ASE President and Founder, Prof. Leonard Wanchekon, was one of the Main Speakers at the 3ie London Evidence Week 2016, which took place from April 11 to 15.  Prof. Wantchekon delivered a lecture entitled “Policy deliberation and voter persuasion: estimating intrinsic causal effects of town hall meetings”. In his address Prof. Wantchekon talked about experimental evidence on the effect of town hall meetings on voting behaviour. He provided a simple statistical framework for causal inference in randomised experiments where the treatment is a decision- making process or an institution such as voting, deliberation on decentralised governance. The proposed framework builds on a standard set up for estimating causal effects in randomised experiments with noncompliance. The same model is used to analyse the effect of policy deliberation on voting behaviour. He provided practical suggestions for estimating intrinsic causal effects of institution.

The 3ie London Evidence Week is a platform to demonstrate innovations in how impact evaluation and evidence synthesis approaches are being adapted to ensure that useful and sound evidence is being produced and is available to decision makers.It is also a forum that brings evaluators, researchers and policymakers together to contribute towards policies and programming that can make a difference in the quality of people’s lives. Main Speakers for this edition included, besides Prof. Wantchekon, Alison Evans (chief commissioner, Independent Commission for Aid Impact) and James Hargreaves , director, Centre for Evaluation, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine – LSHTM.

The lectures were covered vividly on Twitter (#LEW2016). See below a compilation of some of the tweets related to Prof. Wantchekon’s lecture.

Click here to watch the video of the presentation.

Click here to watch an interview with Prof. Wantchekon at 3ie talking about the role of 3ie in evidence gathering, fostering a culture of evaluation and challenges in collecting high- quality evidence in Africa.