Voter Campaign (Uttar Pradesh)
Jennifer Green (PhD candidate, Department of Political Science from Yale University), Donald Green (Professor of Political Science from Yale University), Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee (Professor of Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Rohini Pande (Professor of Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School)
This randomized control trail was carried out in coordination with the Jamal Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based in Lucknow. MORSEL designed the campaigns, trained the facilitators (for both the NGOs) and puppet teams. We collected data from various government agencies, newspapers, NGOs and other organizations. In this project, three randomized field experiments were conducted by researchers between March and May 2007 in Uttar Pradesh. UP is India’s most populous state and home to more than 10% of the world’s individuals living below the absolute poverty line. Unfortunately, in recent years this state has witnessed a significant rise in ethnic politics and, by most accounts, political corruption.
Each voter campaign was conducted in a random sample of villages spread across multiple jurisdictions. The caste and corruption campaigns exhorted voters to vote on the basis of issues and not along caste lines, or for corrupt candidates. Researchers conducted five experiments in 1000 randomly selected villages. Each village received one of three treatments across 27 electoral constituencies.
Location: Uttar Pradesh
