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The Role of Leaders in Democratic Deliberations: Results from a Field Experiment in São Tomé and Príncipe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Macartan Humphreys ,
William A. Masters  and
Martin E. Sandbu
Macartan Humphreys
Affiliation:
Columbia University
William A. Masters
Affiliation:
Purdue University
Martin E. Sandbu
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Abstract

Despite a widespread trend toward the adoption of increasingly participatory approaches to political decision making in developing countries, there is little or no evidence that these practices in fact return the benefits attributed to them. This article investigates one specific worry—that participatory decision-making processes may be vulnerable to manipulation by elites. The authors report on a field experiment, drawing on a unique nationwide experiment in democratic deliberation in São Tomé and Príncipe in which the discussion leaders were randomly assigned across meetings. The randomization procedure provides a rare opportunity to identify the impact of leaders on the outcomes of group deliberations. They find that leader effects were extremely large, in many cases accounting for over one-third of all variation in the outcomes of the national discussions. These results have important implications for the design of such deliberative practices. While the total effect of leadership cannot be assessed, it may still be possible to observe when leader influence occurs and to correct for leader effects in comparisons of outcomes across deliberations.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , July 2006 , pp. 583 - 622
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2006

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References

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2 As an analogy, a study showing systematic differences between majoritarian versus PR systems could establish that institutions matter even in the absence of a no-institution benchmark. The converse is not true, however. If there is no variation in outcomes associated with different types of institutions, this does not establish that institutions do not matter; for such a claim a no-institution benchmark would be needed. We return to this point below.

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27 Ibid.

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29 Available on-line at http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/cgsd/STP/documents/Questionnaire P_final_000.pdf.

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32 For an argument against such structures, see Chambers (fn. 4), 1441.

33 The Saotomean authorities chose to organize proportionately more forum meetings in the less-populated districts, to give equal access to all citizens. Our sampling method follows this approach and should therefore be seen as representative of the population as it was targeted by the forum meetings, rather than of the unweighted national population. There were two districts for which we could not sample respondents before the forum meetings, since the forum was already starting in those locations at the time the survey interviews were launched. The remaining districts, which we did sample, account for 86 percent of the voting population in the country. Th e forum meetings in the two missing districts (Caué and Cantagaló), moreover, were demographically similar to the forum-going population nationally.

34 For more details about the survey and a more detailed analysis of the effect of forum participation on privately reported individual preferences, see Martin E. Sandbu, “Does Deliberation Engender Public-Spiritedness? A Study of Deliberative Democracy in Sao Tome and Principe's National Forum” (Manuscript, Wharton Business School, 2006).

35 These two are the first session (the pilot) held in Santa Margarida and an extra final session (the makeup) held in Trindade.

36 To illustrate the logic, consider a binary setting and assume that in the absence of manipulation by leaders a given group would select option 1 with probability q. Assume that share α of leaders in fact support option 1. Finally, assume that if a leader does not like the outcome that a group would otherwise select, he has the ability to exercise influence and change the outcome with probability β. This bias parameter, β, is not directly observable. Nonetheless we can show that the R 2 statistic—that is, the share of variance in outcomes explained by the characteristics of leaders—provides rich information on β. In this case the expected R 2 is given by

We can see from this expression that conditional upon some level of heterogeneity across leaders (α€(0, 1)), R2=0 if and only if β=0, and R2=1 if and only if β=1. In addition, for all values of q, α β, we can show that R 2≤β. Hence if R 2 of the variation can be explained by leader characteristics, then at least share R 2 of the time, leaders can enforce their will on the groups that they lead.

37 Our “intention to treat” variable was determined by replacing our leader indicator (in cases where the leader for a meeting did not correspond to one of the assigned leaders for a site) with a leader randomly selected from the pool of leaders that ought to have gone (but did not go) to a particular meeting. In some cases there were no such individuals. This can arise, for example, if due to large turnout more meetings are held at a given venue than originally planned. In such cases in which a leader is moved from one venue to another to lead an unanticipated meeting, the leader is not in fact replacing any other leader. Rather, there is an unanticipated observation in the data.

38 If we add a fixed effect for each location, we find that using an F test on the leader dummies we continue to be able to reject the null of no leader effect in nine of twelve cases at the 90 percent level and in seven cases at the 95 percent level. By construction, location variables are independent of leader dummies. Moderador dummies are not, however; the introduction of these moderador dummies is discussed below.

39 The weights placed on leaders' preferences to generate these averages are determined by their relative frequency in leading discussions.

40 The tests on the effects of age and gender effectively assume that the observations we examine are all independent. However insofar as the responses of meetings run by a given discussion leader are correlated, this assumption is inappropriate. It is not possible to include fixed effects in our examination of gender and age effects, since these effects are themselvesfixed.In order then to isolate these effects, we also implemented a test that focuses narrowly on the effects of gender and age characteristics independent of individual fixed effects by taking the average response to a question over the set of meetings led by a given leader and regressing average responses on the gender and age of the leader. This reduces the number of observations to between thirty and forty for each regression and so provides a difficult environment to identify these effects. We find that for two issues gender effects remain strong and significant at conventional levels and for another two age effects remain strong, accounting for between 10 and 20 percent of the observed variation. These results are available on request from the authors.

41 Chattopadhyay, Raghabendra and Duflo, Esther, “Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from an India-Wide Randomized Policy Experiment,” Econometrica 72 (September 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Although, we note, there is no relationship between the number of older people attending the meetings and responses on this issue.

43 A counterargument is the following: plausibly individuals are more likely to change their opinion on some issues than on other issues. For issue-areas in which opinions are relatively fixed, we should expect that none of the variance in responses is explained byfixedeffects and that there will be no correlation between leader preferences and group preferences', in those areas in which opinions are more easily swayed, it is conceivable that individuals in a group are influenced by some feature not necessarily related to a leader's attitudes (for example, they may be affected simply by a leader's age or gender) and subsequently adopt a position that the leader in turn adopts, swayed by the position of the group (itself a function of some feature of the leader other than her prior preferences). This argument relies on the notion that leaders are different from participants in the sense of being very open to suasion, whereas participants, though not open to suasion based on the attitudes of leaders, are very ready to change their views based on other characteristics of leaders. Convoluted as this argument is, we are not yet able to discount it.

44 For an experimental study on cue taking, see Kuklinsky, James H. and Hurley, Norman L., “On Hearing and Interpreting of Political Messages: A Cautionary Tale of Citizen Cue-Taking,” journal of Politics 56, no. 3 (1994)Google Scholar.

45 In a given instance it may not be possible to determine whether a particular conclusion provided by a leader that does not correspond to the opinions of individuals is a result of deliberate misrepresentation or self-censorship; both may be in operation. Persuasion and information provision may in practice be inseparable. And there is much scope for interactions: it is possible that that self-censorship by one section of a discussion group will lead to a preponderance of arguments by a second section that leads to a third section being persuaded by the arguments of the second section.

46 It is of course possible for leader influence to alter the preferences of participants during the course of discussions but for this influence to be very short lived with a near-immediate reversion to prior attitudes subsequent to the discussions.

47 Note that leader suasion (direct or indirect) is a sufficient but not necessary condition for changes in opinions.

48 Although not reported here, no significant changes in any given direction were observed for any of the questions, with one exception: tax rates. Average preferred tax rates declined from 16 percent to 11 percent. Median rates for this issue-area were constant over time at 10 percent.

49 We note, however, a caveat on the interpretation of our results. Our interpretation assumes that individuals do not systematically misrepresent their views when responding to surveys at the individual level. If instead respondents misrepresented their views either because of a consistency bias —with respondents wishing to provide the same answer to the question that they had previously provided, even though their positions may have changed, in order to appear to be consistent—or another audience effect on the part of respondents—with respondents not willing to provide a given answer in private even though they feel comfortable expressing the attitude in a public setting—then we would fail to reject the null for these reasons. While neither appears a priori plausible for the questions at hand, we recognize that we cannot rule out these possibilities.

50 In further experimental work, however, such an effect could be more satisfactorily identified by distinguishing between the moderating and reporting functions of discussion leaders.

51 Note again that for situations like that described in fn. 36, the R 2 is simply a lower bound on leader influence.

52 Chattopadhyay and Duflo (fn. 41).

53 Ackerman and Fishkin (fn. 1).