Stanford Student to Cultivate Democracy in Mali

Jessica Gottlieb understands the luxury of living in a functioning democracy, and she is on a mission to bring others the same.

A fourth-year Ph.D. student in political science at Stanford, Gottlieb was awarded a grant from Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies last week to carry out her dissertation project, "Peasants into Democrats: Evaluating the Impact of Information on Local Governance in Mali."

The project is one of six to be awarded seed grants in the first round of funding from the Global Underdevelopment Action Fund, which is supported by FSI donor gifts.

Gottlieb, who applied for the grant with the help of political science professor Jim Fearon, will study Mali's 18-year-old democracy and implement a three-month education program to teach villagers about their local government system.

"One of the paradoxes that I find about Mali is that it's the fourth-poorest country in the world, but it's also democratic, and we don't often think about stable democracies in poor countries," said Gottlieb.

West Africa's largest country, Mali is nearly twice the size of Texas. In 1992, the former French colony became a democracy, which has remained fairly stable, although corruption in the country is still common and voter turnout low.

"The motivating question for the project is whether low voter expectation is a barrier to democratic accountability," said Gottlieb, who has visited Mali four times.

"[Malians] have very low expectations that their local government is going to do much good for them," she explained. Gottlieb hopes her civics education-intervention program will help educate Malians on the responsibilities of their local government, projects they can expect the government to implement and the basics of government budget.

Gottlieb, who is conducting the project on her own, will randomly select 384 villages from a total of 576 and train local civic staff to teach the villagers about their role in a democratic society.

Upon conclusion of the program in March, 24 Malian staff will travel until June between the villages that received education and 192 "control" villages that did not to study the impact of the education on civic participation.  The benefit of random selection is that differences between the two groups of villages can be identified as coming from the treatment and not something else," said Gottlieb.

"I expect that voters will be more numerous at the town hall meeting, that more people will come and be better prepared," said Gottlieb of the predicted outcome of her education program.

The villagers might determine a demand they want to make on their local government, such as providing money from the budget for fertilizer for local farms, she said.

"I expect that people will be more willing to speak out. In the past, voters have been pretty reticent about speaking out," said Gottlieb, who attributed this to the fact that most of the villagers are unaware of their rights as members of a democracy.

"I also expect that the government might start spending their budget a little bit different—spend it more on things their community wants versus what they want." Whereas most of the budget now goes to town centers, Gottlieb hopes that more peripheral villages will benefit from the local budget because of her education-intervention program.

Gottlieb has studied the democracy of Mali for the last seven years and is excited to do research in a country where she finds the people very welcoming and open. "The humanitarian impact and social impact of the project motivate me," she said.

The Global Underdevelopment Action Fund, which is partly funding Gottlieb's project, grew out of FSI's spring 2010 conference on Technology, Governance and Global Development, of which Bill Gates was the keynote speaker.

"Stanford is uniquely placed among American universities to bring cutting-edge research to bear on practical problems of development," saidi international relations professor Stephan Krasner, deputy director of FSI. "No other institution has lower barriers to multidisciplinary work. The Action Fund award recipients are drawn from many different parts of the university but united in their concern for promoting development."