A secret to beating poverty? Good governance

In the runup to Sierra Leone’s 2018 Parliamentary elections, Stanford King Center on Global Development Faculty Director Katherine Casey worked with leaders of the country’s two major political parties on a novel experiment about how they selected their candidates. 

The goal was to test whether ordinary citizens or party officials are better able to choose candidates who will deliver results to their constituents. The parties agreed to test two methods for citizen participation co-designed with Casey and her co-authors: a party convention at which potential candidates presented their qualifications to political leaders and citizens, and engaged in a public debate, and a polling process in which voter preferences on potential candidates were shared with party officials.  

The impact of the interventions, as described in a 2021 paper, was striking: Although the results of the experimental methods were not binding, they nonetheless led to voters’ preferred candidates being selected by party leaders 61 percent of the time, up from 38 percent of the time under the existing method in which party leaders choose candidates themselves. And those candidates ultimately had stronger records of public goods provision, such as small-scale public infrastructure projects or support to education or agriculture. 

For Casey, the work is just one example in a long career of studying elections and democratic processes in Sierra Leone and elsewhere. That focus emerged early in her career when she began to question the efficacy of traditional development interventions.  

“I realized that nothing was going to work in economic development if the government wasn’t functioning,” she told the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) faculty magazine "Voices", as a professor there since 2012. “It seemed like that was the linchpin to everything else.”

Many of the King Center's faculty affiliates from across the university contribute to its core mission of pursuing global development by making governance and institutions more effective, approaching this goal from a variety of perspectives and in diverse ways. Casey’s work was in partnership with political parties in a democratic nation. Professor of Sociology Xueguang Zhou, who is the Dong Wei Fellow at the King Center,  has done research empirically examining the role of local officials in promoting economic growth throughout China, an authoritarian state. Still others are studying polarization and the impact of news consumption on voters, how to meaningfully address human trafficking and violence perpetuated by police and organized criminal groups, the role of language in democratic participation, and factors that meaningfully affect women’s political participation in countries such as India and Pakistan. 

Underlying all these efforts is the belief that good governance and functioning governmental institutions are crucial in the fight against global poverty.  

“Aid needs to be building governance with the idea that one day countries won’t need aid anymore – their citizens will hold [their leaders] accountable,” Casey says. “We want to be part of that bigger transition, over a very long horizon.” 

Studying Women’s Political Participation 

Assistant Professor of Political Science Soledad Artiz Prillaman, who founded and directs the King Center’s Inclusive Democracy and Development (ID2) Lab,decided to study political science as part of an effort to understand how to improve the lives of the world’s most vulnerable people.  

“I felt like politics is power, and power dictates who has access to what,” she explains.  

She chose to research microfinance organizations, wondering how such groups impacted access to politics or social welfare benefits. What she found changed the course of her career, leading to a published paper, “Strength in Numbers: How Women’s Groups Close India’s Political Gender Gap,” and an award-winning book, The Patriarchal Political Order: The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India.  

In India, women vote at rates almost equal to men, but they rarely participate in politics between elections. Based on several years of field work in rural India, Prillaman argues in her book that women lack political agency partly because patriarchal norms at home allow men to control women’s personal and political choices. However, participation in female-centered self-help groups (informal savings and credit groups) seem to increase women’s political participation.  

“These groups gave women autonomy,” she explains. “The women could bond over their shared experiences and then leverage their collective strength.”

One of Prillaman’s PhD students, Natalya Rahman, is studying the factors that affect women’s political participation in her native Pakistan. She conducted an original survey of 750 working women in urban areas in the country, asking participants about their work, daily lives, childhoods, bargaining power in their households, and political preferences and participation. So far, her findings indicate that public engagement is influenced not by whether a woman herself works outside the home, but by whether her own mother did, and whether the woman lives in a household free from violence. 

“International organizations disproportionately focus on women’s work as a way to empower women,” Rahman says. “First, we need to understand, is that really true? Second, if labor force participation doesn’t matter, what should we be doing instead?” 

Prillaman and her team, including partners in India, have provided policy input to India’s Ministry of Rural Development, including around labor force participation for women.  

“Building an evidence-to-policy pipeline is something I’m very proud of,” she says.  

Prillaman is also studying the effects of affirmative action-style electoral quotas on politicians’ education and quality in India. She says her work raises questions about democracy and accountability. 

“What is democratic accountability when you’re only representing a few?” she asks. “When is it that these institutions will be responsive to the demands and interests of marginalized groups?” 

Prerequisites for Political Participation: Freedom and Safety 

Political participation and empowerment mean, at perhaps the most basic level, having the freedom and security to safely engage in community life and decisions. Some King Center faculty affiliates are focused on conditions and institutions that can make governing – and having a say in who will govern – more difficult.  

Grant Miller, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, directs the Stanford Human Trafficking Lab, for which the King Center provided initial funding. Formed in 2019, the lab works to strengthen anti-trafficking efforts around the world, with a focus on Brazil. Its flagship project is a first-of-its-kind data repository that combines information about labor trafficking survivors with administrative records on social programs, medical information, children’s education, and tax records, among other sources. 

The lab fills a void in anti-trafficking efforts globally. 

“There was very little systematic data that existed,” Miller says. “We thought, ‘Why is there not more quantitatively oriented, large-scale research on how trafficking functions and which anti-trafficking policies do or don’t work? Why don’t we explore what’s possible?” 

Political Science Professor Beatriz Magaloni also works in Brazil, among other countries. Magaloni founded the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab in 2010 to reduce violence through evidence-based, multidisciplinary work and on-the-ground analyses and training. 

Much of Magaloni’s work has explored state violence. She has studied how body cameras affect police behavior, the impact of judicial reforms on the use of torture, and how the effects of community-oriented policing depend on the type of organized criminal group that is most active in a given area.   

“Without limitations on police abusive behavior, there cannot be democratic citizenship,” she wrote in a 2024 article. 

For her work, Magaloni was awarded the 2023 Stockholm Prize in Criminology, which recognizes outstanding achievements in criminological research by practitioners for the reduction of crime and the advancement of human rights. 

Some of her current research examines the effects of Indigenous political autonomy on deterring armed groups and how unresolved problems with crime and poverty are associated with regional democratic backsliding. 

“My journey began when I decided to put academic research to work for the benefit of society,” she says. “This journey has taken me to some of the most violent places in Latin America. It requires courage, determination, and the development of innovative research methodologies to tackle very difficult research problems.” 

Facilitating Citizen Engagement

Effective governance and political institutions also require an electorate that is willing and able to meaningfully participate in their own governance, and several King Center-supported graduate students are studying how to ensure such an electorate exists.  

Adrian Blattner, a PhD candidate in economics, completed a study on how to reduce affective polarization – people’s dislike of candidates from opposing political parties and the voters who support them, rather than their policy ideas – in the lead-up to Brazil’s municipal elections this fall. After matching people from different political parties for virtual conversations, he will assess the impact of those conversations on their political views. 

In a similar study Blattner did in Germany, he found significant reductions in affective polarization, including as measured by an incentivized economic interaction in which participants could allocate a fixed budget of 100 Euros between themselves and someone from another political party. 

“It’s not that suddenly people come together and agree on policy,” he explains. “It’s that rather they feel less animosity toward the other side.” 

Joao Francisco Pugliese, another PhD candidate in economics, also examined affective polarization, but after an intervention involving exposure to traditional media outlets. Pugliese provided people in Brazil with subscriptions to one of five well-known media outlets of their choice; then, he combined survey and administrative data to test the effects of media consumption on political preferences.  

In his early analysis of results, Pugliese has not found that exposure to traditional media reduces affective polarization, but he has found that trust in the media increases, especially among people who had the lowest confidence in traditional journalism initially. He also finds that exposure to media has mild effects on political attitudes, including decreased support for election reforms proposed by Brazil’s former right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro; and decreased support for candidates who have expressed a willingness to enact anti-democratic measures, such as banning protests or military interventions in domestic affairs.  

Pugliese also has an ongoing King Center-supported study examining how providing information about health care in municipalities affects how voters perceive their elected officials’ ability to manage such affairs.  

“Day-to-day things – such as how we consume information – can impact how we evaluate politicians,” he says. “Understanding which information triggers people to react, and how, can be really important to have healthy voting systems in democracies.” 

Meanwhile, political science PhD candidate Camille DeJarnett is studying the impact of language on people’s ability to participate meaningfully in the political process. In Senegal, which, like much of sub-Saharan Africa, uses its former colonial language for official purposes, she is conducting a field survey and experiment designed to measure people’s levels of political engagement and sophistication in French and indigenous languages.   

“People in a democratic society want and need to engage in political discourse in order to be democratically involved,” she says. “Language policy choices may thus inadvertently disenfranchise, rendering politically inert those who could otherwise be full participants in civic life.” 

Analyzing an Authoritarian State

For a glimpse into how governance works in an authoritarian state, the work of sociology Professor Zhou, MA ’85, PhD ’91, is informative. Zhou has spent much of his career studying institutional changes in his native China, with a focus on Chinese organizations and management, social inequality, and state-society relationships.

“As a person who went through the turmoil of the Chinese political environment in the Mao era and then left the country for graduate school, I have a tremendous interest in China,” he explains.

One of Zhou’s largest projects is a study of the role local government officials – whom he calls elites – play in Chinese economic development. The project combines administrative and economic data on more than 100 counties in Jiangsu Province between 1990 and 2019, comparing the results of local officials who spend the majority of their career in the province with the results of party officials who may stay only a few years and thus have shorter-term goals.

His team, which includes undergraduate research assistants and graduate student fellows funded by the King Center, continues to analyze the data – which includes nearly 600,000 records corresponding to more than 65,000 public officials – but early analysis shows that local elites have a positive effect on economic development compared to party officials.

Eventually, Zhou hopes to include data on social welfare, hospitals, transportation, and other forms of development. 

“In the literature, there is a great emphasis on the role of formal institutions and the state,” he says. “But sometimes it is the local bureaucrats whose interests are aligned with local interests who play a much bigger role in local economic development.” 

Compared to the United States or other democracies with federalist systems, where state and local authorities have the autonomy to make their own decisions, local officials in authoritarian states have the challenge of doing what’s best for their community while still toeing the official party line. 

“I hope our study raises questions about what is the appropriate role of the state in economic development, not only in China but in general,” Zhou says.  

Lessons to Share

Good governance and effective institutions are critical in the fight against poverty and the guarantee of basic human rights and dignity, and King Center-affiliated faculty are committed to studying what makes governance effective and the factors that bring about inclusive and resilient institutions. In many cases, they are partnering with government officials, law enforcement agencies, national media outlets, and other major institutions to do so.  

And, although the King Center’s work focuses on low- and middle-income countries, developed nations have much to learn about effective governance as well. Blattner is considering testing his affective polarization interventions in the United States, for instance. 

His interventions could be used “at work, in schools, religious settings – you name it,” he says. “We hope that we’re able to put together a more generalizable set of policy recommendations to allow us to come up with new interventions or [use existing interventions] in new domains.” 

Casey agrees.

“The biggest lesson from all this is being willing to experiment with different kinds of policies toward well-defined goals,” she says. “Any government can do this. Take an area of government that isn’t working well that could make the lives of citizens better – that’s an area to innovate.”