This paper provides an analysis of how political factors affect the incidence of the evaluation of public policies, with a focus on Randomized Control Trial (RCT) experiments in international development. We argue that political environments where incumbents face greater electoral competition and smaller ruling margins are more likely to host RCT experiments. Using various data sources for the incidence of RCTs both at the cross-country level and at the sub-national level in India, we find that RCTs are more likely to occur in politically competitive jurisdictions. We employ fixed effects regressions using various estimators and an instrumental variable strategy that exploits an electoral reform in India which limited the entry of independent candidates and exogenously affected the degree of electoral competition in state-level politics. The effect seems concentrated on RCTs that have the government as a partner, suggesting that political competition has an important demand-side effect on the incidence of RCTs.

本文分析了政治因素如何影响公共政策评估的发生，重点是国际发展中的随机对照试验（RCT）实验。我们认为，现任者面临更大的选举竞争和较小的统治利润的政治环境更有可能主持RCT实验。通过在印度的跨国水平和国家以下水平使用各种数据源进行RCT的发生，我们发现RCT更有可能在具有政治竞争性的司法管辖区发生。我们使用各种估计量和工具变量策略来采用固定效应回归，这种策略利用了印度的选举改革，该改革限制了独立候选人的进入，并在外部影响了州级政治中选举竞争的程度。