Disempowered: Trust, Citizenship and Private Service Delivery in Pakistan

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries I

Abstract

What motivates the urban poor and middle-income groups to participate in politics? And what impact does the privatization of public goods have on the future of urban politics in the global south? This study examines the provision of electricity in a semi-autocratic polity, Pakistan, leveraging neighborhood-level service delivery data on the megacity of Karachi to examine the impact of low-quality service delivery on incipient democratic participation. Using a novel dataset of over 25,000 electricity transformers, I leverage a unique identifier of the quality of service delivery to establish that poor service delivery is highly correlated with low trust, voter turnout and political interest. Using an original face-to-face survey (N=1000) implemented around the General Elections in Pakistan in 2018, I find that low institutional and interpersonal trust suppresses voter turnout and participation. Finally, I use an endorsement experiment to establish that low trust is causally linked to poor service delivery. I argue that low access to public goods such as electricity makes individuals less trusting, less likely to depend on political parties and therefore reduces their scope for democratic participation. The second theoretically novel contribution of this study is that privatization does not have uniformly beneficial outcomes for middle-income groups: arguably, the very constituency expected to benefit from liberalization. Middle-income households whose service delivery is clubbed with “mostly poor” neighborhoods face many of the same symptoms of atomization and inefficacy as their lower-income peers, and will demonstrate measurably less trust in institutions, both private and public. These findings suggest that weak regulatory mechanisms in the context of service delivery directly reduce opportunities for accountability, participation and robust civic participation.

Author

• Erum Aly Haider, Georgetown University