Candidate debates have a rich history, offer a unique communication forum, and are integral to contemporary campaign strategy. There is, however, little evidence on whether they affect actual voting behavior. The developing world offers an attractive testing ground, where the relative scarcity of information could amplify debate impacts. We controlled citizen exposure to debates in Sierra Leone and find positive effects on political knowledge, policy alignment, and votes cast. Participating candidates endogenously responded to our experiment by increasing campaign expenditure in communities where debate videos were screened in public gatherings. Debate participation enhanced the subsequent accountability of elected Parliamentarians, who allocated more public funds to development projects. A companion experiment parses the effects of information about policy versus candidate persona, and find that both matter. The results speak to the central political economy question of whether elections effectively discipline politicians, and show how political information--conveyed via candidate debates--can trigger a chain of events that ultimately influences policy.
