Translating Legal Empowerment into Political Impact

Abstract

The CJAs’ indirect legal empowerment practices were not generating impacts on a scale such that they could be detected in a random sample of the treatment communities. The community-level structure of the RCT relied on robust and active implementation in order to generate large-scale impacts. However the CJA’s indirect legal empowerment practices took the project in a different direction than the one anticipated when the survey was designed. The result was a mismatch between the community-level design of the RCT, on the one hand, and the indirect legal empowerment practices the CJAs were trained to perform, on the other. Following the first round of piloting, Siddiqi and Sandefur were concerned that a zero-impact assessment would hold little political value given the experimental and unconventional nature of the CJA program. From their perspective, a zero-impact assessment would only indicate that the CJA program had not been properly implemented; it would provide no politically valuable data about why the program had no impact and what the impact could have been had it been implemented more robustly.¹