Accountability and Inclusion in Customary Institutions: Evidence from a Village-Level Experiment in Zimbabwe

The problem of traditional leadership is often conceived as one of low accountability due to a single unelected leader having unchecked power within communities. Instead, we argue there are strong norms of collective deliberation in most traditional political institutions. As a result, a key constraint on inclusive decision-making and broad accountability is the composition of traditional leaders’ advisers and councils. We test whether encouragement to broaden advisers to village chiefs in Zimbabwe can result in better decision-making outcomes using a field experiment in 270 villages. The field experiment included two treatment arms, one which provided village chiefs with information on laws and norms encouraging inclusive decision-making through workshops and one that additionally included a local civil society leader in the workshops. We find that including a civil society leader results in more inclusive decision-making processes and improved outcomes for the village chief’s political opponents, including fairer court decisions and less partisan food aid distribution. These results have important implications for how scholars conceptualize traditional leadership and indicate the possibility for improved representation through incremental changes to traditional political institutions.