Powering Through-Participation & Citizenship in Hybrid Service Delivery Regimes

• In Event: Comparative Urban Politics

Abstract

Across the developing world, state services such as water and electricity are outsourced to private providers. What happens to the relationship between citizens and political leaders, when the latter no longer influence service delivery? Taking advantage of a unique spatial dataset of 25,000 service delivery clusters in Karachi, Pakistan, I examine the economic stratification of service delivery under privatization, and find that it creates variation in political expectations of the state. Interviews from ten months of fieldwork are used to establish neighborhood-level variation in private, semi-private and state-provided services, constructing a measure of `state embeddedness.' I test conditional effects of state embeddedness on political participation using an original survey of over 1000 households. I find that improved service delivery under privatized service delivery regimes can reinforce political participation, but only if some services continue to be provided by the state. Conversely, low quality private services across sectors can lead to voter exit.
This study contributes to theories of claim-making and democratic development: I suggest that even after privatization a virtuous cycle of trust between private institutions and consumers can create efficiencies in the consumption of scarce resources, and provide important psychic benefits. On the other hand, a cycle of mistrust can create uncertainty that spills over into the political sphere. This work joins emergent scholarship that suggests that patronage in hyper-local contexts, far from being a one-way relationship between powerful state actors and powerless clients, is an important feedback loop for citizens to express priorities, preferences and satisfaction within and beyond the electoral cycle.

Author

• Erum Aly Haider, Georgetown University