Syndicate content  Do Elected Councils Improve Governance? -
Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan  Andrew Beath's picture
Opportunities do, though, occasionally present themselves at the
local level. That is, there are, from time-to-time, instances
whereby specific reforms are introduced asymmetrically across
sub-national units and which are essentially uncorrelated with
other factors (that is, ‘exogenous’). One such case occurred in
Afghanistan in 2007, when the creation of democratically-
elected, gender-balanced village development councils was
randomized across 500 villages in 6 provinces. We had the
opportunity to study this event and, in a recent paper, we
report back on what we found.  We were particularly interested
in understanding how the creation of the councils affected the
most direct potential outcome: governance quality. But finding
an appropriate measure of "governance quality" presented
additional headaches. Measures based on on perceptions (e.g.,
“do village leaders act in the interests