Replication Data for: The Effect of Sustained Transparency on Electoral Accountability

Transparency is expected to strengthen electoral accountability. Yet, initiatives disseminating politician performance information directly prior to elections have reported disappointing re- sults. We argue that to be effective, transparency needs to be sustained: the dissemination of politician performance information needs to occur early, regularly, and predictably throughout the term. Using a formal model of electoral accountability under non-programmatic and un- even party competition, we study how sustained transparency impacts a string of decisions by various actors in advance of elections: incumbents’ running choices, party nomination strate- gies, and potential challengers’ entry decisions. We show how these effects shape the candi- date slate and ultimately electoral outcomes, conditional on incumbent performance and the incumbent party’s relative strength. We test our theory using a field experiment involving 354 subnational constituencies in Uganda, and find robust support for the idea that sustained transparency can improve electoral accountability even in weakly institutionalized electoral settings.