Empowering Young Citizens through the Practice of Accountability: An Experiment in Bangladesh

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairsgram on Global Trends in Autocracy and Democracy present “Empowering Young Citizens through the Practice of Accountability: An Experiment in Bangladesh” with Akshay Dixit.

The authors evaluate a novel accountability-based approach to civic education, which enables young people to hold local authorities to account for the quality of public services. They theorize that engaging young people in making demands of local authorities empowers them as active citizens while enhancing their interest in politics. In Bangladesh, young people who volunteered to participate in the study were randomly assigned to join a program that informed them of their rights to education and healthcare and enabled them to make demands of their service providers. Relative to a comparison group that only received information, participation in holding service providers accountable enhanced their self-efficacy and political efficacy, increased knowledge of politics and the extent to which they discussed politics and followed the news. These effects were similar across three separate cohorts of participants, underscoring their robustness. The findings show how active citizens can be fostered even in non-democratic, low-resource settings.

Akshay Dixit is an Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He studies political economy with a regional focus on South Asia. Much of his current work examines caste-based divisions and disparities in India.

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