In all villages, council elections were organized and administered by “social organizers”employed by the NGO contracted to facilitate NSP in the region. Monitoring results from a randomly selected set of 65 villages that held district elections and 66 villages that held at-large elections, including data from the monitors’ 784 polling station reports and interviews administered to 1,675 male voters, indicate that election procedures were professionally executed by the contracted NGOs and that villagers exhibited a good understanding of the different electoral rules.<sup>16</sup> Monitoring results thus confirm high levels of compliance with the assigned treatment status.

# 2.4 Sample and Randomization

Electoral rules were randomized across 250 villages that formed the treatment group for the randomized impact evaluation of NSP and were assigned to receive NSP. The villages are evenly split across ten administrative districts in northern, northeastern, eastern, central, and western Afghanistan (see Figure 1). Despite the necessary exclusion of southern areas from the sample due to security concerns, the 10 districts are broadly representative of Afghanistan’s ethnolinguistic diversity, with five predominantly Tajik districts, four predominantly Pashtun districts, one predominantly Hazara district, and two districts with significant populations of Uzbek and Turkmen minorities.

The average population in our sample of villages is roughly one thousand people (see Table 1). There is notable variation in the geographic size of villages, with quite a few villages spanning several kilometers. The average distance between the house of a randomly selected survey respondent and the center of the village is about 400 meters, with a standard deviation of more than one kilometer. About 25 percent of villages are ethnically mixed, with the rest being exclusively Pashtun, Tajik, or Hazara (as well as one Turkmen village). The average level of education in the sampled villages is very low, with more than seventy percent of adult male villagers having no formal education and only four percent having finished high school. An average household consists of about ten people, of which about five are children under the age of fifteen. The sample villages are also very poor: only forty-five percent of respondents indicate that they never or rarely have problems supplying food for their families.<sup>17</sup> Random assignment of electoral rules was made concurrently with the assignment of project selection procedures. Specifically, 25 treatment villages in each district were paired to minimize differences in background characteristics within each pair (leaving one village unpaired) and then matched in pairs of pairs to form quadruples.<sup>18</sup> Unpaired villages across districts were also grouped into two quadruples (leaving two villages unmatched). Each village within the quadruple (and the two unmatched villages) was then randomly assigned one of the four combinations of council election rules and project selection procedures.

This assignment procedure, which essentially represents randomization with stratification by

> 16 A detailed description of the monitoring results can be found at: http://www.nsp-ie.org/reports/CDCE-MR.pdf

> 17 An assessment of the demographic and economic characteristics of the sample villages reveals few substantive differences with those of a random sample of Afghan villages surveyed by the 2007-08 National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment. See Beath, Christia and Enikolopov (2013d) for more details.

> 18 These characteristics include village size (based on data collected by Afghanistan’s Central Statistics Offi ce) and a set of geographic variables (distance to river, distance to major road, altitude, and average slope). Pairs of pairs were formed by performing the same matching procedure treating each pair as a single village with background characteristics that equal the average of the respective characteristics of the two villages in a pair.

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