Foreign aid may act much like oil money in reducing voters’ willingness to demand accountability from their government, enabling corruption, clientelism, and repression. This is an important causal mechanism connecting public budgets to quality of governance. Yet other scholarship counters that aid is more beneficial than oil, either indirectly because of donor oversight or directly because aid is more likely to produce citizen pressures on governments. Empirical work on the topic employs observational data at the national, macro level, and has left the question unresolved. At the micro level, in some countries citizens have experience with aid revenues and oil funds, thus possessing information about the political implications of these different revenue sources. This article provides the first experimental tests of the direct mechanism linking aid and oil revenues to demands from citizens for greater political accountability. We report the effects of randomly assigned treatments identifying aid funds compared to oil money on behavior of citizens in six survey and lab experiments in Ghana and Uganda. We find no differences in accountability pressures when subjects are randomly assigned to aid or oil conditions in any experiment, including a survey-based field experiment in Uganda that employed very strong information treatments on the extent of aid and oil funds. Though little evidence suggests that either windfall necessarily reduces accountability demands from baseline in a meaningful way, citizens’ actions for aid money were statistically indistinguishable from oil revenues across all experiments. Aid may well have governance effects through the indirect route of donor oversight, but the results presented here suggest no evidence that aid, compared to oil, directly induces greater accountability demands among citizens.

外国援助可能像石油钱一样，在减少选民要求其政府问责的意愿，助长腐败，客气和镇压方面。这是将公共预算与治理质量联系起来的重要因果机制。还有其他学者提出反对，认为援助比石油更有益，这间接是因为捐助者的监督，或者直接是因为援助更有可能对公民造成政府压力。关于该主题的实证研究使用了国家宏观层面的观测数据，但这个问题尚未解决。在微观层面上，在某些国家中，公民具有援助收入和石油资金的经验，因此拥有有关这些不同收入来源的政治影响的信息。本文提供了将援助和石油收入与公民要求更大的政治责任联系起来的直接机制的首次实验性测试。在加纳和乌干达的六个调查和实验室实验中，我们报告了与石油钱相比，随机分配的治疗方法（确定援助资金）对公民的行为的影响。当在任何实验中将受试者随机分配到援助或石油条件下时，我们都没有发现问责压力上的差异，包括在乌干达进行的基于调查的实地试验，该研究对援助和石油资金的使用程度进行了非常强的信息处理。尽管几乎没有证据表明这两种意外之财必定会以有意义的方式降低基线的问责制要求，但在所有实验中，公民的援助资金行动与石油收入在统计上是无法区分的。