Using Social Media to Guard the Ballots: Evidence from a Facebook Campaign to Monitor Elections

Clientelism and other forms of electoral corruption remain an important challenge to democratic institutions in the developing world. Bottom-up monitoring technologies, which rely on civil society to oversee the provision of public goods and services, have been increasingly used by governments in a wide array of areas, but their effectiveness in ensuring electoral transparency has received scant attention in the literature. In this project we plan to use a field experiment that exposes citizens to a large-scale Facebook adverisement campaign encouraging them to report electoral corruption around the 2019 Colombian elections to study this issue. In order to understand whether these campaigns prevent politicians to engage in electoral corruption, we will further cross-randomize whether candidates are informed about this monitoring campaign.