Title: Better together? The unintended consequences of joint civic education training in a clientelist democracy

Abstract: Many civic education interventions seek to inform citizens about government officials' actions and duties in the hopes that citizens will reward and sanction officials to incentivize better performance. But in contexts where mechanisms for sanctioning poorly-performing officials are weak, empowering citizens through traditional civic education may instead create antagonism that leads officials to retreat and citizens to disengage. Through a field experiment conducted in collaboration with civil society partners across 224 villages in the northern Philippines, we test whether training citizens alongside local elected officials is more effective than training citizens alone. Our findings indicate that joint training did not make officials more responsive to citizen engagement. Instead, eight months after the intervention, officials in the joint training condition were less likely to have included citizen leaders in decision-making forums, and no more or less likely to express policy priorities consistent with their preferences.