UC Santa Barbara

Citizen monitoring of government performance is often ineffective at improving performance, perhaps because information from monitoring does not make it far enough up in the chain of bureaucracy where the authority to punish public mismanagement rests. In a field experiment, we test whether delivering regular, officially certified reports derived from citizen monitoring and describing specific problems with the implementation of public projects to high-level bureaucrats charged with overseeing the projects improved their delivery. We do not find evidence that this treatment improved the delivery of public projects. Follow-up interviews revealed that the targeted officials seemed to avoid knowledge of the monitoring, perhaps to avoid taking on the responsibility that would come from such knowledge. However, the treatment also provided information to citizens about what they should expect from local governments, which instigated several direct complaints that the targeted officials did not ignore. Based on this alternative channel, which we did not anticipate, we conclude that citizen monitoring must be deployed in ways that make knowledge of problems undeniable for authorities who have a responsibility to address them.