Can Information Campaigns Overcome Political Obstacles for Serving the Poor?

An innovative instrument that development practitioners and policymakers are experimenting with is to spread information about public service delivery through grassroots “campaigns”, to mobilize citizens to demand better services from public providers. However, new political economy research suggests that the impact of such campaigns is limited by the extent to which they influence overall political incentives of governments to serve the poor. This paper proposes a new type of information campaign with the potential of strengthening political incentives by generating yardstick competition across political jurisdictions, and voter coordination in evaluating governments on the basis of improvements in actual development outcomes.

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