Constitutions empower people to ask judges for binding orders directing state agents to remedy rights violations, but state agents do not always comply. Scholars propose that by making it easier to observe noncompliance, courts can leverage public pressure for compliance when it exists. Yet, exposure to information about noncompliance might lead individuals to accept high levels of noncompliance and reduce support for judicial remedies. We estimate the rate of noncompliance with judges’ orders via a rigorous tracking study of the Colombian tutela. We then embed this rate in three survey experiments fielded with online national quota samples. We show that people find the noncompliance rate in the tutela highly unacceptable regardless of a variety of mitigating factors. We also show that public reactions to this information depend on prior expectations, a finding that stresses the importance of scholarship in cognitive psychology for studies of compliance in law and politics.

Toilet ownership in India has grown in recent years, but open defecation can persist even when rural households own latrines. There are at least two pathways through which social norms inhibit the use of toilets in rural India: (1) beliefs/expectations that others do not use toilets or latrines or find open defecation unacceptable; and (2) beliefs about ritual notions of purity that dissociate latrines from cleanliness. A survey in Uttar Pradesh, India, finds a positive correlation between latrine use and social norms at baseline. To confront these, an information campaign was piloted to test the effectiveness of rebranding latrine use and promoting positive social norms. The intervention targeted mental models by rebranding latrine use and associating it with cleanliness, and it made information about growing latrine use among latrine owners more salient. Following the intervention, open defecation practices went down across all treatment households, with the average latrine use score in treatment villages increasing by up to 11% relative to baseline. Large improvements were also observed in pro-latrine beliefs. This suggests that low-cost information campaigns can effectively improve pro-latrine beliefs and practices, as well as shift perceptions of why many people still find open defecation acceptable. Measuring social norms as described can help diagnose barriers to reducing open defecation, contribute to the quality of large-scale surveys and make development interventions more sustainable.

While behavioral public policy remains underutilized in rich countries relative to its potential impact, the required infrastructure for diagnosing behavioral bottlenecks and the autonomy to act on those diagnoses are even less common in developing countries. At the World Bank, the Mind, Behavior, and Development Unit (eMBeD) aims to promote the systematic use of behaviorally informed tools in development policies and projects, institutionalize the use of behavioral science in development organizations and governments, provide evidence on scaled and sustainable behavioral solutions, and generate more and better behavioral data. By focusing on thorough diagnosis and ongoing adaptation, we aim to create impactful, behaviorally informed interventions in complex, resource-constrained settings. While Sanders, Snijders and Hallsworth (2018) raise valuable points about the implications for impactful behavioral public policy, for those working in developing countries, issues of replication and scale come with unique contextual challenges.

While many find cause for optimism about the use of law and rights for progressive ends, the academic literature has long been skeptical that courts favor the poor. We show that, with the move toward a robust “new constitutionalism” of social and economic rights, the assumptions underlying the skepticism do not always hold. Our theories must account for variation in the elite bias of law and litigation. In particular, we need to pay closer attention to the broad, collective effects of legal mobilization, rather than focusing narrowly on the litigants and the direct benefits they receive. We support the claim by showing that litigation pursued in legal contexts that create the expectation of collective effects is more likely to avoid the potential anti-poor bias of courts. On the other hand, policy areas dominated by individual litigation and individualized effects are more likely to experience regressive outcomes. Using data on social and economic rights cases in four countries, we estimate the potential pro-poor impact of litigation by examining whether the poor are over- or under-represented among the beneficiaries of litigation. We find that the impact of courts is positive and very much pro-poor in India and South Africa, and slightly negative in Indonesia and Brazil. Overall, we challenge the tendency in the literature to focus on the direct effects of litigation, find that the results of litigation are more positive for the poor than the conventional wisdom would lead us to expect, and offer an explanation that accounts for part of the variation while raising a number of questions for future research.

This paper develops a framework and some hypotheses regarding the impact of local- level, informal legal institutions on three economic outcomes: aggregate growth, inequality, and human capabilities. It presents a set of stylized differences between formal and informal legal systems, identifies the pathways through which formal systems promote economic outcomes, reflects on what the stylized differences mean for the potential impact of informal legal institutions on economic outcomes, and looks at extant case studies to examine the plausibility of the arguments presented. The paper concludes that local-level, informal legal institutions can support social substitutes for the enforcement of contracts, although these substitutes tend to be limited in range and scale; they are flexible and could conceivably be adapted to serve the interests of the poor and marginalized if supportive organizational and social resources could be brought to support the legal claims of the disempowered; and they are more likely to support personal integrity rights than the positive liberties that are also constitutive of development as freedom.