(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
Editor’s Note: In June 2015, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society hosted its second Junior Scholars Forum. The following article covers a not-yet-published research paper presented there. To learn more about the research, readers can contact the paper’s author, Gregory S. Schober (gregory.schober@ duke.edu).
Over the past 20 years, conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become a common form of economic and social policy in many parts of the developing world. Most governments in Latin America, for example, now offer such programs, and today CCTs benefit more than 100 million people in that region. To receive support under a CCT program, beneficiaries need to meet certain continuation requirements—attending a health education workshop, for example, or making sure that their children attend school for a given percentage of days each year. Efforts to evaluate CCTs have shown that they improve outcomes for recipients in the areas of health, education, and poverty reduction.
But research by Gregory S. Schober, a doctoral candidate in political science at Duke University, indicates that CCTs also have a notable impact on civic and political participation. His work, which focuses on the impact of CCTs in Mexico, reveals a significant correlation between receiving CCTs and taking part in behaviors that signal involvement in civic life. Schober suggests that the transfer of cash partly accounts for this finding: The wish to maintain that benefit drives recipients to become politically active. Yet the continuation requirements of CCT programs are a critical factor as well, Schober argues: “It’s not the cash alone that is leading to success.”
Another finding in his study reinforces that conclusion: CCT beneficiaries are more likely to exhibit civic behaviors than those who receive unconditional cash transfers (UCTs), which come without continuation requirements.
To explain why CCTs have a strong effect on civic engagement, Schober posits a “policy push model.” Recipients “are being pushed into practicing civic skills, and they’re being pushed into interactions with state and community leaders,” he says. “And these ‘pushes’ ultimately reduce the cost of civic and political participation.” To receive cash, for example, beneficiaries must regularly speak with government officials. In doing so, they end up honing the kinds of communication and organizational skills that are essential to many forms of civic activity.
Schober says that he chose to focus on Mexico in his research because the Mexican government offers CCT and UCT programs that are similar in structure and scope. He drew on three sources of information for his study: data from a survey that he conducted in Mexico; interviews and focus group sessions with CCT recipients and program officers in Mexico; and data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project, a survey initiative that posed questions about both CCTs and political participation.
Using those data, Schober considered six modes of political participation: voting, campaign activism, contacting public officials, community activism, civil society engagement, and protest. “CCTs have a positive and statistically significant relationship in four of the six participation modes,” he explains. The two modes for which that connection was not present are community activism, which has a statistically insignificant relationship with CCTs, and voting, which actually has a slight negative relationship with CCTs. The latter finding, according to Schober, probably reflects the fact that the cost of voting is very low: CCT recipients, he suggests, may prefer to spend time on “more demanding” forms of civic activity.
Schober’s work on the link between giving cash and driving political engagement is “suggestive,” says Michael Faye, a cofounder of Give Directly, a nonprofit organization that operates UCT programs. (He also cofounded Segovia, a for-profit company that is developing a technology platform to manage such programs.) Faye adds that he would like to see further research that uses randomized trials to tease out the impact of both conditional and unconditional cash transfers: “The Mexican UCT and CCT programs were meant to address fundamentally different populations,” he says.
Gregory S. Schober, “With Strings Attached: Conditional Cash Transfers and Broad Political Participation in Latin America.”
Read more stories by Adrienne Day.