# 6 **Conclusions**

There is growing consensus that parents‟ participation in school accountability systems is a necessary condition to ensure accountability of teachers and school directors, especially in contexts where top-down accountability is missing or inefficient. The current debate on how to induce effective parental participation has highlighted the importance of the adoption of participatory mechanisms by schools, and the diffusion of information among parents about the existence of such mechanisms. However, the evidence on the effectiveness of introducing participatory mechanisms and informing parents is mixed, and the reason why similar interventions produce contrasting results in different settings is unclear. As pointed out by Bardhan (2005), the identification of average treatment effects does not make it possible to identify “the mechanisms through which certain outcomes are generated (the “why” and the “how”) and the social dynamics that are involved”. An understanding of these mechanisms is necessary if we wish to make predictions about where interventions designed to enhance participation will work and where they will fail.

We argued that the decision to participate is a social dilemma; therefore, the effectiveness of any intervention aimed at increasing participation is likely to be conditional upon individuals‟ willingness and ability to overcome collective action problems. Economic experiments employing the public goods game have generated a considerable body of evidence that individuals vary markedly in their willingness to cooperate and that a significant portion of the variation occurs at the society-level. This suggests that the strength of the relationship between a given intervention and participatory outcomes is likely to be moderated by a variety of individual-level attributes and community-level formal and informal institutions affecting people‟s willingness to cooperate with others in collective action situations.<sup>_35_</sup> In this paper, we investigated whether both at the individual- and the community-level, willingness to cooperate with others for the common good is associated with willingness to participate both in the short route and the long route to accountability. We conducted a comprehensive survey of 1,800 randomly selected parents of children enrolled in 180 nationally representative Albanian schools. In order to isolate the effect of individuals‟ willingness to cooperate with others in collective action scenarios, we involved all the surveyed parents and teachers in a simple public goods game. At the individual-level, we tested whether parents who behaved cooperatively in the game were more likely to have participated in the most recent elections of parent class (i.e., the short route to accountability) and in the most recent parliamentary elections (i.e., the long route). At the community-level, we tested whether districts characterized by more cooperative parents have higher participation in school accountability and higher voter turnout (based on

> 35 See Preacher et al. (2007) for a discussion of “moderated mediation effects.” See Bjorkman and Svensson (2011) for an example of how social heterogeneity within a country can lead to heterogeneous treatment effects.

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