in the future and decreases the attractiveness of minority-owned investments. The implications of our model are supported by empirical tests.

Social Image, Networks, and Protest Participation

Social motivation plays a vital role in electoral participation, political contributions, and charitable donations. We examine the role of social image concerns in the decision to participate in political protests. We develop a dynamic model of protest participation, where socially-minded individuals use protest participation to signal their type. We then test predictions of the model using individual and city-level data from 2011-2012 political protests in Russia. We report several findings, consistent with the theory. First, list experiment results from a specially conducted survey imply that social signaling motives indeed were important for the decision to participate in protests. Second, participation in online protest groups increased offline protest participation. Third, participation in protests was associated with higher social capital in a city. Finally, the importance of both online social networks and offline social capital for protest participation diminished over time.