The Political Economy of Service Delivery in Developing Democracies

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The delivery of state services lies at the core of politics in most democracies in the developing world. Services create rents that frontline administrators often leverage for political or monetary gain. Effective service delivery or credible promises of future delivery can yield electoral benefits for parties and candidates that are able to claim credit. Service delivery creates opportunities for intermediaries to serve as clientelistic brokers but also for citizens to organize from the bottom up and demand their due. The papers on this panel examine these aspects of the politics of service delivery across three developing democracies in different world regions: Brazil, India, and Ghana. Dasgupta, Kapur, and Agnihotri focus on the state, examining subnational variation in state capacity to administer land records and enforce local property rights in India. Boas, Hidalgo, and Kasahara examine the partisan angle, looking at how the participation of non-governmental organizations in service delivery in Brazil helps allied parties claim credit and reap electoral benefits. Goyal and Harding look at whether policy promises that are attributable to politicians’ effort influence voting behavior in Ghana and India. Cooperman focuses on the dynamics of bottom-up interest representation, examining how community associations leverage the electoral weight of their members to obtain better services in rural Brazil. All of the papers draw on original data, including surveys of citizens or elites, and they employ methods for causal inference, including survey experiments, conjoint analysis, and regression discontinuity designs.

Sub Unit

• Division 6: Political Economy

Individual Presentations

• State Capacity at the Front Lines: Evidence from Land Administration in India - Aditya Dasgupta, University of California, Merced; Devesh Kapur, Johns Hopkins SAIS; Anustubh Agnihotri, University of California, Berkeley

• Saturating Partisanship: Credit-Claiming for Service Delivery in Brazil - Taylor C. Boas, Boston University; F. Daniel Hidalgo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Yuri Kasahara, Oslo Metropolitan University

• Policy Attribution and Candidate Choice: Conjoint Experiments in Ghana and India - Tanushree Goyal, Harvard University; Robin Harding, University of Oxford

• Trading Favors: Politics, Service Delivery, and Civil Society in Brazil - Alicia Dailey Cooperman, Texas A&M University

Chair

• Sarah Brierley London School of Economics

Discussant

• F. Daniel Hidalgo Massachusetts Institute of Technology