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Together We Will: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Female Voter Turnout in Pakistan Xavier Gine & Ghazala Mansuri DECRG, World Bank Motivation Over the 20 th century, women have acquired de jure rights to participate in democratic institutions
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Together We Will: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Female Voter Turnout in Pakistan Xavier Gine & Ghazala Mansuri DECRG, World Bank
Motivation • Over the 20th century, women have acquired de jure rights to participate in democratic institutions • Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) • Convention on the Political Rights of Women (1952) • International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) • Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979) • However, barriers to effective participation by women both as voters and as legislators remain significant • Number of efforts to introduce quotas for women legislators. Results suggest some impact on policy choices as well as perceptions (Chattopadhyay & Duflo (2004); Bardhan et al (2005, 2008); Ban and Rao (2008)) • But women also have: • Lower participation rates as voters • They are also more likely to vote in accordance with the preference of male clan and household heads (family voting)– unlike men of all ages
Why should we care? • Good governance and development viewed as intrinsically linked (Sen 1999); World Bank (2005) • Voting is essential for electoral accountability: Basic premise of representative democracy is that those who are subject to policy should have a voice in its making. • Preference Heterogeneity: Women have different preferences so their participation could lead to different policy choices • Human Rights/Equity
Potential barriers to female participation in the electoral process • Costs of Participation: • Social constraints may restrict choices and/or restrict women’s freedom of movement • Traditions, social and cultural stereotypes may lead to a sense of disempowerment and discourage women from participation in electoral processes or exercising their own preferences • Concerns about security in conflict environments may have a greater impact on female participation • Information: • Women have fewer and poorer sources of information about the significance of political participation and/or the balloting process, in part due to illiteracy and mobility constraints • Lack of information may reinforce disempowerment and stereotypes
What we assess • How important is information for turnout and candidate choice? • Why? • Attitudes change slowly but information can be provided quickly and may serve to • enhance equity • induce a change in attitudes (Beaman et al (2007)) • be habit forming (Gerber, Green, Shachar (2003)) • change policy (Edlund & Pande (2002); Lott & Kenny (1999)) • Are there significant peer effects? • Why? • Is this a cost effective way to boost participation? • Evidence of spillovers (Duflo & Saez (2003); Kremer & Miguel (2004 & 2007)) • Evidence of contagion within family (Nickerson(2008)) • Does information matter more/less when an election takes place in a politically volatile environment and is highly contested?
Context • Rural Pakistan • According to the 1998 Human Development Report, Pakistan ranked • 138 out of 174 on the Human Development Index (HDI) • 131 out of 163 on the Gender Development Index (GDI) • 100 out of 102 on the Gender Empowerment Measure(GEM) • “Political parties, by and large, tend to view women as a passive vote bank, following the dictates of men within their families or clans. Even within their own parties, they treat them largely as followers to be strategically used for election canvassing and public campaigns. Thus, most parties do not even have lists of female members.” “ Aurat Foundation,2004
What we do • Conduct a door to door voter information campaign directed at rural women just before the February 2008 national elections in Pakistan • Two “treatments” • The importance of voting (T1) • T1 plus the significance of secret balloting: Ability to vote in accordance with one’s own preferences without external pressure (T2) • The information campaign was developed as a set of simple visual messages
Study Design-1 • Two districts in Sindh, Sukkur and Khairpur, selected because sharp electoral competition between two major political parties • Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) (secular-left leaning) and • Pakistan Muslim League (F) (allied with the military, led mainly by large landlords who are also religious leaders “pirs”). • 6 villages selected from each district, where an NGO, MRDO, which mobilizes women using a CBD approach was either working (or about to start work) • 3 villages in Khairpur dropped just before the elections due to security concerns. These had more contested polling stations relative to our sample villages • Final sample has 9 villages and 21 polling stations • Average village population: approx 300 households
Study Design-2 • Variation in treatment type (T1 or T2) as well as treatment intensity to look at peer effects • Village divided into geographical clusters • Clusters randomly assigned to get T1, T2 or nothing as follows: • start in a random cluster, deliver T1 • leave a gap cluster • in the next cluster, deliver either T2 or nothing using a coin flip • leave a gap cluster • deliver either T2 or nothing depending on prior coin toss result • process repeated till all clusters in village covered • Households within clusters selected as follows: • starting from any one end, every fourth household selected until up to 18 households covered • In T1 and T2 clusters every 5th selected household left as a control. So 2 to 4 control households in treated clusters. • In controls clusters, all selected household left as controls.
Timeline Feb 5 -15 Feb 18 Feb 18-19 March 5-25 HH visits and Pre-Election Survey National Elections Voting Verification Post-Election Survey
Data I • Pre-Election Visit (information intervention): • Household location (GIS); basic roster of all adult women, plus past voting record and the name and address of closest friend/confidant in the village • No refusals, so we have 100% compliance • Post-election verification: • Self report and verification by checking ink stain • One friend per household, randomly selected from among women “eligible” to vote (had NIC or claimed to be on the voter list)
Data II • Post election survey • Household demographics, including caste (zaat/biradari) • Intervention checks • Mobility constraints • Access to media • Knowledge of location of polling station and the protocol for casting a vote • Election day environment • Knowledge of: candidates, party platforms, recent political events, election outcomes • Knowledge of whether other household members voted and for whom • Polling Station data • Electoral results by gender and by candidate/party
Final Sample • Pre-election visit: • 64 clusters • 1019 households • 2735 women • 2735 friends • Post-election verification visit: • 64 clusters • 992 households • 2637 women • 727 friends • 98 women (27 households) lost because of temporary or permanent household migration. Friends of women in lost households not verified. • Attrition is orthogonal to treatment • Ink mark was missing for 135 women who claimed to have cast a vote. Err on the safe side by treating these women as not having voted
Randomization worked • Little difference in household characteristics. Treatment households have a little more land than control households in some comparisons, but no difference in assets or housing quality • Women in treated households are a little younger in some comparisons and have more young kids as a result and also appear to have less access to cable TV, perhaps due to their lower mobility • In the analysis, we control for the household and woman characteristics that we lack balance on as well as the total number of women registered to vote in a polling station • We also control for whether the woman had a national id card (NIC), which is needed to cast a ballot, since young women are also less likely to have an NIC or to have voted in the past
Regression specification-Woman Level Average Effect • For woman i in household h in village v: Yihv= bThv + fXihv + uv + εihv • Yihv = Women voted (1=Yes) based on verification • Thv = treatment indicator • Xihv = vector of control variables • uv = village fixed effect • Standard errors clustered at geographic cluster level
Table 3: Average Effect of the Information Campaign on Turnout
Regression Specification-Peer effects-II • Similar to Kremer and Miguel (2004). For woman i in household h in village v: Yihv= bThv + ∑dD(gdDNTdD+ kdDNdD) + fXihv + uv + εihv • Yihv = Women voted (1=Yes) based on verification • Thv = treatment indicator • NTdD = number of treated households between distance d and D from household • NdD = number of households between distance d and D from household • Xihv = vector of control variables • uv= village fixed effect • Standard errors clustered at geographic cluster level
Regression SpecificationPolling Station Level • For polling station p in village v: Ypv= bNTpv + fXpv + εpv • Ypv = Number of valid votes cast by women • NTpv = Number of women treated in polling station • Xpv = Vector of polling station control variables, including the number of registered women
Table 8: Effect on Candidate Choice Using Cross Reports from Family Members
Summing up • Substantial peer effects • Accounting for spillovers, the information campaign increased turnout among sample women by about 12 % (little more than an additional female vote for every 10 women (or about 4 households treated) • The polling station level effects are much larger. For every 10 women treated, there are almost 7 additional votes • Information campaigns appear to be an effective way of reaching poor rural women • I additional vote cost about 103 Rs. (or 1.51 US$) • Some evidence that voting is habit forming, so sustained impacts from a single intervention are plausible • Information campaigns can affect not just turnout but also independence in candidate choice • Men in treated households have significantly less knowledge about women’s candidate choice • Information on electoral rights may be more valuable where differences in preferences over candidates are larger • The information campaign increased turnout in more contested areas, and in areas where PML-F had a significant vote share, although both tended to depress turnout among sample women
Table A3: Gender Differences in Radio and TV Access and Exposure to News
Table A4: Gender Differences in Knowledge about Current Political Issues and the Results of the Election
Table A5: Gender Differences in Participation in Village Political and Social Events
