Overcoming or Reinforcing Coethnic Preferences? An Experiment on Information and Ethnic Voting * Claire Adida † Jessica Gottlieb ‡ Eric Kramon § Gwyneth McClendon ¶ January 25, 2017 Abstract Social scientists often characterize ethnic politics as a threat to democracy and growth, and recent scholarship investigates factors that could exacerbate or alleviate it. A dominant view— that ethnicity acts as a heuristic in low-information contexts—implies that information access could reduce ethnic voting. But this view contrasts with evidence that identity often conditions information processing, potentially in ways that amplify in-group preferences. We test these expectations with a field experiment around Benin’s 2015 legislative elections. Behavioral and attitudinal data reveal that voters reward good-performing incumbents only if they are coethnics, and punish bad performers only if they are non-coethnics. Coethnics are also more (less) likely to accurately recall performance information if it is positive (negative). These results are consistent with a theory of ethnically motivated reasoning whereby voters act on new information only when it allows them to reaffirm their social identity. These findings improve our understanding of comparative ethnic politics, identity and information processing, and information and accountability. * We thank EGAP for generous funding. This study is part of the larger Metaketa initiative to accumulate knowl- edge about the relationship between information and accountability across country contexts. The registered pre- analysis plan for the Metaketa project can be found at: http://egap.org/registration/736. The registered pre- analysis plan for this particular study can be found at: http://egap.org/registration/735. We thank Amanda Pinkston for sharing 2011 legislative election data and Ana Quiroz for excellent research assistance. We thank partic- ipants at Princeton University, Harvard University, George Washington University, MPSA and WGAPE, and Leonard Wantchekon, Karen Ferree, Nahomi Ichino, Dan Posner, Thad Dunning, Kadir Yildirim, Guy Grossman, and Jake Bowers for helpful comments. This research was conducted in collaboration with the Centre de Promotion de la Démocratie et du Développement (CEPRODE), and we thank Adam Chabi Bouko for leading the implementation ef- fort. Our project received ethics approval from the authors’ home institutions. We also obtained permission to conduct the study from the President of the National Assembly of Benin. In each study village, permission to conduct research was obtained from the chief and consent was obtained from each surveyed participant in the study. † University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive #0521, La Jolla, CA 92093. cadida@ucsd.edu. ‡ Texas A&M University, 4220 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843. jgottlieb@tamu.edu. § George Washington University. Monroe 440, 2115 G. St NW, Washington, DC 20052. ekramon@gwu.edu. ¶ Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge Street, CGIS Knafel 207, Cambridge, MA 02138. gwyneth_mcclendon@harvard.edu. 1