Abstract: Civic engagement underpins a healthy democracy when it provides channels outside of elections for citizens to express preferences and demands to politicians. This mechanism of democratic accountability is undermined when groups of citizens face differential access or barriers to participation. I argue that, particularly in developing country settings, women face discrimination in the public sphere, impeding their participation in civic life. Given the complexity and sensitivity of the subject of gender norms, this study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods. First, I examine the impacts of a field experiment in the West African country of Mali that randomly assigned a civics course to some localities and not others. This exogenous increase in civic and political information caused no net effect on treated communities, but had striking effects conditional on gender: men participated significantly more in civic activity while women participated less. Focus groups and interviews suggest that in a place where women are traditionally unwelcome actors in the public sphere, the intervention heightened the salience of civic participation, thus increasing costs to participation for women. Following the course, women who wished to engage in civic activity reported both implicit and explicit threats of sanctions from male relatives and village elders. The intervention did, however, improve women's knowledge and ability to evaluate poor performance, and increased male civic participants and the airing of grievances. Together, these findings suggest that citizens do face an information constraint to civic participation, but that information alone cannot overcome inegalitarian social norms – and may even exacerbate them.
About the Presenter: Jessica Gottlieb joined the Bush School in the fall of 2013 after earning her PhD in political science at Stanford University. She also holds a Master’s degree in economics from Stanford University. Her research and teaching interests include democratic accountability in developing countries, political and economic development in Africa, as well as formal and informal institutions. Much of her research has been in sub-Saharan Africa, where she has conducted field experiments, behavioral games and surveys. Her dissertation was a study in Mali of why free and fair elections failed to generate government accountability in a new democracy. Her work has also taken her Senegal, Liberia, France and the West Bank. Prior to her doctoral studies, Gottlieb worked at the Center for Global Development on a project encouraging bilateral donors, country governments and multilateral organizations to better learn what works in development through improved impact evaluation. She previously studied at Yale University, receiving a dual BA degree cum laude in political science and international studies in 2004. While at Stanford, Gottlieb received the Stanford Interdisciplinary Fellowship and was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law.
