We find that both civil society organization (CSO) score cards and Ghana Audit Service (GAS) programming have had some important impacts, even as many features of district governance do not change. We find that overall citizen knowledge of GSAM is limited, but when it is known, citizens in CSO districts are much more likely to attend a community meeting and actively engage with district government. In both GAS and CSO districts, key administrators and District Assembly (DA) politicians are aware of GSAM, indicate that it has increased citizen engagement, and well over half say the district government has changed how it operates as a result of GSAM. More generally, CSO and GAS programming have different effects. GSAM’s bottom-up CSO programming has generally had more effect on citizen engagement and the behavior of administrators than top-down GAS programming. On the other hand, the top-down GAS programming has had a bigger effect on politicians, who have decreased political manipulation of the budget. This makes sense, since the bottom-up CSO programming engaged citizens more, while the top-down GAS programming impacted district politicians in a context where political parties and budgets are highly centralized.
