Visibility Traps: Evidence from China, Lebanon, and Brazil

• In Event: Poster Session: Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence; Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations & Science, Technology and Environmental Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Federalism & Intergovernmental Relations: Subnational Autonomy

Abstract

A global wave of decentralization reforms has placed local governments within a complex web of accountability relationships. Local officials have become accountable to several distinct stakeholders, including citizens, state and national officials, and international NGOs. Building on a principal-agent model, we argue that these relationships are often characterized by profound information asymmetries, which have the potential to undermine the benefits of decentralization. Specifically, principals often have limited information about what’s actually going on at the local level, which prompts them to rely on highly visible heuristics to learn about local realities.

We find that the information asymmetries that exist at the local level can lead to “visibility traps,” a previously unidentified phenomenon in which local officials (as agents) adopt visible policies that are inconsistent with their principals’ preferences, rather than less visible policies that are more consistent with their principals’ preferences. These dynamics have the potential to become self-reinforcing because principals reward agents for these ultimately sub-optimal policies. Drawing on original quantitative and qualitative evidence from both authoritarian and democratic contexts, we show that "visibility traps” help explain policy distortions in a diverse set of cases, including refugee policy in Lebanon, waste treatment policy in China, and budgetary policy in Brazil.

In doing so, we make both theoretical and empirical contributions: Theoretically, we advance an incipient research agenda that explores how the intrinsic nature of public goods shapes their provision. We introduce a new concept ("visibility traps") and demonstrate how differences in the visibility of public goods can lead to policy distortions in decentralized contexts. And empirically, we demonstrate that comparisons across radically different contexts can prove theoretically fruitful. Visibility traps take different forms in China, Brazil, and Lebanon, but lead to distorted forms of government responsiveness in each context.

Authors

• Peter G. Johannessen, University of Virginia

• Ning Leng, Georgetown University

• Lama Mourad, University of Pennsylvania