Better together? The unintended consequences of joint civic education training in a clientelist democracy

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Many civic education interventions seek to inform citizens about government officials’ actions and duties in the hopes that citizens will reward and sanction officials to incentivize better performance. But in contexts where mechanisms for sanctioning poorly-performing officials are weak, empowering citizens through traditional civic education may instead create antagonism that leads officials to retreat and citizens to disengage. Through a field experiment conducted in collaboration with civil society partners across 224 villages in the northern Philippines, we test whether training citizens alongside local elected officials is more effective than training citizens alone. Our findings indicate that joint training did not make officials more responsive to citizen engagement. Instead, eight months after the intervention, officials in the joint training condition were less likely to have included citizen leaders in decision-making forums, and no more or less likely to express policy priorities consistent with their preferences. Citizen leaders trained jointly with officials were less satisfied with officials’ performance and responsiveness than their counterparts trained separately. This greater dissatisfaction is reflected in behavior during local elections held fourteen months after the intervention: citizen leaders in the joint condition were less likely to report campaigning in support of incumbent politicians, but also no more likely to back challengers. In clientelist democracies, interventions combining civic education and direct interactions with elected officials may have the unintended consequence of discouraging political engagement by tempering citizen expectations of formal political institutions, with nuanced implications for government accountability.