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DRG Learning Quarterly
November 2017
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Welcome to the November 2017 DRG Learning Quarterly, the newsletter that will keep you informed on new learning, evaluation, and research in the DRG sector.
This edition of the Learning Quarterly includes information on the impact of legal assistance in Haiti, women's participation in political and civil space, findings from the Metaketa Initiative, national human rights institutions, as well as video teasers of current literature reviews.
We welcome your feedback on this newsletter and on our efforts to promote the accessibility, dissemination, and utilization of DRG research.
Please visit the DRG Center's
Learning Division page
for additional information.
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IMPACT EVALUATION FINDS BENEFIT TO USAID LEGAL ASSISTANCE
Over 70% of Haiti's prisoners are held in pretrial detention (PTD), mainly due to Haiti's multi-stage prosecutorial and judicial system, combined with inefficiency and resource shortages. An impact evaluation of USAID's Improving Justice Service Delivery and Sector Reform in Haiti Project, PROJUSTICE, found that legal assistance increased the proportion of detainees who were free, provided substantial financial benefits to the Government of Haiti, but had no measurable effect on detainees' trust or economic opportunities. The impact evaluation also found that individuals in prolonged PTD are disproportionately poor, young men.
Read the final report
here
,
or a two page brief
here
.
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BRIEFER: HOW TO STRENGTHEN WOMEN'S CIVIL AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
Women's civic and political participation is crucial for democracy and development. Nevertheless, obstacles to women's participation persist.
Given these obstacles, how can development
interventions most
effectively encourage women t
o participate in civil society and politics?
See two pager based on the literature reviews
here.
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EGAP METAKETA FINDINGS: INFORMATION INTERVENTIONS MAY NOT ALWAYS IMPROVE DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY
A rigorous and innovative five-country study demonstrates that activities to provide voters with better information about candidates may not improve electoral accountability in the ways that USAID theories of change tend to predict. This study was part of the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network's Metaketa Initiative which coordinates field experiments in different countries on a common question, ensuring rigorous and consistent design and reporting standards and better generalizability of findings. This first wave of the Metaketa Initiative tested whether providing voters with credible, impartial information about incumbent corruption affects voter turnout and vote choice. USAID theories of change would predict that more informed voters would make "better" choices and would be more likely to vote, but none of these studies found significant effects of information on voters'
support for incumbents or on voter turnout. In fact, these studies show how context-specific factors need to be taken into account when developing theories of change about how candidate information affects voter behavior.
See the
one-page EGAP Evidence Brief
for more details about these findings, which have been made available for USAID internal use only until they are peer-reviewed.
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BRIEFER: DO NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS INSTITUTIONS IMPROVE HUMAN RIGHTS OUTCOMES?
Scholarly evidence indicates that NHRI's independence from government is key to effectiveness. However, the main factors that influence this independence are largely beyond donor control. And though the international community's technical support is clearly important in the
creation
of NHRIs, the impact of international assistance on the continuing effectiveness of NHRIs is less well researched.
See two pager that summarizes the literature reviews here.
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VIDEO TEASERS OF DRG LEARNING AGENDA LITERATURE REVIEWS
As part of the DRG Learning Agenda, USAID Democracy Fellow, Laura Adams, put together videos of current literature reviews. The videos capture discussions with USAID staff and the academics involved in this research, touching on civil society in closing spaces, grassroots reform, and human rights campaigns. All videos are about three minutes long.
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Recommended Reading:
The Governance and Social Development Resource Center (GSDRC) provides applied knowledge services on demand and online. The project began as the Governance Resource Center, established by DFID in 2001, and is linked with the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and other researchers. The rapid-response reports provide digests of key research findings, lessons and expert thinking on specific questions from development practitioners and policymakers.
How does the Internet affect authoritarian regimes? This article argues that while the internet has made mass mobilization easier than ever, its spread has also counter-intuitively allowed savvy authoritarian regimes to become more stable than ever.
The authors make use of a new dataset which identifies five distinct dimensions of democratization. They argue that prolonged unarmed contentious mobilization prior to transition drives democratic progress in each of these five dimensions. Mobilization matters because it generates a new, democratically-oriented political elite and because it furnishes non-elites with the capacity for autonomous collective action.
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