Can Redistribution Change Policy Views? - Aid and Attitudes toward Refugees in Uganda Abstract

Our experiment randomly varied both the direct receipt of assistance and information linking assistance to the refugee presence, allowing us to compare the roles of knowledge about the policy bargain and of direct receipt of aid in driving policy views. [...] This policy is in line with the global Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework—a component of the Global Compact on Refugees, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2018—under which a portion of aid for the refugee response is directed to the hosts, and refugees are granted the right to access labor, housing, and education markets. [...] This exercise was incorporated into the beginning of the information script to “break the ice” by building rapport between the respondent and the sta↵ member and giving context for the purpose of the visit. [...] We chose treatment probabilities within stratum based on the number of available refugee mentors in that gender-sector cell, and set the probability of assignment to the Ugandan mentorship arm to be equal to that of the refugee-mentorship arm. [...] 27 6.1 Unpacking the E↵ect of Labeled Grants In this section we present evidence for three mechanisms we find to be driving impacts of labeled grants on policy views: information about aid-sharing, the salience and credibility of that information, and the inherent association between aid and the refugee presence created by the refugee-led implementing organization.