Civic Education, Political Knowledge and Support for Decentralisation and Democracy: Evidence from a Randomised Information Campaign in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Does increasing political knowledge translate into citizen engagement and support for democratic political processes? Recent work on adult civic education programs in developing democracies has found consistent effects on information and engagement, but less is known about whether such programs can induce support for democratic attitudes and values, or on potentially contentious political issues. We investigate the impact of a program implemented by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in 2010-2011 designed to disseminate information about democracy and the ongoing political decentralization process in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We implemented an “encouragement design” whereby 100 individuals in each of 8 villages were randomly encouraged at the end of a pre-test interview to attend an upcoming information session, while 40 randomly-selected individuals in those “treatment villages” received no information about the workshop. Interviews were also conducted with 60 individuals in 8 “control villages” from the same territories, selected to match treatment villages in terms of population, ethnicity and socio-economic characteristics. Follow-up interviews were conducted with all respondents between one week and one month after the workshop in the treatment villages took place. The findings, from a variety of intent-to-treat and instrumental variable models that account for selection effects due to unobserved heterogeneity, show that the program had powerful effects on knowledge but negligible effects on support for the decentralization process and generalized democratic support in the DRC. We also find weak evidence of spillover effects of the program on individuals in treatment villages who did not attend the workshops. We discuss the implications of the study for understanding the theoretical relationship between information and support for democratic processes and for furthering our knowledge of what civic education programs can and cannot achieve in developing democratic contexts.