Local Politics in Developing Countries: Experiencing and Engaging with the State

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

What impacts how the state provides services or public goods and how citizens access the programs and services they need at the local level? What constrains the demands citizens make on the state and how they hold their local elected officials accountable? What unites these diverse research questions is an underlying need to understand how ordinary citizens interact with and view the state at the most local level. The papers in this panel address a variety of themes – from political accountability to public service provision – but always with an eye to understanding how ordinary citizens experience, engage with and make demands on the state at the local level.

Spanning three distinct geographical regions, the papers help advance our understanding of the commonalities and differences across contexts in these issues. And they showcase the variety of methods, from original surveys and qualitative work to randomized program evaluations, currently being used to study local politics in developing countries.

Two of the papers explore the panel’s themes through studies of how the state offers particular public goods: social policy and formal justice. Eric Kramon’s research examines how social programs may get co-opted by the state at the local-level for clientelistic exchange, explaining the conditions under which citizens are offered more programmatic social programming through a study from Kenya. Matthew Winter’s paper assesses how underlying attitudes about the state impact whether citizens access services from the formal justice system in Mali, and whether improving their views on formal justice institutions impacts in turn how they view the state overall.

The next two papers zoom out from particular policy areas and focus on citizen expectations and engagement with the state more generally. Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner’s paper from India documents how urban versus rural citizens have differing expectations of how the state will respond to their demands, and shows how this impacts whether citizens turn to political intermediaries or access public officials directly when they make demands of the state. Julie Anne Weaver’s research from Peru shows how underlying attitudes about politicians, the role of local mayors and the institutional context impact whether and how citizens choose to use voting or non-electoral means to push for greater accountability and better performance from their local mayors.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Cosponsor

• DIVISION 12: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• Local Politics and Social Program Implementation in Kenya - Eric J. Kramon, George Washington University

• Uneven Expectations: Geography of Citizenship Practice in Rural & Urban India - Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, University of Virginia; Adam Michael Auerbach, American University-SIS

• Institutional constraints, citizen expectations and local-level accountability - Julie Anne Weaver, Harvard University

• Does Information about the Formal Justice Sector Change Perceptions of the State - Matthew S. Winters, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Jeffrey K. Conroy-Krutz, Michigan State University

Chair

• Matthew S. Winters University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Discussant

• Brigitte Seim University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill