Green Neighborhoods for All? Sub-municipal Voting Behavior and Service Provision

• In Event: Local Elections, Institutions, and Bureaucracies in the Global South and North

Abstract

Improving the provision and quality of public services is one of the main justifications for political and administrative decentralization. Yet, coordination issues across multiple levels of government, limited electoral returns for politicians’ shorter time horizons and unclear attribution of responsibility from voters create distributive trade-offs in deciding whom, when, and how to provide services or respond to requests. This is particularly troublesome in the context of large urban centers, as many public services and development projects are tied to a specific location, and the benefits of collective goods provision are often spatially concentrated within neighborhoods. In this paper, I highlight the role that geographic representation and coordination across multiple layers of government play at the local level in the provision of services. I contend the capacity to provide and maintain public goods in different city’s areas is conditional on whether or not there is `vertically-divided authority’ between the two tiers of government within a municipality. Specifically, when the city and sub-municipal governments are in the hands of the same party, I would expect the city mayor and city deputies to encourage better service delivery at the local level. In 2016, Mexico City implemented a political decentralization reform, creating sub-municipal councils in each of the 16 boroughs. In the case of Bogotá, an administrative decentralization reform was implemented in 2013, giving sub-municipal mayors and councilors the responsibility for the construction, maintenance, and administration of neighborhood parks in the city. I leverage the implementation of two decentralization reforms in Mexico City and Bogotá to test to what extent “bringing government closer to the people” affects delivering public goods such as parks, trees, and green areas in neighborhoods across the two cities.

Author

• Manuela Muñoz Fuerte, Texas Tech University