RESEARCH PAGE
Field Experiments
I am co-investigator on a number of field experiments in partnership with the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) and two local civil society organizations, the Liberia Democracy Watch (LDW) and the Bong Youth Association. The first is a year long randomized control trial study that evaluates impacts of distinct peacebuilding and democracy promotion strategies on a wide range of security and socio-political outcomes. One component of this project is an exposure to security forces intervention that entails setting up security committees tasked with meeting international and local security forces (i.e. UN peacekeepers and the Liberian National Police) on a monthly basis to discuss a wide range of issues facing their community and reporting back to fellow residents. The trial tests the effects of these interactions on governance and democracy-related outcomes, including security, political participation, democratic empowerment, election violence, respect of human rights and social cohesion, trust in public institutions, accountability, among others. Another component of the project is an impact evaluation of a 13-topics democracy and governance promotion program, covering a wide range of issues such as nationhood and citizenship; human rights and rule of law; democratic governance and political participation; the electoral process, among others. This intervention also has subprograms that emphasize dispute resolutions and gender-related issues. The trial randomly assigns these treatment conditions over a set of 162 Liberian communities, using a multi-way hierarchical design that will allow us to measure effects for treatments and sub-treatments and capture any spillover effects.
I am also the principal investigator on another randomized control trial that evaluates impacts of listenership to the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) Radio’s election programming on attitudes and behaviors of potential women voters in 40 communities in rural Liberia. The crux of this intervention is that women in treatment communities were provided a radio and invited to participate in a series of weekly listening sessions of selected elections-related programs in a group setting. This intervention was motivated by findings from my earlier studies that suggested that despite high levels of engagement of ordinary Liberians with Radio UNMIL—with 77% of survey respondents indicating that they had listened to it at least a few times a week and 84% of listeners considering it to be “more objective” and “detailed” than other local, national, or international stations—women had generally less opportunity than men to access to and engage with this radio’s programs. Thus, the hypothesis being tested in this trial is whether providing women more access to electoral programs can enhance the likelihood that they will be more political engaged and ultimately make better voting decisions.
We use these experiments not just to measure treatment effects of the particular interventions, but also to adjudicate competing theoretical claims about the mechanisms purported to link international interventions to socioeconomic and political outcomes of interest.
End line data collection for both field experiments will take place around the October/November 2011 general elections.
Click here to see a map showing locations of these randomized interventions
Click here for working papers related to these projects
Click here for some thoughts on implementation of field experiments