Browsing by Author "Tran, A"

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    Testing legislator responsiveness to citizens and firms in single-party regimes: A field experiment in the vietnamese national assembly
    (Journal of Politics, 2021-10-01) Todd, JD; Malesky, EJ; Tran, A; Le, QA
    We investigate whether communicating constituents’ preferences to legislators increases the responsiveness of delegates to the Vietnamese National Assembly (VNA). Using a randomized control trial, we assign legislators to three groups: (1) those briefed on the opinions of their provincial citizenry, (2) those presented with the preferences of local firms, and (3) those receiving only information on the Communist Party’s objectives. Because voting data are not public, we collect data on a range of other potentially responsive behaviors during the 2018 session. These include answers to a VNA Library survey about debate readiness; whether delegates spoke in group caucuses, query sessions, and floor debates; and the content of those speeches. We find consistent evidence that citizen-treated delegates were more responsive, via debate preparation and the decision to speak, than control delegates; evidence from speech content is mixed.
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    The Adverse Effects of Sunshine: A Field Experiment on Legislative Transparency in an Authoritarian Assembly
    (American Political Science Review, 2012-11) Malesky, EJ; Schuler, P; Tran, A
    An influential literature has demonstrated that legislative transparency can improve the performance of parliamentarians in democracies. In a democracy, the incentive for improved performance is created by voters' responses to newly available information. Building on this work, donor projects have begun to export transparency interventions to authoritarian regimes under the assumption that nongovernmental organizations and the media can substitute for the incentives created by voters. Such interventions, however, are at odds with an emerging literature that argues that authoritarian parliaments primarily serve the role of co-optation and limited power sharing, where complaints can be raised in a manner that does not threaten regime stability. We argue that under these conditions, transparency may have perverse effects, and we test this theory with a randomized experiment on delegate behavior in query sessions in Vietnam, a single-party authoritarian regime. We find no evidence of a direct effect of the transparency treatment on delegate performance; however, further analysis reveals that delegates subjected to high treatment intensity demonstrate robust evidence of curtailed participation and damaged reelection prospects. These results make us cautious about the export of transparency without electoral sanctioning. © 2012 American Political Science Association.
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    The Impact of Recentralization on Public Services: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the Abolition of Elected Councils in Vietnam
    (American Political Science Review, 2014-02) Malesky, EJ; Nguyen, CV; Tran, A
    Comparative political economy offers a wealth of hypotheses connecting decentralization to improved public service delivery. In recent years, influential formal and experimental work has begun to question the underlying theory and empirical analyses of previous findings. At the same time, many countries have grown dissatisfied with the results of their decentralization efforts and have begun to reverse them. Vietnam is particularly intriguing because of the unique way in which it designed its recentralization, piloting a removal of elected people's councils in 99 districts across the country and stratifying the selection by region, type of province, and urban versus rural setting. We take advantage of the opportunity provided by this quasi experiment to test the core hypotheses regarding the decision to shift administrative and fiscal authority to local governments. We find that recentralization significantly improved public service delivery in areas important to central policy-makers, especially in transportation, healthcare, and communications. Copyright © American Political Science Association 2014.
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    Vietnam 2010: Familiar Patterns and New Developments Ahead of the 11th Vietnam Communist Party Congress
    (Southeast Asian Affairs, 2011) Malesky, EJ; Schuler, P; Tran, A