The People’s Voice and Access to Sanitation

This paper estimates the effect of voice and accountability, which captures transparentelectoral processes, free media, and freedom of expression, on access to sanitation services in developing countries.The core argument is that voice and accountability increases the visibility of sanitation as a public good and raisesawareness of its benefits; hence, increasing its supply and demand. The analysis utilizes data from 73 developingcountries and an instrumental variable approach to identify the causal effect of voice and accountability on access to,and use of, sanitation. The paper also employs a novel instrument-free estimator as both an alternative estimatorfor the analysis and an empirical strategy to formally assess the validity of the instrument in a just-identifiedmodel—a previously untestable just-identifying exclusion restriction. The paper finds robust evidence that voice andaccountability increase access to sanitation and help close the persistent rural-urban inequality in access tosanitation. The results suggest that key tenets of democracy such a freedom of speech, free media, and power of electoralincentives are not a luxury of the rich—they are relevant to the world’s poor as they can shape the demand anddistribution of sanitation services.