Individual participation in holding service providers directly to account or in voting involves a private cost. However, individual participation benefits others, as efficacy requires a significant number of participants; hence, participation has the characteristics of a social dilemma and is likely to be subject to “free-rider” problems (Samuelson, 1954; Olson, 1965; Grossman and Hart, 1980).

In education, reforms aiming to improve accountability by increasing parental participation in schools – also called school-based management reforms – have been and are currently being conducted in a number of places around the world.<sup>4</sup> The few scientific evaluations of their effectiveness have focused on two issues: 1) the institution of participatory mechanisms; and 2) the extent to which parents are aware of such mechanisms. Existing studies (Banerjee et al, 2010; Blimpo and Evans, 2011; Duflo et al., 2011; Pradhan et al. 2011) provide mixed evidence of success,<sup>5</sup> yet the reasons for the contrasting results obtained in different societies are unclear.<sup>6</sup> We argue that variations in the success of participatory interventions could be owing, at least partly, to variations in individuals‟ willingness to act cooperatively in collective action problems.<sup>7</sup> Experimental studies employing public goods games have shown that individuals vary markedly in their willingness to cooperate with others for the common good (Isaac and Walker, 1988; Fehr and Gachter, 2000; Fischbacher et al., 2001; Bowles and Gintis, 2002; Fischbacker and Gachter, 2010, among others).<sup>8</sup> Moreover, a few additional experimental studies (Heinrich et al., 2005; Herrmann et al., 2008; Gachter et al., 2012) have highlighted that a significant proportion of the variation in individuals‟ willingness to cooperate occurs at the society level.<sup>9</sup> We investigate whether, both at the individual- and the community-level, willingness to cooperate with others for the common good is associated with willingness to participate in both the short- and the long-route to accountability. We conduct our study in Albania, a country that slowly transitioned from

> 4 In practice, school-based management (SBM) programs may or may not give decisional power to the parents. Some programs give parents decisional power over the school budget only; others involve parents also in the choice of the curriculum and textbooks; others give parents responsibilities in the hiring and firing of teachers; others invite parents to participate in the development of a school improvement plan, and possibly in fund-raising, and so on and so forth. School-based management programs may also exclude parents from participating in the decision process.  See Wohlstetter and Odden (1992) for a categorization of school-based management models, and Barrera-Osorio et al. (2009) for a comprehensive review of schoolbased management reforms recently undertaken all over the world.

> 5 For mixed evidence not relating to the education sector, see Olken (2007) and Bjorkman and Svensson (2008).

> 6 Investigations based on observational rather than experimental data – also called “retrospective studies” – conducted in the US (Houtenville and Conway, 2007) in Argentina (Eskeland and Filmer, 2007), in El Salvador (Jimenez and Sawada, 1999), in Mexico (Gertler et al., 2008; and Skoufias and Shapiro, 2006), among others, all show a significant impact of participatory programs and parental involvement on education outcomes.

> 7 This is an important issue that has received little attention in the existing empirical literature. As stated by Platteau (2008), in order for participation to be effective, “community members must be able to use the available information jointly in a way that creates some action, that is, they must be able to come together, share and discuss their knowledge and be ready to act on it” (p. 128).

> 8 For comprehensive reviews of the experimental literature relating to behavior in public goods experiments see Ledyard (1995) and Chaudhuri (2011).

> 9 One important society characteristic that has been shown to be negatively correlated with individual contributions to a public good (Habyarimana et al. 2007), participation in community activities (Alesina and La Ferrara, 2000), community-based monitoring of public service providers (Bjorkman and Svensson, 2010), and local public good provision (Miguel and Gugerty, 2004) is ethnic fragmentation.

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