Information and Motivation: Why Governments Respond to Watchdog Journalism

Abstract

This paper evaluates two explanations for why governments respond to journalism: journalism informs government officials about their constituents’ preferences, and journalism motivates officials with the threat of public exposure. It first draws on surveys of 4,200 citizens and 340 leaders across 109 Tanzanian villages to document whether leaders understand, share, and respond to their constituents’ policy preferences. It then examines the effect of two overlapping treatments, each designed to capture a mechanism of journalism’s influence. In the “information” experiment, leaders were randomly assigned to receive information about their constituents’ priorities. In the “motivation” experiment, leaders were randomly assigned to be contacted by journalists planning reports on a specific development issue in the leader’s village. To evaluate outcomes, the paper developed a behavioral measure of the willingness of village leaders to lobby district council officials for development projects on behalf of their constituents. It found mixed evidence for the role of information, strong evidence for the role of motivation, and no evidence that the mechanisms reinforce one another. The effect is concentrated among elected officials rather than bureaucrats but not in electorally competitive communities.

Keywords: media, accountability, Sub-Saharan Africa, jouralism