Oversight, Capacity, and Inequality

• In Event: Government Accountability to Citizens

Abstract

Bureaucratic oversight frequently relies upon information provided by citizens complaints. I argue that the use of complaints in oversight generates variation in a state's capacity to implement public policies and shapes "who gets what" from the state. I study the distributional consequences of oversight institution by developing a model of service provision. Specifically, I consider a politician's choice to use or ignore information generated by complaints when monitoring a bureaucrat. Complaints generate information that direct a politicians' remediation of bureaucratic decisions and may increase bureaucratic effort. However, when costs of complaint vary across the population, use of this information generates inequality in the distribution of service outputs, improving access of citizens that can complain while reducing access of citizens that cannot. Further, relying on citizen information can build or erode a state's capacity for policy implementation, depending on the distribution of these costs across the population. This paper introduces citizen complaint systems as an institution that shapes both policy implementation capacity and distributional outcomes in comparative perspective.

Author

• Tara L Slough, New York University