"If we move, it moves with us:" Physical distancing in Africa during COVID-19.

Health behaviors to prevent the spread of infectious diseases are often subject to collective action problems, and social norms can play an important role in inducing compliance. In this paper, we study knowledge, beliefs, and behavior related to one such practice during the COVID-19 pandemic - physical distancing - using an online survey of social media users in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda. We find that, while there is widespread knowledge that physical distancing reduces the spread of the virus, respondents underestimate their peers' support for policies designed to enforce physical distancing, expect others not to practice physical distancing, and do not maintain physical distance themselves. However, more than half of respondents wrote a message to encourage others to practice physical distancing. Findings from survey experiments suggest that making salient the social and material costs for not keeping physical distance were insufficient to encourage compliance, suggestive of the absence of a social norm of physical distancing at the time. Given the large gap between own attitudes and expectations of others' attitudes toward lockdown policies, we propose that providing information on the extent of public support for physical distancing in citizens' own words may encourage compliance in the future.

Voter information campaigns and political accountability: Cumulative findings from a preregistered meta-analysis of coordinated trials.

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives' performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.