Abstract

Bureaucratic performance depends not only on individual incentives and ability but also on bureaucrats' beliefs about how others in the organization behave. We examine whether deliberation, an institutional process in which aggregate performance-relevant information about the organization as a whole rather than about individual officials is shared and discussed collectively, can improve performance. We conduct a randomized controlled trial with municipal administrations in Benin. Using administrative audit data from 2014 to 2019, we find that deliberation raises municipal performance by 8.7 percent of the control mean. The gains are broad-based: deliberation reduces financial irregularities, shifts procurement away from less competitive procedures, strengthens project implementation, and reallocates investment toward citizen-facing services rather than the administration's own overhead. Deliberation also changes the internal environment of the bureaucracy: bureaucrats come to perceive more corruption and weaker rule enforcement, and interpersonal trust declines. These results show that sharing aggregate information about organizational performance within the bureaucracy and deliberating on it collectively is a low-cost lever for improving  performance, while revealing a tension in weakly institutionalized settings: performance gains may come at the cost of interpersonal trust and the relational arrangements that sustain it.