This is the 27th in this year’s series of posts by PhD students on the job market.
Over two billion people live in countries where governments routinely under-deliver on essential public services. Yet citizens rarely use formal grievance systems to demand better. To address this participation gap, policymakers have promoted transparency programmes designed to make government performance visible to citizens. These initiatives rest on a simple premise: if citizens know that their locality is under-performing, they will press officials to improve.
But does transparency actually work? Despite major investments in government-led transparency programmes, we still lack evidence on whether information from these initiatives succeeds in changing citizen participation behavior. Moreover, the mechanisms driving potential behavior change remain poorly understood. How do citizens interpret transparency information? What role do their prior beliefs play?
In my job market paper (with Diwakar Kishore), we test a low-cost, scalable intervention built on a national transparency initiative, the Aspirational Districts Programme, in India to answer two questions. First, does information about government performance from a flagship transparency programme change citizens' participation in non-electoral accountability (e.g., meeting civic officials, filing complaints, petition signing, and attending workshops on grievance redressal systems)? Second, what mechanisms drive this change? We explore two belief dimensions as relevant mechanisms: whether citizens believe their actions can influence service delivery, and how they perceive their locality's performance relative to comparable places.
Our Setting: A district in India's Aspirational Districts Programme
Since 2018, India’s Aspirational Districts Programme has tracked 112 most underdeveloped districts (aspirational districts) out of the country’s 800, across 49 development indicators. The government publishes monthly performance rankings on a public dashboard, hoping that transparency will drive citizen demand for accountability and bureaucratic competition. This initiative is one of the first large-scale government efforts in a developing country to systematically track and publicly disclose local performance rankings. It is therefore highly policy relevant for assessing how transparency can improve accountability and service delivery.
The dashboard reports each district’s performance and rank among the 112 aspirational districts across various indicators, but it remains difficult to use given the low literacy and numeracy levels of citizens living in these districts. We web-scraped district performance data from this public dashboard on three indicators: severely underweight children under six, public elementary schools not complying with pupil-teacher ratios, and habitations lacking all-weather roads. Using these data, we created rankings for one aspirational district—Ranchi—and compared its performance on these indicators with five neighboring aspirational districts in the same Indian state of Jharkhand. The rankings were based on the actual performance levels reported for each indicator, with higher ranks assigned to worse-performing districts and lower ranks (closer to 1) assigned to better performing districts.
Ranchi, an aspirational district of over one million residents, provided an ideal setting for our study. Pre-intervention survey data from 2,107 respondents across 51 villages revealed four key patterns:
- Citizens were active in community forums but rarely used formal grievance channels—only 12% had ever filed a formal complaint despite widespread dissatisfaction.
- Fewer than 10% had ever heard of the Aspirational Districts Programme, and only 4% knew of its performance dashboard.
- Most citizens viewed service quality as poor yet overestimated their district’s relative performance; over 75% ranked it higher than reality, and overestimation predicted lower participation.
- Finally, 90% believed citizens had little influence, yet this perception did not deter those who did engage.
This gap between official statistics and popular beliefs and participation behaviour creates an opportunity to test whether correcting overestimated beliefs can unlock citizen participation.
The field experiment: Translating transparency information for citizens
We conducted a randomized field experiment which randomly assigned respondents within each village to watch one of two videos. The treatment video showed accurate data about district performance, comparing their district to five neighboring aspirational districts, with animated bar charts showing worsening rank since 2018 on the 3 development indicators. In addition, we also mentioned formal accountability channels: digital complaint applications, the central grievance redressal system, and responsible civic officials for different kinds of public services. The control group watched a placebo video about ancient history.
After watching the video and towards the end of the survey, both groups then faced real participation opportunities: registering for a workshop organised by a local organisation to introduce citizens to grievance redressal systems and signing petitions for the District Magistrate for better public services in health, education, and infrastructure. We then measured attendance of citizens in these workshops. One month later, we surveyed everyone about subsequent participation behaviours: if citizens had ever submitted formal complaints, met civic officials, attended local village meetings, talked to citizen groups, and expressed opinions on social media.
Transparency works - When citizens overestimate government performance
Three key findings emerged from the study.
Citizens participated more, both immediately after and one month later. Panel A, Figure 1 shows that workshop attendance increased by 8 percentage points, and petition signing rose by 5 percentage points relative to the control group. One month later, treated respondents were more likely to engage in both individual and collective forms of civic participation. Individual actions included expressing opinions on social media or using formal complaint portals, while collective actions involved meeting civic officials, attending village meetings, talking to citizen groups or joining civil society initiatives (Panel B, Figure 1). We combine these activities into an overall participation index to summarize the effects. We found no change in voting preferences, including choice of political party or reasons for voting.
Citizens became more aware of their district’s rank. Immediately after watching the video, treated respondents were less likely to overestimate their district’s rank on child malnutrition, pupil-teacher ratio, and quality of roads (Panel C, Figure 1). However, their beliefs about personal influence of civic action over public service quality remained unchanged (Panel D, Figure 1). One month later, beliefs about the district’s rank converged between the treated and control groups but citizens in the treated group were significantly more likely to know that their district is part of the Aspirational Districts Programme, that the programme aims to promote civic participation, and that the performance information is published on a public dashboard.
Figure 1: Information increased participation behaviour and corrected beliefs about district performance, but did not change perceived influence
Overestimators of district’s performance increased participation. Panel A, Figure 2 shows that citizen participation behaviours increased only among respondents who initially overestimated their district’s performance—respondents who initially believed their district ranked higher in performance than it actually did. This group also corrected their beliefs about the district’s rank and reported lower satisfaction with public services and reduced trust in local government immediately after watching the video. In contrast, citizens who already believed their district was underperforming showed no change in participation, satisfaction, or trust.
Figure 2: Only citizens who initially overestimated district performance increased their participation
Citizens' beliefs about their ability to influence government remained unchanged. The treatment had no effects on whether citizens thought that officials were free of corruption, whether people could protest freely, whether their concerns were heard, or whether they could voice concerns without fear. There were also no effects on beliefs about community support for participation or civic duty. Awareness of the transparency program increased equally for everyone.
We rule out alternative explanations: effects did not vary by baseline characteristics such as awareness of government programs, prior civic activity, education, caste, or perceived influence over the government.
Overall, the evidence from our study points to an accountability channel driven by beliefs about relative ranking. Learning that one’s district performs worse than its peers increased participation while keeping beliefs about own influence of actions unchanged.
Policy implications: Getting transparency right
Transparency improves accountability only when citizens understand and act on the information provided. In India’s aspirational districts, awareness of Aspirational Districts Programme and government performance remains low among residents of these districts. Our intervention offers a scalable, low-cost complement. A short video costing about $1 per person generated sustained increases in citizen participation. Scaling this approach across all 112 districts could reach 180 million adults.
As India invests in expanding transparency infrastructure to the block level, pairing dashboard expansion with information delivery could transform data collection into genuine demand for accountability by its citizens. The challenge isn't just tracking performance but also ensuring the 250 million people this programme aims to help, actually know about it and can act on it.
Pallavi Prabhakar is a PhD student at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH)
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