communism to a parliamentary democracy in the 1990s, and that, like other new democracies in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, is characterized by the lack of an active civil society, owing to policies implemented by former regimes to eliminate groups mediating between the individual and the state or control these groups in order to prevent organized opposition to the regime (Lipset, 1993).<sup>10</sup> Our analysis is based on a comprehensive survey of 1,800 parents and 900 teachers, randomly selected from 180 nationally representative primary schools. Isolating the effect of willingness to cooperate with others in collective action scenarios is empirically challenging. We generate a direct, _experimental_ measure of individuals‟ propensities to cooperate with others in social dilemmas, by involving the parents and teachers in a simplified version of the public goods game first introduced by Cardenas et al. (2009). We then correlate cooperativeness in the game with parents‟ decision to participate in both the short route to accountability, i.e. the decision to participate in the election of parent class representatives, and the long route to accountability, i.e., the decision to vote in the most recent parliamentary elections. The nature of the survey sampling also allows us to investigate whether and how the distribution of willingness to cooperate varies spatially within Albania.

We found that parents who behaved cooperatively in the public goods game are significantly more likely to have participated in the election of parent class representatives who go on to elect parent representatives to the school board. This relationship remains significant after controlling for the degree to which parents are informed about aspects of local accountability in schools. We also found that parents who behaved cooperatively in the public good game are more likely to (claim that they) have voted in the latest national elections. Our data show significant variation in both participation and cooperativeness across districts. Our district-level analysis confirms that districts characterized by a higher proportion of cooperative parents have a higher degree of participation in school accountability and a higher turnout in the 2009 elections according to official records.

Our results suggest that one important reason why, in some societies more than in others, creating participatory institutions and providing information about the existence and functioning of these institutions might fail to induce participation and bottom-up accountability is that potential participants might be unwilling or unable to overcome collective action problems. Our study also contributes to the literature on the external validity of public goods laboratory experiments by providing evidence of a correlation between behavior within a lab-type public goods game and behavior in naturally occurring decision-contexts within which inter-personal cooperation is also salient. While the public goods game has been shown to correlate with fishermen‟s productivity when pooling their catches with other fishermen (Carpenter and Seki, 2011), and with their propensity (not) to over-exploit common fishing grounds (Fehr and Leibbrandt, 2011), this is, to the best of our knowledge, the first study providing

> 10 For instance, in Albania religious practices were officially banned in 1967, to be reinstated in the 1990s.

4