A lot of research has documented how voting behaviour that does not hold politicians accountable for their performance - e.g. clientelism or ethnic voting - leads to insufficient or low-quality public services for citizens. An important strand of the literature has engaged in research around a hypothesis stating it is lack of information about incumbent or candidate quality and performance that drives the lack of accountability in developing democracies. A priori, the assumption that more knowledge about individual performance of politicians would, on average, makes citizens more likely to re-elect good candidates and vote bad ones out of office seemed sensible. However, a recent meta-analysis shows that providing information on incumbent performance has overall no effect on voting behaviour. Possibly even more surprising is the finding that citizens understand the information that is provided to them but do not, as a result, evaluate politicians differently. In other words, the causal chain leading from information provision on performance to changes in voting behaviour breaks down early on in the process. The general puzzle that emerges from this literature is then: Why is performance information understood but not salient?
This paper engages with this puzzle and explores whether clientelism influences how citizens process performance information on politicians. In particular, it studies whether performance information is irrelevant because citizens evaluate politicians on their ability to be a good clientelistic patron rather than performance efforts.
To investigate this hypothesis, we produced a radio cast that varies the politician's general profile (good patron or neutral politician) as well as his performance. We evaluate whether citizens pay less attention to performance information when receiving the good patron profile and whether this effect depends on demand for clientelism. The experiment is embedded in a survey that is at present, conducted in Tunisia and South Africa.
