To measure the fairness and effectiveness of village heads in managing local problems, we consider village-level outcomes in two issue areas where they are typically involved: the distribution of food aid and the handling of land and livestock disputes.<sup>16</sup> The most prevalent type of bias that features in village head’s decision-making in Zimbabwe is bias against political opponents. As table 2 showed, individuals who report having different political opinions from their village head are significantly less likely to view the village head’s court to be a neutral mechanism for resolving disputes. In contrast, we do not observe similar divisions of opinion across gender lines or ethnic lines.<sup>17</sup> As a result, we measure whether the two interventions reduced bias by looking at their effects on household survey respondents who reported having different political views from their village head.<sup>18</sup> We measure bias in food aid distribution by examining the likelihood of people with different political views from the village head receiving food aid, a measure of bias in real outcomes. We examine _perceived_ bias in dispute resolution, measured as the likelihood of people with different political views from the village head viewing most decisions by the village head’s court as fair.<sup>19</sup> We also measure the efficacy of the village head in solving problems in both these areas. We measure the effectiveness of village processes in reducing food insecurity by measuring the effect of households’ measured need on their likelihood of receiving maize food aid in the past year, where our measure of need is based on whether respondents in the household survey reported they had enough grain to feed their family after either harvesting it or buying it on the market.<sup>20</sup> In villages where the village head is more effective in using available food aid to reduce food insecurity, we expect that the need of a household will be a more 16Because the involvement of the village head in these issue areas is the result of strategic processes, we cannot exclude the subset of cases in which they are not involved in estimating our effects.

17These results are reported in tables 3 and 4 of the appendix.

18For the purposes of this study, we treat difference in reported political views as an exogenous covariate; although it is theoretically possible that people could have changed their response to this question in response to the intervention, we have empirically assessed whether individuals who give this response differ across the arms of the experiment, and we have found no evidence that this is the case. These results are reported in table 7 of the appendix.

19If the village head actually reduces bias against political opponents, individuals who share the village head’s views will likely start to receive less favorable treatment. For this reason, we measure the likelihood of receiving food aid and believing court cases to be fair on the village head’s political opponents only. Note that we cannot identify the effect of the intervention on whether the decisions of the village head’s courts are actually more biased against political opponents; this outcome can only be measured over people who have disputes and also choose to take them to the village head, and the characteristics of this subset of people might be affected by the intervention.

20We provide further details on this measure in section 6 of the appendix.

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