Do Good Intentions Matter? Experimental Evidence on how Citizens Respond to Promises of Government Service Delivery

Abstract

Can government programs that fail to deliver still influence citizen behavior? Large literatures in political science and economics study the effect of various government programs on how citizens engage with the state. A tacit assumption in many of these papers is that citizens value government programs proportionally to the amount of money spent. Yet there is tremendous heterogeneity in the mapping between spending and how much value citizens actually get from a program. And even programs that do not work may still reflect substantial government investments, thereby informing citizens' beliefs about how much weight the government places on their welfare. Using a large-scale randomized evaluation of a vocational training program in southern Punjab we provide evidence that good intentions might matter; citizens offered a program that almost no one used voted for the ruling party at higher rates in subsequent elections if offered multiple training vouchers than if only offered one. Men who received the training offer became more socially engaged and used government services at higher rates. Women had the opposite reaction. These results have implications for theories of civic engagement.