8. The effectiveness of development projects, improvements in general economic welfare, and increases in support for local leaders and democratic processes are all higher in villages that held at-large elections as compared to villages with district elections.

To examine the effect of the electoral system on the effectiveness of development projects, we exploit data on access to clean drinking water, access to electricity, and agricultural productivity. These three indicators measure impacts of the three projects most commonly funded by NSP in the sample: drinking water wells, electrical generators, and irrigation facilities. Measures of general economic welfare are provided by measures of subjective economic welfare, as well as measures of household income and expenditure. Finally, we look at villager attitudes toward local leaders and their support for democratic elections as a way of selecting public offi cials. Since the village council elections under study were the first local elections experienced by these villagers, we expect satisfaction with particular candidates elected to the council to be readily translated into attitudes toward elections more generally.

# 5 Data

Indicators of educational attainment of council members, which are used to assess the competence of elected representatives, are given by three dummy variables indicating whether a member finished high school, middle school, or primary school. The data on members’educational attainment, as well as their gender, age, occupation, and district of residence and the election results for each village, were provided for 2,044 men and 2,015 women elected to councils for 241 villages by NGOs contracted to facilitate NSP in the 10 sample administrative districts.<sup>31</sup> Overall, the level of education of council members is very low, although still higher than the average level of education of villagers (see Table 1). Among male council members, only 9 percent had finished high school, 17 percent had finished middle school, and 33 percent had finished primary school (see Table 2 for a breakdown by election type). In 161 out of 241 villages, none of the male council members had finished high school. Educational levels among female representatives was even lower: only 0.8 percent had finished high school and less than 10 percent had finished primary school.

We use the distance between the location of council members’houses and village centers as a proxy for policy bias of elected representatives. To construct this measure, we first compute the location of the village center by averaging GPS coordinates of the houses of the baseline survey respondents. Then, we compute the distance between the village center and the locations of council members’houses. Information on the locations of council members’houses is available only for a subset of villages, since some monitors failed to collect coordinates.<sup>32</sup> For cultural reasons,

> 31 Of the nine villages for which data was not received, seven villages did not comply with the NSP treatment assignment, an error driven primarily by confusion between villages with similarly-sounding names. For the remaining two villages, the relevant NGO did not provide the necessary information. In both cases, attrition was not correlated with the assigned electoral rules.

> 32 In addition, some coordinates contained obvious mistakes and were excluded from the analysis. These mistakes were identified by superimposing location of council members’houses and satellite images of the respective villages and identifying the instances in which coordinates did not belong to the village. We documented all such instances and ensured that the data cleaning exercise was conducted in absence of information about the treatment status of the villages, so that it does not bias the results. We winsorize the distance at the 95 percent quintile to limit the influence of potential outliers.

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