Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives’ performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.

Can descriptive representation for a stigmatized group change the beliefs and intentions of members of dominant groups? To address this question, I focus on quotas (reservations) that allow members of the scheduled castes to access key executive positions in India's village institutions. To measure the psychological effect of reservations, I combine a natural experiment with an innovative MP3-player-based self-administered survey that measures various beliefs and behavioral intentions. Results provide credible causal evidence that reservations affect the psychology of members of dominant castes. Even though villagers living in reserved villages continue to think poorly of members of the scheduled castes (stereotypes do not improve), reservation affects two other types of beliefs: perceived social norms of interactions and perceived legal norms of interactions. These changes in beliefs in turn appear to have far-reaching consequences for intercaste relations, as villagers’ discriminatory intentions also decrease under reservation.

This article introduces an inexpensive, low-tech audio-Selfadministered Questionnaire that uses a basic mp3 player (mp3/aSaQ) and compares its performance in collecting data about sensitive attitudes with a number of alternatives, including a face-to-face survey. The paper compares five administration procedures in an experiment conducted in a survey on sensitive caste-related attitudes in rural India. respondents in the mp3/aSaQ group listened to a prerecorded instrument that presented them with a number of first-person statements made by "respondents like [them]," entered their responses on an answer sheet using simple shapes and logos, and finally placed their form in a bolted ballot box. Like previous studies evaluating self-administration techniques, our study indicates that the mp3/aSaQ significantly increased socially undesirable answers, as compared with an equivalent face-to-face interview. comparisons with additional administration procedures suggest that when self-administration is combined with the use of earphones the threat of bystander disapproval (as opposed to interviewer disapproval) is reduced by effectively isolating respondents from their social environment. introduction Self-interviewing, particularly in its modern form (computer-assisted selfinterviewing, or caSI), has emerged as an efficient way to limit underreporting of sensitive attitudes and behaviors. numerous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of video-and audio-caSI in increasing reports of risky behaviors (o'reilly et al. 1994; Tourangeau and Smith 1996; Turner et al. Simon chauchard is an assistant professor of government at dartmouth college, hanover, nh, uSa. he thanks Shankare gowda, martin gilens, don green, eric dickson, Kanchan chandra, Lynn vavreck, deborah Brooks, and three anonymous reviewers for feedback on the design and the presentation of this project. *address correspondence to Simon chauchard, department of government, dartmouth college,

In the study of electoral politics and political behavior in the developing world, India is often considered to be an exemplar of the centrality of contingency in distributive politics, the role of ethnicity in shaping political behavior, and the organizational weakness of political parties. Whereas these axioms have some empirical basis, the massive changes in political practices, the vast variation in political patterns, and the burgeoning literature on subnational dynamics in India mean that such generalizations are not tenable. In this article, we consider research on India that compels us to rethink the contention that India neatly fits the prevailing wisdom in the comparative politics literature. Our objective is to elucidate how the many nuanced insights about Indian politics can improve our understanding of electoral behavior both across and within other countries, allowing us to question core assumptions in theories of comparative politics.