22 The example from the Philippines also suggests that tackling the proximate symptoms of clientelist political competition directly may not be effective. An alternate strategy, akin to the Benin town halls, could use information on policy performance to coordinate voters better on public goods platforms. Can policybased information and mobilization interventions overcome collective action problems (such as social polarization, ethnic fragmentation, and vote-selling), and weak sanctioning power (such as through state-led coercion and violence in elections)?

**_Politician and Constituency Report Cards:_** Civil society organizations in some countries have attempted to garner and provide information on performance of politicians in delivering benefits to their constituents. Banerjee et al (2010) evaluate the impact in India of providing information on the performance of state legislators in delivering constituency development projects and subsidized food rations to the poor. They find that greater information enabled voters to punish incumbents who performed poorly by voting against them in local elections. However, a similar experiment in Uganda with the African Leadership Initiative, providing information about the legislative activities of their MPs, and efforts towards spending their constituency development funds, seems to have had little or no impact on election outcomes (Humphreys and Weinstein, Forthcoming). Full results from Uganda are not currently available to assess whether greater performance information may nevertheless have contributed to improvements in legislator use of their funds, with the politicians changing their behavior in anticipation of electoral punishment. Keefer and Khemani (2009) find more qualitative evidence from India that a surge in media reporting about the lack of effort among MPs in using their constituency development funds was associated with dramatic increases in legislator effort and utilization of funds.

There is a new civil society effort underway in Africa, called Uwezo<sup>14</sup> , to measure education service delivery and learning outcomes on a large scale, enabling performance measures to be computed at disaggregated jurisdictional levels such as districts. Such disaggregated measurement could potentially enable attribution of performance in delivering education services to specific government agents and politicians. The Uwezo effort was partly inspired by a similar effort in India, called ASER (Annual Status of Education Report), run by the organization Pratham<sup>15</sup> . Although media stories would suggest that such initiatives contribute to strengthening political accountability for education outcomes, because of the information generated and collective pressure exerted by CSOs, there is as yet no rigorous evidence of how this changes key politically motivated distortions in education allocations. In the case of India, five years of ASER reports has played an important role in raising public awareness of the education quality, but has essentially found no overall increase in test scores for rural children in the period to 2010 (ASER 2011). There remains substantial untapped potential for examining whether such disaggregated information can indeed generate sufficient political 14 http://www.uwezo.net/ 15 http://www.pratham.org/M-20-3-ASER.aspx