Columns 1 and 2 of Table 6 show that, while, as expected, information is a determining factor of parents‟ participation, parents‟ willingness to cooperate with others in the public goods experiment remains a predictor of participation in the election of parent class representatives. This result is robust to restricting the sample to the informed parents. The estimated coefficient becomes smaller as compared to the estimates displayed in column 4 of Table 6, but it retains statistical significance at the 10% level, with a p-value of 0.057.<sup>32</sup> The smaller and less significant coefficient within the informed sample, suggests that those who invested in the group account were also more likely to select into the informed group.

# _The long route to accountability_

In this subsection, we turn our attention to the long route to accountability, i.e., citizens‟ willingness and ability to hold public officials accountable through the instrument of the vote in parliamentary elections. We asked parents whether they voted in the most recent (2009) parliamentary election and we also collected data on district-level voter turnout from official records. Here, we investigate whether parents who invested in the group account in the public goods game are more likely to have voted.<sup>33</sup> According to our School Stakeholder Survey, 93% of the parents voted in the 2009 parliamentary elections, whereas official records show that turnout was only 51%. Given this discrepancy, we investigate whether parents‟ behavior in the game correlates with turning out to vote both at the individual level using self-reported turnout and at the district level using official turnout figures. The district level analysis is reported in the next subsection of the paper.

In Table 7, we report estimated coefficients from individual-level probit regressions where the dependent variable is a dummy equal to one if the parent stated that he/she voted in the 2009 parliamentary elections and zero otherwise. We employ the specifications used when analyzing the short route to accountability, in Tables 5 and 6. The only differences is that, owing to limited within district variation in self-reported votes, we are unable to employ district fixed effects without losing a substantial number of observations. This is why in columns 2 to 4 of Table 7 we employ county fixed effects instead. We acknowledge that our set of controls is likely to be missing important explanatory variables, such as the extent of individual information about the parliamentary elections and the candidates, as well as the degree of exposure to electoral campaigns. The county fixed effects allow us to at least partially address geographical differences in information, campaigns and political alliances.

> 32 Table A3 in Appendix shows that the frame used in the example employed to explain the public goods game does not affect the predictive power of the behavior in the game.

> 33  Our investigation here relates to the literature on voting.  While the first theoretical investigations suggested that voting is an irrational act because the expected benefit of voting – i.e. the probability that one‟s vote is pivotal times the differential benefit generated by the preferred electoral outcome – is lower than the cost of voting (Downs, 1957), later studies (see Palfrey and Rosenthal, 1983, 1985) argued that the decision to go to vote has the characteristics of a „participation game‟. Given that the electoral outcome itself is non-excludable and non-rival and the act of voting involves a private cost, turning out to vote also has the characteristics of a collective action problem (Palfrey and Rosenthal, 1983, 1985).

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