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Traditional Governance, Citizen Engagement and Local Public Goods: Evidence from Mexico
Abstract
We study the governance of public good provision in poor communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. We estimate the effect of usos y cost umbres a form of participatory democracy prevalent in indigenous communities on the provision of local public goods. Because governance is endogenous, we address selection effects by matching on municipal characteristics and long-term settlement patterns. Using a first-differences design we show that these municipalities increase access to electricity, sewerage, and education faster than communities ruled by political parties. We also show they are places of vibrant political participation, not authoritarian enclaves protecting the political monopoly of local bosses.
... Decisions are taken through direct participatory practices (e.g. community assemblies), allowing communities to better hold their political leaders accountable, prevent elite capture, and monitor and sanction non-cooperative behavior (Díaz-Cayeros et al., 2014). Electoral accountability is enabled through diverse mechanisms for citizen participation and oversight of elected officials (Baldwin and Holzinger, 2019). ...
... Traditional governance is a collaborative approach to public goods provision (Díaz-Cayeros et al., 2014). Integrating traditional governance into western governance systems can ensure that local customs and traditions are respected while also delivering urban infrastructures and services that are responsive to the needs of all residents; this is particularly true in urban peripheries where hybrid governance systems are usually in place (Sim et al., 2018). ...
... In contrast with cases of coproduction where civil society organizations act as mediators between stakeholders to resolve conflicts (both within and outside communities) (Siame and Watson, 2022b), coproduction enabled by democratic traditional governance has developed culture-specific forms of management (Osuteye et al., 2019) that enable conflict resolution at the interior of communities before it escalates. For instance, the fact that communities monitor the behavior of community leaders (see, for example, Díaz-Cayeros et al., 2014) and remove them if they suspect wrongful or inefficient practices, utilizing community assemblies is an efficient way of dealing with problematic leaders and reducing the scale of conflict. Community decision making in assemblies allows the definition of strategies and procedures in a democratic way, which is key to balancing internal interests and reducing the risk of internal fractures. ...
Building urban resilience in vulnerable global South settlements is a pressing twenty‐first century challenge. Building urban resilience involves addressing institutional deficiencies to mobilize resources for the delivery of urban services and infrastructures. State–civil society partnerships are effective in low‐capacity settings as a step forward in the consolidation of the state, and as an opportunity for the emancipation of vulnerable communities. Coproducing urban resilience requires recognizing marginalized communities (e.g. indigenous groups), their capacity for local problem solving and governance structures for community engagement. In this article, we explore a coalition of five periurban neighborhoods in Oaxaca City (Mexico), which collaborate with the state to address flooding and drought using traditional governance. We argue that, although the recognition and mobilization of traditional governance has enabled the coproduction of public services (adaptation), it has been limited in delivering radical governance transformations. Traditional governance may prevent neighborhood leaders from reaching government positions to secure further resources required for the construction of urban resilience. The article contributes to debates on coproduction, explaining how traditional governance enables the coproduction of infrastructures and service delivery, but is limited in forwarding deep societal transformations necessary for resilience building in vulnerable contexts of the global South.
... Participation mechanisms operated through the promotion or formalisation of processes for meaningful citizen input in public policy or strategy design and planning, or implementation of public services. An example was the introduction of participatory budgeting so that citizens may directly contribute to the development of a budget proposal (e.g., Gonçalves, 2013;Diaz-Cayeros et al., 2014;Rao et al., 2017). ...
... Fourteen participatory priority setting, planning or budgeting interventions were evaluated. These include instances where citizens engaged in participatory budgeting in municipal government in Brazil (Gonçalves, 2013;Touchton and Wampler, 2014), Mexico (Diaz-Cayeros et al., 2014) and Russia (Beuermann and Amelina, 2014), Rao et al., 2017), support for participatory planning in rural India (Rao et al., 2017), and enhancements to the participatory monitoring components of CDD programmes in Afghanistan (Beath et al., 2013), the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Pakistan (Giné et al., 2018). In addition, three studies pertained to community forest management programmes in Nepal (Tachibana and Adhikari, 2009), Madagascar (Rasolofoson et al., 2015) and Tanzania (Persha and Meshack, 2016), and four were of water user associations in Brazil (Barde, 2017), China (Huang, 2014), the Philippines (Bandyopadhyay et al., 2010) and Namibia (Bandyopadhyay et al., 2004). ...
... These included programmes targeting inclusion of women or poorer groups in Brazil (Gonçalves, 2013), India (Pandey et al., 2007), Indonesia (Banerjee et al., 2018), Malawi (Gullo et al., 2017), Mexico (Diaz-Cayeros et al., 2014), Pakistan (Giné et al., 2018) and Uganda (Björkman and Svensson, 2009;Björkman Nyqvist et al., 2017). ...
Effective, accountable and transparent institutions, that engage in inclusive and participatory governance, are crucial for the sustainability of global development investments. However, there is a debate about whether effective approaches to improving governance processes operate from the bottom up (e.g. by enabling citizens to hold service providers accountable) or the top down (by enabling service providers to be held accountable by the State). This paper systematically reviews participation and accountability mechanisms in a range of sectors, drawing on principles of realist evaluation to develop and test middle-range theory using framework synthesis and statistical meta-analysis. We show that interventions promoting citizen engagement through participatory priority setting or accountability mechanisms are often effective in stimulating active citizen engagement in service delivery and realising improvements in access to services, where they facilitate direct engagement between service users and front-line service providers, such as in health care. However, citizen engagement interventions alone are not effective where services are accessed independently of service provider staff, for example road infrastructure. Interventions promoting participation by increasing citizens’ pressures on politicians to hold providers to account are also not usually able to influence service delivery.
... Local government reformists across the world have provided various arguments in favor of decentralization but the improvement in the delivery of public services remained a common objective of all (Park 2022;Diaz et al. 2014;Martinez-Vazquez et al., 2016;Goel et al., 2017). In contrast, decentralization could not be proven effective for the improvement of service delivery in each country case due to the poor financial structure, low revenues, and inadequate administrative capacity at the local government level (Rubio & Gomez, 2017). ...
... The literature on decentralization and its effects on socioeconomic variables is too vast to review. Proponents of decentralization support the public sector reforms in developing countries (Canavire-Bacarreza & Martinez-Vazquez, 2012;Diaz et al. 2014;Rodden, 2016) while opponents argue that this system creates problems (Rubio, 2011). The disagreements arise after observing the impact of these policies, implemented in developing countries. ...
Countries around the globe are devolving fiscal, administrative, and political powers to sub-national governments. Generally, the federal transfer system places constraints on local government’s ability to plan and to administer the efficient provision of basic public services. The Devolution Plan in Pakistan was formed on August 14, 2000, which strongly recommended the transfer of power and authority to the lower tiers with the objective of better provision of public services. In addition, the Local Government Ordinance transferred the political, administrative, and fiscal powers to the district and tehsil level in Pakistan. Following 2008, with the shift in the political hierarchy, the higher tiers regained their authority. This study aims to examine the impact of fiscal decentralization in the improvement of public services in 34 developed and developing districts of the Punjab Province, Pakistan, during a 13-year period, from 2003 to 2015. The first differenced GMM and system GMM techniques are applied for the estimation of study data. The comparative analysis of this study finds that fiscal decentralization improves education in developed districts while in developing districts, there is no evidence of improvement. In addition, there is evidence of improvement in health outcomes, in the case of both developed and developing districts of Punjab. Decentralized reforms presented under Local Govt. Ordinance 2001 was only effective during the Pervez Musharraf regime, but after the end of this regime, in 2008 this policy became ineffective, because of recentralization. The transfer of power and authority is suggested to the local governments with a special focus on developing districts of Punjab, Pakistan.
... Some employ survey questions asking about citizens' perceptions of the general influence and trustworthiness of different leaders, or the overall desirability of increasing their power (Henn, 2023;Logan, 2009). 2 Others use lab games that intentionally abstract away from the specifics of particular activities to examine different leaders' authority (Gottlieb, 2017). Even when scholars empirically measure leaders' influence over multiple activities, they rarely conceptualize influence over different activities as distinct phenomena (Baldwin, 2019;Bullock et al., 2011;Dıaz-Cayeros et al., 2014;Logan 2013;Magaloni et al., 2019). ...
... Studying native American reservations, Cornell and Kalt (2007) find that "nation-building" approaches to economic development, in which tribes make the decisions and conceive of economic development as a social problem, work better than "standard approaches," in which federal decision-makers set the agenda and treat development as an economic problem. Similarly, Dıaz-Cayeros et al. (2014) find that poor communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, governed by an indigenous participatory practice (usos y costumbres) have better public goods provision than those governed by partisan, elected municipal leaders. Our study suggests that the "nation-building" and usos y costumbres approaches may be more successful because they empower local leaders who have more appropriate geographic scope and greater expertise than the federal and party leaders, particularly when local problems are redefined as social problems. ...
Scholars increasingly recognize the plurality of leaders who exercise de facto authority in governing communities. But what limits different leaders’ power to organize distinct types of collective action beyond the law? We contend that leaders’ influence varies by activity, depending on the degree to which the activity matches the leaders’ geographic scope and field of expertise (“domain congruence”). Employing conjoint endorsement experiments in Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia, we test whether domain congruence predicts citizens’ willingness to comply with leader requests across different activities and examine the mechanisms that explain its importance. We find limits on leaders’ authority, that the concept of domain congruence helps predict the activities over which leaders have the greatest influence, and that leaders’ domain legitimacy may underpin the relationship between domain congruence and authority.
... Although few studies explore traditional governance systems within the management field, research has shown that Indigenous governance systems are strongly informed by cultural values, which may include reciprocity and interconnection with local ecosystems (Trosper, 2002), or elements of democratic decision-making processes (Bentzen, Hariri, & Robinson, 2019;Diaz-Cayeros, Magaloni, & Ruiz-Euler, 2013). These governance systems have demonstrated their historical resilience to colonial efforts to undermine them, while providing modern solutions to sustainable resource management (Trosper, 2002) and the provision of public goods (Diaz-Cayeros et al., 2013;Kudo, 2020). ...
... Although few studies explore traditional governance systems within the management field, research has shown that Indigenous governance systems are strongly informed by cultural values, which may include reciprocity and interconnection with local ecosystems (Trosper, 2002), or elements of democratic decision-making processes (Bentzen, Hariri, & Robinson, 2019;Diaz-Cayeros, Magaloni, & Ruiz-Euler, 2013). These governance systems have demonstrated their historical resilience to colonial efforts to undermine them, while providing modern solutions to sustainable resource management (Trosper, 2002) and the provision of public goods (Diaz-Cayeros et al., 2013;Kudo, 2020). Further illustrating the resilience of Indigenous governance systems, studies within this category expose how such systems continue to operate within highly controlling and restrictive bureaucratic environments (Lofthouse, 2019b;Mika, Smith, Gillies, & Wiremu, 2019). ...
Indigenous Peoples and contexts have offered valuable insights to enrich management and organization theories and literature. Yet, despite their growing prevalence and impact, these insights have not been compiled and synthesized comprehensively. With this article, we provide a systematic and thorough analysis of Indigenous Management and Organization Studies research published over a 90-year period (1932 – 2021) and synthesize this body of work into a multi-dimensional framework, exploring the various features and methodological considerations of Indigenous research. Our analysis reveals that the literature in the field remains fragmented and dispersed across many different subfields and publication outlets, making it challenging for researchers to aggregate, synthesize, and build upon prior works. Our framework integrates insights into recurrent themes and provides a common language to further advance this vitally important field of research. Keywords: Indigenous; Management; Organization; Literature Review
... Although few studies explore traditional governance systems within the management field, research has shown that Indigenous governance systems are strongly informed by cultural values, which may include reciprocity and interconnection with local ecosystems (Trosper, 2002), or elements of democratic decision-making processes (Bentzen, Hariri, & Robinson, 2019;Diaz-Cayeros, Magaloni, & Ruiz-Euler, 2013). These governance systems have demonstrated their historical resilience to colonial efforts to undermine them, while providing modern solutions to sustainable resource management (Trosper, 2002) and the provision of public goods (Diaz-Cayeros et al., 2013;Kudo, 2020). ...
... Although few studies explore traditional governance systems within the management field, research has shown that Indigenous governance systems are strongly informed by cultural values, which may include reciprocity and interconnection with local ecosystems (Trosper, 2002), or elements of democratic decision-making processes (Bentzen, Hariri, & Robinson, 2019;Diaz-Cayeros, Magaloni, & Ruiz-Euler, 2013). These governance systems have demonstrated their historical resilience to colonial efforts to undermine them, while providing modern solutions to sustainable resource management (Trosper, 2002) and the provision of public goods (Diaz-Cayeros et al., 2013;Kudo, 2020). Further illustrating the resilience of Indigenous governance systems, studies within this category expose how such systems continue to operate within highly controlling and restrictive bureaucratic environments (Lofthouse, 2019b;Mika, Smith, Gillies, & Wiremu, 2019). ...
This study investigates the conditions that influence organizational success in protecting the legitimacy of large capital investment projects in plural and complex institutional contexts. Following a bottom-up approach, we distinguish and measure the different components that characterize plural and complex institutional contexts. Then, we investigate under which context-specific conditions are different organizational responses linked to low organizational success. Our results show that contexts of volatile complexity lead to low success irrespective of the type of organizational response. Additionally, we find that incompatibility alone, a key feature of complex institutional contexts according to prior research, does not seriously compromise organizational success. Our dataset is comprised of the hearing transcripts of the regulatory review processes of 35 oil pipeline project proposals in Canada (1993 – 2018). Our research design combines topic modelling and fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA).
... Mexico has been chosen as the case study for analysis of PCSD and Indigenous Peoples for a number of reasons. First, Indigenous communities in Mexico share a very rich history, as groups such as the Aztecs, Maya, and Olmec, among others, built civilizations of worldwide renown that have contributed to modern-day advances in science, natural resource management, disaster prevention, and more (Díaz-Cayeros et al., 2014). According to INEGI (Mexico's National Institute of Statistics and Geography) there are presently 68 different Indigenous Peoples inhabiting the country. ...
... This situation is refl ected in Mexico. The academic literatures on Indigenous Peoples in Mexico generally focus on three discussions: the need to address poverty and marginalization (Rieger, 2021), the impact of Indigenous community self-governance (known as usos y costumbres) on resource distribution, well-being and sustainability (Díaz-Cayeros et al., 2014), and political participation and empowerment (Durán-Díaz et al., 2020). Even the current government's National Program for Indigenous Peoples (2018-2024) focuses on these themes. ...
Coherence for Sustainable Development (PCSD) has promoted sustainability through policy coordination, but to what extent does it respond to the needs of local communities? Scholars of PCSD have acknowledged how it has been considered as an end in itself rather than a means to achieve normative impact. A major limit of PCSD has been its institutionalized nature, as mechanisms for social participation have not been highlighted in implementation strategies. This article addresses this issue. It proposes “pull-push-match” as a methodology for the establishment of participative PCSD. The article, co-authored by a team of researchers and practitioners from Mexico, addresses PCSD in relation to Indigenous communities.
Spanish Abstract: La Coherencia de Políticas para el Desarrollo Sostenible (CPDS) ha promovido la sostenibilidad mediante la coordinación de políticas, pero ¿en qué medida responde a las necesidades de las comunidades locales? Los estudiosos de la CPDS han reconocido que ésta se ha considerado un fin en sí misma más que un medio para lograr un impacto normativo. Uno de los principales límites del CPDS ha sido su carácter institucionalizado, ya que los mecanismos de participación social no se han destacado en las estrategias de implementación. Este artículo aborda esta cuestión. Propone el “pull-push-match” como metodología para establecer un CPDS participativo. El artículo, elaborado por un equipo de investigadores y profesionales de México, aborda la CPDS en relación con las comunidades indígenas.
French Abstract: La cohérence des politiques de développement durable (CPDD) favorise la durabilité par la coordination des politiques, mais dans quelle mesure répond-elle aux besoins des communautés locales? Les chercheurs dans ce domaine ont montré que la CPDD est considérée comme une fin en soi plutôt que comme un moyen d’avoir un impact normatif. L’une des principales limites de la CPDD a été sa nature institutionnalisée, car les mécanismes de participation sociale n’ont pas été mis en évidence dans les stratégies de mise en oeuvre. Cet article aborde la question et propose la méthode “pull-push-match” pour l’établissement d’une CPDD participative. Il est co-écrit par une équipe de chercheurs et de praticiens au Mexique et traite de la CPDD en relation avec les communautés indigènes.
... Discussions of customary political institutions have experienced a surge in the literature. Scholars highlight the influence of traditional authorities on outcomes such as electoral mobilization (e.g., Baldwin, 2013Baldwin, , 2014Kadt and Larreguy, 2018;Krämer, 2016), development and public goods provision (e.g., Acemoglu, Reed, and Robinson, 2014;Baldwin, 2013;Díaz-Cayeros, Magaloni, and Ruiz-Euler, 2014;Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2013;Wilfahrt, 2018), democracy (e.g., Aagaard Seeberg, 2018;Baldwin, 2016;Baldwin and Holzinger, 2019;Kromrey, 2016), as well as violent conflict (Depetris-Chauvin, 2015;Eck, 2014;Mustasilta, 2019;Paine, 2019;Wig, 2016;Wig and Kromrey, 2018). Wig (2016), Paine (2019), and Depetris-Chauvin (2015) all use measures on the precolonial institutionalization of ethnic groups from George Peter Murdock's seminal Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock, 1969) of Africa to predict conflict today. ...
... Lastly, traditional institutions are not an African phenomenon, but are prevalent in large parts of the world. For instance, there is evidence that indigenous institutions affect political outcomes in Latin America (e.g., Díaz-Cayeros, Magaloni, and Ruiz-Euler, 2014;Mähler and Pierskalla, 2015) and Asia (e.g., Cooper, 2018;Grenfell, 2006;Isser, 2011;Tajima, 2013Tajima, , 2014. ...
... Turning to competition, local democratic institutions are thought beneficial for public goods provision due to their ability to decrease elite participation in state capture (Díaz-Cayeros et al., 2014). Government officials that are subject to competitive elections are less able to collude to divert resources to private interests. ...
... The existence of elected local officials, rather than appointed officials, increases accountability and transparency such that public goods provision operates more effectively and with less corruption, increasing access. Indeed, the literature has identified both the existence of local elections and the degree of competition of these elections as central to adequate goods provision (Díaz-Cayeros et al., 2014;Miller, 2015, and to a lesser extent Carlitz, 2017). ...
Democracies are commonly thought to provide greater levels of public goods than autocracies. Given that many public goods are provided locally, higher levels of local democracy are further thought to result in better rates of provision in both autocratic and democratic systems. However, several studies have cast doubt on democratic superiority in public goods provision both nationally and locally. We re-examine these contested relationships, investigating a locally provisioned public good: access to basic water. To determine what, if any, effects democracy has on public goods provision, we analyse the effects of both national and local democratic institutions, in conjunction with economic development. In cross-national regression analyses, we examine a global sample of 140 states from 2000 to 2015, arriving at three findings. First, access to basic water varies little by national regime type once accounting for development. Second, the existence of local elections and the degree to which they are free and competitive are positively correlated with basic water access rates in poor states. Finally, the positive effects of local democracy on water access in poor states increase with democratic institutional longevity. The findings of this study suggest two necessary additions to future research. First, more nuance is needed in the study of public goods provision beyond resources or a theoretical rationale for increased provision related to national regime characteristics. Second, considering the conditional influences of local institutional characteristics, development metrics could help illustrate the complicated circumstances determining access to basic public goods.
... No obstante, los 570 municipios de Oaxaca, independiente de si eligen a sus autoridades municipales por el SPP o por el SNI, todos tienen la misma estructura formal, es decir, se integran por un ayuntamiento conformado por un presidente municipal, síndico y regidores cuyas atribuciones se derivan de las constituciones federal y local. Así como lo señalan Díaz-Cayeros, Magaloni y Ruiz-Euler (2014), todos los municipios comparten una relación legal y fiscal con su Estado y la federación. Es importante señalar que el reconocimiento constitucional del SNI no cambió las relaciones fiscales de los gobiernos locales con el gobierno federal. ...
Desde 1995 Oaxaca reconoce constitucionalmente los Sistemas Normativos Indígenas (sni), a través de los cuales los municipios indígenas tienen el derecho a gobernarse de acuerdo con sus instituciones originarias. En teoría, este reconocimiento acercaría a los pueblos indígenas del estado al ideal de libre determinación establecido en las normas internacionales y nacionales a través del cual cada pueblo es libre de alcanzar su desarrollo conforme sus aspiraciones definidas colectivamente. Sin embargo, a tres décadas del reconocimiento persiste un bajo desarrollo y una alta desigualdad. Se parte de la premisa de que ningún sistema normativo es puro ni estático, sino que se encuentra en permanente cambio e interacción con otros sistemas. En los municipios de sni el acceso a diversos mecanismos de financiamiento es necesario para el desarrollo, pero a la vez se requiere de una gobernanza que se observa en la participación, la coordinación y la resolución de conflictos.
... The traditional governance practice had been plagued with bureaucratic complexities with an opportunity for a minimal level of citizens' participation in the decisionmaking processes (Díaz-Cayeros et al., 2014). In classical thought, public administration was viewed as politically neutral, and the major focus of the government was public service which was expected to be delivered by centralized bureaucracy (Svara, 2006). ...
Administrative reform emerged as a recurrent phenomenon that indicates “the induced systematic improvement of public sector operational performance” (Caiden, 1991). The major propositions of reform initiatives include the reorganization of structures, processes, and practices within it. The other concurrent concept of “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) points toward the simulation of human intelligence performed through machines (i.e., computer systems) and automation processes (McCarthy, 2007). Artificial Intelligence stepped up a new trajectory in the governance dynamics of administration with the inclusion of algorithmic-based accountability for accomplishing tasks through AI technologies (Engstrom & Ho, 2020). In the traditional practices of governance, administrative functions were attributed to formalism and hierarchical compliance (Peters & Pierre, 2001). Gradually, the government mobilized the application of ICT tools toward the modernization of public services and adopted various initiatives in the field of e-governance to ensure the simplification of services by reducing the cost, number of visits, and time (Islam & Rahman, 2020). However, with the widespread market functions and trade liberalization, the concentration of reform initiatives tends to managerial functions, business, and partnership approaches in public service delivery (Islam, 2024). There has been a shift in concentration in governance due to the digital revolution toward the utilization of Artificial Intelligence for speeding up the administrative functions of the government (Mukherjee, 2022). Realizing the resurgence of AI, the Bangladesh government developed a “National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence” (2020–2024) with some priority sectoral coverage that included “public service delivery, manufacturing, agriculture, smart mobility and transportation, skill and education, finance and trade, and health”. In this strategy, the road map of the Bangladesh government shows a gradual path from 2020 to 2024 in completing innovation in AI, industrialization, AI start-ups, data-driven policies, workforce preparedness, and so on (ICT Division, 2020). Recently, a draft of the National Artificial Intelligence Policy 2024 was promulgated to transform smart Bangladesh by leveraging AI technologies to promote the overall development of the country. The policy intertwined with the strengthening of administrative assistance through the AI system (ICT Division, 2024). In the era of AI, the inherited administrative setup of the Bangladesh government needs to be reinvigorated so that the reform agenda can be exerted toward the upliftment of administrative and managerial functions.
... In usos municipalities, the allocation of resources is decided collectively in community assemblies. In a sense, usos municipalities' public spending is a participatory budget (Diaz Cayeros et al., 2013). ...
... The Tupinikim and Guarani indigenous groups make decisions through participatory democracy that reduces the risk of agency loss, which is crucial to maximize collective well-being. Díaz-Cayeros et al. (2014) found similar practices in the local governance structure studying the provision of public goods in indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. We emphasize that the shadow network comprises two different ethnicities, with cultural differences within and between indigenous tribes. ...
This study aims to understand the emergence of bottom-up social practices in shadow networks in the context of an industrial disaster. The empirical focus involves the Guarani and Tupinikim indigenous people, victims of the Fundão tailing dam rupture, one of the world’s greatest socio-environmental disasters. We adopted a qualitative approach to identify the indigenous shadow network’s agency, resistance mechanisms, and resilience activation. We interpret indigenous resistance as a way of fighting for their existence, with mechanisms crafted by collective deliberation and community mobilization. We identified the mining industry’s efforts to divide resistance and how the indigenous shadow network rebuilt resistance mechanisms through activating resilience based on indigenous values, interconnected leaderships, and social memory from their ancestral land. We thereby advance in understanding the indigenous shadow network’s agency that allows managers to intervene with on-ground actions to maintain or enhance resistance and resilience in the context of organizational studies.
... Los resultados son similares y muestran aquellas comunidades o localidades regidas por los Usos y Costumbres, en comparación con aquellas regidas por partidos políticos, es más eficiente la provisión de bienes públicos locales. En los municipios regidos por Usos y Costumbres, es más probable que se lleven a cabo reuniones abiertas y participativas, por ello, los ciudadanos participan en los procesos de toma de decisión, mejorando la distribución de bienes públicos locales (Díaz-Cayeros et al, 2014). Lo anterior conlleva a un mayor compromiso cívico de los ciudadanos y un sistema de sanciones creíble. ...
El artículo tiene como objetivo analizar la literatura sobre la accesibilidad a servicios públicos desde un punto de vista de representación territorial. Durante mucho tiempo la representación política se estudiaba desde el punto de vista de la elaboración de políticas públicas. En este estudio se parte de una concepción multidimensional, tomando también en cuenta la distribución de recursos y servicio al distrito. Además, previamente se había estudiado el caso estadounidense, sin embargo, en América Latina existe evidencia de que es un fenómeno importante, por lo que resulta fundamental revisar los estudios para la región. Se identifican condiciones institucionales, partidarias, individuales y características del distrito que influencian la responsividad hacia el distrito electoral
... For instance, as discussed above, "solidary groups" in China affect who is perceived to be accountable to whom (Tsai 2007). Similarly, Diaz-Cayeros, Magaloni, and Ruiz-Euler (2014) show that indigenous communities in Mexico that have chosen to govern themselves through usos y costumbres 7 experienced improvements in the quality of electricity, education, and sewerage. The authors attribute this in part to the collective decision-making processes in these communities. ...
Recent research demonstrates that the quality of public institutions is crucial for a number of important environmental, social, economic, and political outcomes, and thereby human well-being broadly conceived. The Quality of Government (QoG) approach directs attention to issues such as impartiality in the exercise of public power, professionalism in public service delivery, effective measures against corruption, and meritocracy instead of patronage and nepotism. The 38 chapters in this handbook offer a comprehensive, state of the art overview of this rapidly expanding research field and also identify viable avenues for future research. The initial chapters focus on theoretical approaches and debates, and the central question of how QoG can be measured. The remaining chapters examine the wealth of empirical research on how QoG relates to democratic accountability, ethnic diversity, human well-being, economic growth, political legitimacy, environmental sustainability, gender equality, social cohesion, and the outbreak of civil conflicts. A third set of chapters turns to the perennial issue of what contextual factors and policy approaches have proven successful (and not so successful) for increasing QoG. The QoG approach both challenges and complements important strands of inquiry in the social sciences. For research about democratization, QoG adds the importance of taking state capacity into account. For economics, the QoG approach shows that in order to produce economic prosperity, markets need to be embedded in institutions with a certain set of qualities. For development studies, QoG emphasizes that issues concerned with corruption are integral to understanding development writ large.
... Nonetheless, it is crucial to note that this policy innovation has engendered substantial resistance within the Sleman area of Yogyakarta Province. As reported by [10], the local populace harbours reservations concerning the suitability of e-voting as an alternative means of determining leadership. The rationale behind their resistance encompasses various concerns, ranging from apprehensions about technological manipulation to a perception that the prevailing regulatory framework lacks the requisite fortitude to address violations of e-voting. ...
INTRODUCTION: The rapid technological advancements of Industry 4.0 have influenced government politics, extending to the adoption of electronic voting in village head elections. In Sleman, e-voting was introduced in 2020, aiming for voting system efficiency and synchronization of population data, positioning the region as an e-voting pioneer in Indonesia. While e-voting offers efficiency and cost savings, it faces some problems. OBJECTIVES: This study endeavors to comprehensively assess the implementation of the e-voting system in village head elections and provide recommendations for its optimization, with a specific focus on the context of Sleman Regency.METHODS: This qualitative research encompasses data from 17 villages spread across 35 sub-districts within Sleman Regency. The study utilizes a comprehensive approach that includes secondary data analysis, incorporating literature, internet-based resources, scientific journals, books, regulations, and official documents. It further involves interviews with government officials at Sleman offices, officials at polling stations, and voters. Additionally, observational data is gathered to shed light on the intricate dynamics of e-voting.RESULTS: The evaluation focused on four pivotal aspects of the e-voting system's success: public trust, public participation, technology, and adherence to election principles. The findings reveal improved dynamics in 2021 when compared to 2020. Public trust in the e-voting system has notably increased, aligning with the relatively successful implementation in the previous year. While community participation has reached a satisfactory level, it has yet to attain full community control, with interesting nuances observed, particularly in less ‘advanced’ villages where participation tends to be lower. In the realm of technology, the e-voting system excels in terms of security, hardware reliability, the comprehensiveness of application features, and user-friendliness.CONCLUSION: The study underscores that the enhancement of e-voting systems presents an avenue to fortify democratic practices and electoral processes in Indonesia. Acknowledging imperfections in data collection systems and addressing participation disparities among villages should be prioritised. Furthermore, the study suggests that comprehensive future research is needed to evaluate the feasibility of extending e-voting systems to higher levels of government elections. This examination offers valuable insights into the evolution of e-voting in Indonesia and the prospects for its expansion in democratisation efforts.
... Some studies directly assess the provision of rural public goods as the main reason for the existence and function of village clan groups from the perspective of functionalism [38]. However, existing studies have found that the impact of formal institutions or new policies can play a role through the trust compensation mechanism, which can not only significantly increase farmers' willingness to supply public goods [45], but even improve the supply level of actual public services [46]. After supervision is sent to the countryside, the village discipline inspection committee concurrently serves as the director of the village supervision committee, which expands the channels for villagers to offer suggestions, and guarantees the power of democratic supervision within the village. ...
This paper mainly studies the effect of village-level power supervision reform on the rural supply of public goods. In this paper, the panel data of 100 villages in five provinces of China from 2005 to 2019 are used to identify and analyze the impact of the supervision policy on the supply of rural public goods. The study adopted PSM-DID as the identification strategy to alleviate the endogenous problem of the model; it found that the supervision policy significantly improved the supply of public goods in villages, and increased the satisfaction of villagers with the village economic base and public social services. There is regional heterogeneity in the improvement effect of policy on public goods supply, which mainly reflects the regions with weak economic development. This policy mainly promotes the optimization of public goods supply by strengthening villagers’ public participation, and promoting the improvement of the current situation of public goods by restraining village cadres’ duty behaviors. It is also found that the coupling of clan power and village formal authority can inhibit the positive effects brought by the policy, and only in areas with strong clan power can the negative effects be mitigated. Moreover, there is an alternative relationship between the assessment pressure of village cadres and the supervision force sent to the countryside, which will form a situation of excessive supervision and inhibit the optimization of village public goods. The conclusion of this paper provides empirical support for the view that “top-down external institutional supervision and bottom-up internal democratic supervision should be effectively integrated” in the theory of village power supervision.
... Although Oaxacan municipalities experience the same institutional weakness described above, the coexistence of normative frameworks (Factor One) has developed governance arrangements that provide opportunities for local authorities to acquire more political power than the Sonoran counterpart. Resource-wise, Oaxacan municipalities have been historically disadvantaged, but not legitimate-wise (Díaz-Cayeros et al., 2014). Capulalpam's local authorities -in particular the president of the agrarian assembly with support of mayor and councillors alongside the social movements' narrative of autonomy, self-governance and dignityhave found ways to legitimise their decisions, not only to residents but also towards other state institutions found at the state-level government (i.e. ...
This paper offers an analytical framework to identify how communities that have been negatively affected by mineral extraction and its infrastructure can begin to transition toward an emancipatory approach to overcome their marginalization, which has been accentuated by the socio-environmental conflicts caused by mining. We argue that through the extractivism–infrastructure nexus, alternative options to overcome these conflicts can be unveiled and unpacked. By comparing two Mexican mining cases—the Sonora River region in the northwest of the country and the Oaxaca highlands in the southeast—we identify the instances of everyday resistance, struggle, and contestation that are important to assessing emancipation. The cases show how non-Indigenous communities, inspired by Indigenous groups, can begin to think differently and move toward a transition that is more socio-environmentally just. Building on interlegal and municipalism debates, we argue that this transition can be accomplished through a focus on narratives, practices, and norms within four analytical factors: normative frameworks, legacies of social movements, local governance, and alternative economies. Our argument offers an alternative way to investigate the function infrastructural projects have in municipal policy-making.
... O ne of the fundamental issues of politics is how political power is distributed between the national center and local actors. In many developing countries, this issue takes the form of a central state confronting traditional local governance institutions such as village elders in South Asia (Chaudhary 1999), lineages in China (Tsai 2007), or caciques in Latin America (Díaz-Cayeros, Magaloni, and Ruiz-Euler 2014). In Africa, local governance is dominated by traditional authorities or chiefs that interact with the state in a myriad of ways (Baldwin 2016;de Kadt and Larreguy 2018;Logan 2013). ...
How does the central state affect public goods provision by local actors? I study the effect of state capacity on local governance in sub-Saharan Africa, which I argue depends on whether traditional authorities are integrated in the country’s constitution. I use distance to administrative headquarters as a measure of state capacity and estimate a regression discontinuity design around administrative boundaries. If traditional authorities are not integrated, then the state and traditional authorities compete with each other, working as substitutes. That is, a stronger state undermines the power of traditional authorities. If traditional authorities are integrated, then the two work as complements. A stronger state then increases the power of traditional authorities. I show that these relationships are crucial to understanding the influence of state capacity on local economic development.
... Lastly, the Progresa results have clear connections to, and implications for, research on the comparative politics of developing countries. A sizable literature, with a focus on Mexico, has emerged to analyze public access to basic utilities, as researchers aim to identify the determinants of government responsiveness for water and drainage services (Cleary, 2007(Cleary, , 2010Diaz-Cayeros et al., 2014, 2016Hiskey, 2003). Based on the results of this study, I join Adida and Girod (2011) in calling for a refinement of government responsiveness measures, with an emphasis on distinguishing between public access methods and private access methods. ...
This article examines policy feedback via economic behavior in the mass public, with a focus on consumption behavior. Do public policies affect the consumption behavior of mass publics and subsequent policymaking processes and outcomes? If so, how? I introduce a policy feedback model of consumption behavior in the mass public. Within this model, I advance a theoretical argument on the consequences of targeted cash assistance policies (TCAPs) for consumer spending behavior and government provision of basic utilities in developing countries. Using a randomized field experiment in Mexico and pre–post analysis, I find that TCAPs boost consumer spending on private access to basic utilities in the short term and reduce government provision of basic utilities in the medium term. The study pushes policy feedback theorists to think beyond the arena of mass politics, and the findings have important implications for social policy and human development in developing countries.
... Therefore, this study widens the narrow research conducted on political competition in a developing country. Previous studies using developing countries, for example in Brazil (Arvate 2013;De Janvry et al. 2012;Chamon et al. 2019), Russia (Nye and Vasilyeva 2015), India (Arulampalam et al. 2009;Crost and Kambhampati 2010;Besley et al. 2011;Nath 2014;Mitra and Mitra 2017), Mali (Gottlieb and Kosec 2017) and Mexico (Clearly 2007;Díaz-Cayeros et al. 2014). Nevertheless, these countries have a different institutional set up than Indonesia. ...
This paper analyses the impact of political competition on economic performance in Indonesia. This study uses a database covering 427 districts in Indonesia, from 2000 to 2013. Political competition is measured using the Herfindahl Hirschman Concentration Index for the district parliament election. This variable is potentially endogenous, because political competition is likely to be non-random and correlated with unobservable variables. To solve this problem, I use the lag of the average political competition within the same province as the instrumental variable for political competition. The degree of political competition boosts real Regional Gross Domestic Product (RGDP) per capita and RGDP growth by 0.7 and 0.6%, respectively. This study also finds that stiffer political competition is associated with lower own source revenue, higher non agricultural RGDP share, and higher Human Development Index (HDI).
... The studies on urban crime (Sampson et al., 1999), civil war (Arjona, 2016), and organized crime have revealed the importance of collective organization to resist violence. In this regard, Indigenous ethnic institutions in some Mexican states have been relatively successful at providing public goods (Díaz-Cayeros et al., 2014), including the containment of criminal violence (Romero and Mendoza, 2015). Specifically, scholars have found that Indigenous peoples' ethnic organizations can provide alternative justice and policing institutions. ...
Yucatán state’s homicide level has remained low and steady for decades and criminal violence activity is low, even while crime rates in much of the rest of the country have increased since 2006. In this research note, we examine five main theoretical explanations for Yucatán's relative containment of violence: criminal competition, protection networks and party alternation, vertical partisan fragmentation, interagency coordination, and social cohesion among the Indigenous population. We find that in Yucatán, interagency coordination is a key explanatory variable, along with cooperation around security between Partido Revolucionario Institucional and Partido Acción Nacional governments and among federal and state authorities.
... While indigenous organizations found an administration eager to enlist them in patronage-based electoral mobilization, Salazar proved less willing to open space for their programmatic participation. He refused to discuss modifying state institutions to open space for institutions of indigenous governance, as the neighboring state of Oaxaca had done by adopting the usos y costumbres system (Benton 2012;Díaz-Cayeros, Magaloni, and Ruiz-Euler 2014). A former president of CIOAC and PRD Congressman in the 1990s attested that the Salazar administration refused to participate in a roundtable discussion organized by indigenous leaders and the state legislature to discuss modifying the state constitution. ...
Why have Latin American democracies proven unable to confront the structural inequalities that cripple their economies and stymie social mobility? Brian Palmer-Rubin contends that we may lay the blame on these countries’ systems of interest representation, which exhibit “biased pluralism,” a system in which the demands of organizations representing economic elites—especially large corporations—predominate. A more inclusive model of representation would not only require a more encompassing and empowered set of institutions to represent workers, but would also feature spaces for non-eliteproducers—such as farmers and small-business owners to have a say in sectoral economic policies. With analysis drawing on over 100 interviews, an original survey, and official government data, this book focuses on such organizations and develops an account of biased pluralism in developing countries typified by the centrality of patronage—discretionarily allocated state benefits. Rather than serving as conduits for demand-making about development models, political parties and interest organizations often broker state subsidies or social programs, augmenting the short-term income of beneficiaries, but doing little to improve their long-term economic prospects. When organizations become diverted into patronage politics, the economic demands of the masses go unheard in the policies that most affect their lives, and along the way, their economic interests go unrepresented.
While sociological discourses have long engaged with societal transformation, recent decolonial critiques have challenged traditional approaches. The emergence of Indigenous Universities in Latin America offers a new perspective on autonomous and alternative knowledge production that challenges Western discourses of epistemic decolonisation. This MA-thesis shows how the Universidad Autónoma Comunal de Oaxaca (UACO) and Universidad Campesina Indígena en Red (UCIRED) as Indigenous Universities reframe sociological knowledge production by grounding it in the lived experiences of Indigenous anticolonial resistance, while similarly informing the Sociology of Societal Transformation. The thesis first examines the historical perspective of the Sociology of Societal Transformation within the German-speaking discourse and then moves on to the Sociological Imagination and Public Sociology as key concepts of the discourse. It provides an overview of the Sociological Imagination, focusing on its central pillars, normative foundations, epistemic strategies for societal transformation, and history reception. Then, it analyses the Public Sociology, its constitutive dimensions, epistemic structure, conceptualisation of societal transformation and reception. The first part closes with a comparative analysis of both concepts, subsequently identifying how they produce monocultures of knowledge as well as their potential for a new, critical conception of the Sociology of Societal Transformation. Secondly, it argues for epistemic oppression as a connecting dot between the epistemic privileges of the aforementioned concepts and the challenges from which Indigenous Universities part their journey to autonomous knowledge production. It introduces the Zone of Non-Being, Epistemicides, and Internal Colonialism to account for the historical and current divisions within the geopolitics of academic knowledge and grasp the impact of the long-lasting effects of colonialism on knowledge production. It then applies this heuristic to identify different orders of epistemic oppression within the sociological knowledge production, thereby revealing how the suppression of Indigenous knowledge has been foundational to global knowledge hierarchies that shape sociological thought. Thirdly, it examines two different Indigenous Universities and their anticolonial praxis of academic knowledge production. Beginning with a general overview on the subject, it then traces the dual history of Indigenous education policies in Mexico as strategies to ‘civilize’ Indigenous populations and a nation-state tool for modernization to demonstrate that these efforts are connected to broader processes of racialisation, colonisation, and patriarchisation. However, it maintains that these processes were essential for the emergence of Indigenous Universities. Next, drawing on ethnographic methods, it examines the UACO and UCIRED as case studies on Indigenous Universities. It argues for the UACO as Indigenous University that disrupts hegemonic academic practices. Centring on Indigenous discourses of Comunalidad (Communality) through their horizontal organizational structures, communal learning, and research grounded in local fights for Indigenous rights, they offer a new vision of academic knowledge production grounded in Indigenous cosmologies. Additionally, it proposes that the UCIRED represents an ephemeral university based on the pedagogy of liberation, learning communities, the production of Artilugios as situational knowledge artefacts and their aim to form agents of radical social change. It then compares both approaches, recurring to the notion of epistemic oppression, the conceptualisation of alternative knowledge production and societal transformation. Fourthly, the thesis concludes with, on the one hand, an argument for indigenous universities as deprofessionalised public sociology that centres autonomous and anticolonial knowledge production. On the other hand, it discusses the implication of this concept for professionalised sociology. It highlights the necessity of ethics of not knowing in professionalised sociological discourses and emphasises that acknowledging the practices of anticolonial movements as theories in their own right is crucial to engage meaningfully with historically absent and invisible forms of knowledge. Lastly, it maintains that by engaging in a systematic dialogue through pluritopic hermeneutics with Indigenous Universities, the discipline can contribute to new forms of thinking and imagining sociological and academic knowledge production, and societal transformation through an anticolonial and critical lens.
At the core of each grand challenge is a society that is thought to have a need and organizations with an ambition to address that need. This article explores the necessary negotiations between organizations and society as they address a grand challenge involving an ambitious programme of change. Using Narrative Inquiry, we analysed 78 interviews conducted with organizations and society in rural Sarawak (Borneo) to understand the process of negotiating narratives of public value when intervening in the societal grand challenge of rural electrification. We found that organizations and society amplified and attenuated narratives of public value through a boundary object (electrical energy), where they pushed out and pulled in viewpoints to adapt narratives of the intervention's public value. The paternal nature of the organization's management of the intervention created conflict about what its perceived and real benefits were. The model we develop explains how conflicting narratives of public value are negotiated and adapted using boundary objects. In illustrating this process, we provide a theoretical model that management research can use to assess the boundary objects, narratives and public values that organizations apply when they seek to do good, and to understand the conflict and negotiation with society where they intervene.
I examine the effect of the policing capacity of traditional authorities (TAs) on communal conflict. TAs of ethnic groups use distinct customary laws and dispute-resolution mechanisms. Their coexistence with national norms and those of other TAs results in parallel legal systems. I argue that this generates uncertainties about norms and vertical and horizontal jurisdictional conflict, which increases the risk of communal conflict. However, this effect can be dampened by state-level rules on norm collisions, which lead to a system of co-production and less violence. To investigate these claims, I use global georeferenced expert survey data on customary policing of TAs and data measuring their constitutional regulation. I show that customary policing can have an adverse effect on communal peace. More subgroups of the larger ethnic group with policing institutions increase the risk of conflict. State-level regulation moderates these relationships. Additional evidence suggests that policing increases communal conflict through vertical jurisdictional conflict but otherwise achieves its intended purpose of providing security.
Cette étude vise à souligner l’importance de la transparence budgétaire dans l’amélioration du développement humain et à combler le vide dans la littérature, qui a traditionnellement considéré le concept de développement en termes économiques. Ici, le développement fait référence aux niveaux de connaissance, à la possibilité de jouir d’une vie longue et en bonne santé et de bénéficier d’un niveau de vie décent. L’amélioration du développement humain est le principal point d’intérêt dans l’évaluation des résultats des politiques publiques et cette étude se concentre sur une politique spécifique, à savoir la transparence budgétaire. Sur la base d’un ensemble de 110 pays pour les années 2008, 2010, 2012, 2015 et 2017, les résultats empiriques démontrent un effet positif de l’indice sur le budget ouvert (« Open Budget Index ») sur l’indice de développement humain, suggérant que la transparence budgétaire est un bon moyen d’améliorer les niveaux de développement humain. Ces résultats sont essentiels non seulement pour le débat académique, mais aussi pour les praticiens car ils montrent que la transparence est un outil pertinent pour améliorer le développement humain. Remarques à l’intention des praticiens La transparence budgétaire est un outil pertinent pour améliorer le développement humain. La transparence peut améliorer la qualité de vie grâce à une meilleure qualité de gouvernance. Les rôles centraux joués par la transparence et la participation, associés à l’imputabilité, ont été confirmés. La complexité du concept de développement humain implique, entre autres, la divulgation d’informations concernant les politiques publiques. L’examen des budgets, garantissant leur transparence ainsi que la transparence du processus budgétaire, est fortement recommandé pour améliorer le développement humain.
This books looks at the in-depth analysis of each individual Social Determinant of Health (SDOH), how it impacts on our everyday life and how to be cognisant in addressing health challenges before they occur.
The last two chapters of the book emphasize Political and Leadership roles in addressing Social Determinants of Health and roles to be played by every citizen in a given demographic population.
Participation from the general public is an essential component that must be taken into account during the legislative process. It is essential to the operation of laws in a country and includes the participation of society in the legislative process. This is particularly important in terms of the rule of law, the hierarchy of legal norms, and the operation of the law in its entirety. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the significance of public participation in the legislative process in Indonesia as well as the potential repercussions of excluding this procedure from the legislative process. For the purpose of carrying out this research, normative legal research that takes both a statutory and conceptual strategy was utilized. According to the findings, public participation offers a variety of possibilities for involvement, in accordance with the requirements of Article 96 of Law Number 11 of 2012 on the Formation of Regulations (UU P3). Due to this, the importance of public participation cannot be overstated, despite the restricted channels through which members of the public can communicate their thoughts and goals.
This paper looks at the experiences of CSOs in the Bottom-up Budgeting (BuB) in four (4) selected localities in the Philippines: Metro Iloilo, Iloilo; Tobias Fornier, Antique; Cagayan de Oro City; and Alubijid, Misamis Oriental. The cases highlight how participation in the BuB impacted local CSOs’ quality of engagement with their respective local governments, organizational capacity, and quality of participatory local governance. The cases also investigate how local CSOs have optimized BuB as a space to participate in local governance.
State-Building as Lawfare explores the use of state and non-state legal systems by both politicians and ordinary people in postwar Chechnya. The book addresses two interrelated puzzles: why do local rulers tolerate and even promote non-state legal systems at the expense of state law, and why do some members of repressed ethnic minorities choose to resolve their everyday disputes using state legal systems instead of non-state alternatives? The book documents how the rulers of Chechnya promote and reinvent customary law and Sharia in order to borrow legitimacy from tradition and religion, increase autonomy from the metropole, and accommodate communal authorities and former rebels. At the same time, the book shows how prolonged armed conflict disrupted the traditional social hierarchies and pushed some Chechen women to use state law, spurring state formation from below.
In many American Indian nations the security situation is dire. While scholars have studied how institutions shape economic development in American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) nations, the role of AIAN institutions for security and violent crime has received much less attention—despite the extensive literature highlighting the important role of effective and legitimate institutions in the long‐term decline of violence. We analyze how varying types of American Indian polities and judiciary institutions fare in tackling violent crime using data across 146 American Indian polities. Our findings indicate that more autonomous American Indian criminal justice institutions with specialized court systems are associated with lower violent crime. However, customary justice institutions do not appear to be effective in reducing violent crime, highlighting the problem of cultural mismatch between traditional and formal justice systems. We argue that analyzing AIAN nations provides important insights into how institutional legitimacy can shape violent crime.
La présente étude évalue le rôle d’une institution démocratique – le budget participatif – dans l’amélioration de l’efficacité du gouvernement. Les institutions participatives visent à améliorer la gouvernance, le partage de l’information et la réactivité des agents politiques vis-à-vis des citoyens, à des fins d’imputabilité et d’efficience budgétaires. En nous appuyant sur une base de données de 221 gouvernements municipaux en Corée du Sud autour d’une période d’adoption obligatoire du budget participatif, nous constatons que l’adoption des budgets participatifs est suivie d’une amélioration de plusieurs dimensions de l’efficacité du gouvernement. En particulier, les gouvernements municipaux connaissent des améliorations statistiquement significatives de leur viabilité budgétaire et de leur efficacité administrative. Dans une analyse complémentaire, nous constatons que les améliorations de l’efficacité sont plus prononcées en présence d’un leadership fort de la part des maires. Les résultats globaux suggèrent que les programmes de budgétisation participative contribuent à la santé budgétaire et à l’efficacité administrative, au-delà de leur rôle dans la garantie de la démocratie budgétaire. Remarques à l’intention des praticiens L’étude actuelle suggère que les systèmes de budget participatif contribuent non seulement à la qualité de la démocratie (comme l’ont constaté des études antérieures), mais améliorent également l’efficacité et l’imputabilité budgétaires en servant de mécanisme de gouvernance ascendante. Nous démontrons que l’introduction de programmes de budgétisation participative est suivie d’améliorations statistiquement significatives de la viabilité budgétaire et de l’efficacité administrative. Les résultats indiquent également que l’effet d’amélioration de l’efficacité diffère selon les municipalités, en fonction de leur environnement politique. Dans l’ensemble, cette étude fournit un argument fort en faveur du système de budgétisation participative en confirmant empiriquement son effet d’amélioration de l’efficacité.
r )What are the planning challenges faced in addressing equity? This paper discusses the importance of understanding institutional and policy contexts affecting planners’ efforts to close water access gaps across communities in low and middle income countries. Three challenges combined complicate local governments action towards water access: decentralization of water policy, high levels of inequality and low levels of local capacity, what we call the ‘impossible triad.’ Our analysis of two programmes designed to address the needs of the most marginalized communities in Mexico shows that programme requirements still fail to consider local constraints. Prior to decentralization, policies designed to reduce water access inequality relied on national government provision of municipal water infrastructure. Decentralized water policies differ, presenting severe institutional challenges for even the most well-intentioned planners. This paper emphasizes the importance of national-level government involvement in addressing national-level inequalities and calls for reconsideration of decentralized policymaking structures to address massive water access inequalities.
Scholars and practitioners seek development solutions through the engineering and strengthening of state institutions. Yet, the state is not the only or the primary arena shaping how citizens, service providers and state officials engage in actions that constitute politics and development. These individuals are members of religious orders, ethnic communities, and other groups that make claims on them, creating incentives that shape their actions. Recognizing how individuals experience these claims and view the choices before them is essential to understanding political processes and development outcomes. This Element establishes a framework elucidating these forces, which is key to knowledge accumulation, designing future research and effective programming. Taking an institutional approach, this Element explains how the salience of arenas of authority associated with various communities and the nature of social institutions within them affect politics and development. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Paradox of Traditional Chiefs in Democratic Africa shows that unelected traditional leaders can facilitate democratic responsiveness. Ironically, chiefs' undemocratic character gives them a capacity to organize responses to rural problems that elected politicians and state institutions lack. Specifically, chiefs' longer time horizons encourage investment in local institutions that enable the provision of local public goods. This is the paradox of traditional chiefs in democratic Africa: elected politicians can only effectively respond to rural constituents through institutions constructed and maintained by local leaders who are not worried about electoral terms. Furthermore, the critical role played by chiefs in brokering local development projects forces us to reassess how we understand the basis of their political influence during elections. The book examines the effects of traditional leaders on the electoral connection in Africa through a multi-method approach that combines qualitative research, surveys, and experiments, with particular attention to the Zambian case.
Globally, local officials increasingly employ tools of industrial policy, once considered the prerogative of national governments. On one hand, some research suggests officials who are sensitive to the needs of local industry may be better able to design appropriate policy interventions. On the other, many studies of decentralization suggest that dynamics common to local discretion – including uneven capacity, capture by local elite, and narrow political motivations – may undermine effective industrial policymaking. There is little comparative scholarship that adjudicates between these potential outcomes by examining how local policymakers intervene in industrial development. Accordingly, this paper examines how state governments used discretion allowed by a business development program in Mexico (Fondo PyME) to shape their own approaches to industrial development. It examines the design of state-level interventions under the Fondo PyME and compares these interventions with effective industrial policies employed by so-called developmental states. Quantitative evidence indicates a tendency for Mexican states to use horizontal and passive interventions that address the immediate, short-term needs of local firms, rather than the targeted, risk-mitigating, conditional interventions that were historically effective for developmental states. These findings raise questions about how much local discretion will contribute to effective national industrial development policies.
Television is an overlooked tool of state building. We estimate the impact of televising criminal proceedings on public use of government courts to resolve disputes. We draw on survey data from Afghanistan, where the government used television as a mechanism for enhancing the legitimacy of formal legal institutions during an ongoing conflict. We find consistent evidence of enhanced support for government courts among survey respondents who trust television following the nation’s first televised criminal trial. We find no evidence that public confidence in other government functions (e.g. economy, development, corruption) improved during this period. Our findings suggest that television may provide a means of building state legitimacy during war and other contexts of competition between political authorities.
Democratic decentralization has been widely adopted across the developing world with the goal of improving local accountability and the delivery of public services. However, outcomes have varied widely depending on the degree of local-level elite capture, cohesion, and governing capacity. This article draws on data from one of the most radical recent cases of fiscal and administrative decentralization: post-Soviet Russia from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. Drawing upon detailed demographic, survey, and time-series public goods data from each of 83 districts, this article documents growing inequality in service provision over time and shows via a series of spatial regressions that a strong predictor of success in maintaining public goods delivery was the degree of historically accumulated state capacity. This effect is independent of the degree of local ethnic fractionalization, economic development, or civic association. A detailed examination of two case studies at similar levels of ethnic diversity and baseline development - Tatarstan and Buryatia – suggests that legacies of historical state formation established indigenous elites and bureaucratic capacity, resulting in stronger elite-citizen ties and accountability to local actors and concerns. The wide variation of post-decentralization trajectories in Russia, and the eventual push to recentralize control. suggests an important concern for policymakers promoting devolved governance in polities with divergent subnational legacies of historical state development. Where decentralization occurs in contexts that are not uniformly favorable to its success, both the decentralization and democracy-building aspects of devolution reforms may come under threat from bureaucratic centralism.
Autonomy carries the promise of resolving longstanding distributive inequalities between indigenous and non-indigenous groups. Yet, contemporary autonomy arrangements have often been associated instead with a reduction in native communities' access to needed public goods and services. I situate these negative effects within a broader autonomy-representation dilemma: autonomy provides indigenous groups with more responsive coethnic leaders, but these leaders frequently face difficulties in collecting and deploying revenue. These capacity constraints often arise from the way national governments have recognized autonomy. As such, pursuing coethnic representation within the state might—under certain conditions—be more likely to provide indigenous groups with needed goods and services. Drawing on natural experimental evidence and an original survey of indigenous community presidents from Peru, I first demonstrate that achieving coethnic political representation within the state can expand indigenous groups' access to the public good they most need: water. I then illustrate how capacity constraints that arise from autonomy have prevented native groups in Bolivia's autonomous municipalities from achieving similar distributive gains. Ultimately, the findings provide insights for understanding the sources of—and potential institutional remedies for—indigenous groups' unequal access to local public goods in the Americas and beyond.
The propensity score is the conditional probability of assignment to a particular treatment given a vector of observed covariates. Both large and small sample theory show that adjustment for the scalar propensity score is sufficient to remove bias due to all observed covariates. Applications include: (i) matched sampling on the univariate propensity score, which is a generalization of discriminant matching, (ii) multivariate adjustment by subclassification on the propensity score where the same subclasses are used to estimate treatment effects for all outcome variables and in all subpopulations, and (iii) visual representation of multivariate covariance adjustment by a two- dimensional plot.
A large and growing literature links high levels of ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision. Yet although the empirical connection between ethnic heterogeneity and the underprovision of public goods is widely accepted, there is little consensus on the specific mechanisms through which this relationship operates. We identify three families of mechanisms that link diversity to public goods provisionpreferences,technology,strategy selectionand run a series of experimental games that permit us to compare the explanatory power of distinct mechanisms within each of these three families. Results from games conducted with a random sample of 300 subjects from a slum neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, suggest that successful public goods provision in homogenous ethnic communities can be attributed to a strategy selection mechanism: in similar settings, co-ethnics play cooperative equilibria, whereas non-co-ethnics do not. In addition, we find evidence for a technology mechanism: co-ethnics are more closely linked on social networks and thus plausibly better able to support cooperation through the threat of social sanction. We find no evidence for prominent preference mechanisms that emphasize the commonality of tastes within ethnic groups or a greater degree of altruism toward co-ethnics, and only weak evidence for technology mechanisms that focus on the impact of shared ethnicity on the productivity of teams.
Tras el levantamiento zapatista en el vecino estado de Chiapas, el gobierno de Oaxaca impulsó reformas legales e institucionales en materia de derechos indígenas. Una de ellas fue el reconocimiento de los usos y costumbres en materia electoral. Las normas y prácticas comunitarias de nombramiento de las autoridades municipales fueron incorporadas a la legislación electoral en 1995. Esta reforma creó una nueva frontera normativa y simbólica entre una mayoría de municipios en los cuales los partidos políticos no intervienen directamente en el proceso electoral local, y el resto de los municipios en los que las elecciones pasan por la competencia abierta entre candidatos registrados por los partidos. Este libro analiza las razones que han conducido el gobierno a reconocer legalemente lo que hasta esa fecha había quedado en la informalidad; también analiza los efectos políticos que ha tenido dicho reconocimiento en los municipios de Oaxaca, durante una década de aplicación de esa atípica legislación electoral. El autor muestra cómo lejos de garantizar la reproducción de un sistema de dominación regional articulado en torno al PRI, el reconocimiento de los usos y costumbres ha acelerado la crisis de los mecanismos tradicionales de mediación y de representación política. La transición oaxaqueña es interpretada en toda su complejidad y ambigüedad: la permanencia –e incluso la profundización– de lógicas clientelares y caciquiles coexiste con la eclosión de espacios locales de deliberación democrática.
We combine two experiments and a survey to measure trust and trustworthiness—two key components of social capital. Standard
attitudinal survey questions about trust predict trustworthy behavior in our experiments much better than they predict trusting behavior. Trusting behavior in the experiments is predicted
by past trusting behavior outside of the experiments. When individuals are closer socially, both trust and trustworthiness
rise. Trustworthiness declines when partners are of different races or nationalities. High status individuals are able to
elicit more trustworthiness in others.
We present a model that links heterogeneity of preferences across ethnic groups in a city to the amount and type of public
goods the city supplies. We test the implications of the model with three related data sets: U. S. cities, U. S. metropolitan
areas, and U. S. urban counties. Results show that the shares of spending on productive public goods—education, roads, sewers
and trash pickup—in U. S. cities (metro areas/urban counties) are inversely related to the city's (metro area's/county's)
ethnic fragmentation, even after controlling for other socioeconomic and demographic determinants. We conclude that ethnic
conflict is an important determinant of local public finances.
The distribution of public investment within federal states is often subject to significant political discretion. Yet one of the possible consequences of such discretion is the appearance of path dependency in the way in which public investment is distributed. Mexico offers a unique example of the effect of path dependency in resource allocation, as there has been no political competition over more than seventy years. The authors seek to examine the dynamic structure of the regional distribution of public investment empirically, to test for the existence of path dependency and the influence of the different federal governments in Mexico. They use time-series intervention analysis methodology to study the structure of, and the influence of government change in the allocation of, public investment in Mexico between 1971 and 1999. Findings suggest the existence of path dependency in the distribution of public investment in Mexico during all except for the most recent governments. In other words, federal government change made little difference to the way in which public investment was allocated. Path dependency was only broken in the 1990s, coinciding with the setting up of the North American economic integration process, which in turn led to the loss of public support for the single political party, the Partido Revolitcionario Institucional or PRI, which had been in power in Mexico over the last seventy years.
As part of a recent anti-corruption campaign, the Brazilian government began to audit the municipal expenditure of federally-transferred funds. Using these audit reports, we construct a unique data set of political corruption to test whether reelection incentives affect the level of corruption in a municipality. Consistent with a political economy agency model, we find that mayors who are in their second and final term are significantly more corrupt than first-term mayors. In particular, second-term mayors on average divert, R$188,431.4 more than first-term mayors, which is approximately 4 percent of the total amount transferred to municipalities. We also find much more pronounced effects among municipalities where the costs of rent-extraction are lower, and the density of pivotal voters is higher. Our results also illustrate an important trade-off: second-term mayors, while more corrupt, provide a higher level of public goods. As Brazil and other countries continue their decentralization process, our findings promote the need for a better understanding of how local institutions can help reduce the incentives for corruption.
Social norms and the associated altruistic behaviours are decisive for the evolution of human cooperation and the maintenance of social order, and they affect family life, politics and economic interactions. However, as altruistic norm compliance and norm enforcement often emerge in the context of inter-group conflicts, they are likely to be shaped by parochialism--a preference for favouring the members of one's ethnic, racial or language group. We have conducted punishment experiments, which allow 'impartial' observers to punish norm violators, with indigenous groups in Papua New Guinea. Here we show that these experiments confirm the prediction of parochialism. We found that punishers protect ingroup victims--who suffer from a norm violation--much more than they do outgroup victims, regardless of the norm violator's group affiliation. Norm violators also expect that punishers will be lenient if the latter belong to their social group. As a consequence, norm violations occur more often if the punisher and the norm violator belong to the same group. Our results are puzzling for evolutionary multi-level selection theories based on selective group extinction as well as for theories of individual selection; they also indicate the need to explicitly examine the interactions between individuals stemming from different groups in evolutionary models.
This paper examines the effect of political competition in local elections in regional allocation of public investment. The study employs data on Mexican elections covering the period 1990-95, characterised by an increase in electoral competition and coupled with increasing demands for decentralisation throughout the states. Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that regional allocation of public investment by central government was driven by "political opportunism" and "local pork-barrel politics". A positive relationship was found between the regional allocation of public investment and support for the central ruling party. This might indicate that local spending inefficiencies were partially explained by the specific support for the incumbent party. Copyright 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
An influential conventional wisdom holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic nationalism. We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 50s and 60s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system. We also find that after controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence in this period. We argue for understanding civil war in this period in terms of insurgency or rural guerrilla warfare, a particular form of military practice that can be harnessed to diverse political agendas, including but not limited to ethnic nationalism. The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war are not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgency. These include poverty, which marks financially and bureaucratically weak states and also favors rebel recruitment, political instability, rough terrain, and large populations.
Latin American regimes followed diverging paths during the Third Wave of democratization. Although a few democracies consolidated (Chile, Uruguay), many others (Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, Venezuela) suffered repeated and often severe institutional crises. Most accounts place Argentina's post-1983 democracy in this latter, “crisis-ridden” category. During the 1980s, the country suffered three military rebellions, severe distributive conflict, and an eventual descent into hyperinflation. Although the economy stabilized during the 1990s, the government of Carlos Menem concentrated and abused power to such a degree that Argentina was viewed as a leading case of what Guillermo O'Donnell (1994) called “delegative democracy.” Finally, the political-economic crisis of 2001-02, during which massive protests led to the resignation of two presidents within two weeks, again brought Argentina's democratic institutions to the brink of collapse. Yet Argentine democracy differed in important ways from other crisis-ridden regimes in Latin America. First, Argentina was one of only a handful of Latin American countries that remained fully democratic during the 1990s. The fairness of elections was unquestioned, basic civil liberties were broadly protected, and unlike many other countries in the region (including Chile), the military played virtually no role in politics. Second, the country's core democratic institutions proved remarkably robust. Argentine democracy survived a series of extraordinary tests, including the 1989-90 hyperinflationary crisis, the Menem government's radical economic reforms, and, most recently, the most severe depression in the country's history. Few Latin American democracies have survived such economic shocks.
This volume offers an ambitious and comprehensive overview of the unprecedented advances as well as the setbacks in the post-1978 wave of democratization. It explains the sea change from a region dominated by authoritarian regimes to one in which openly authoritarian regimes are the rare exception, and analyzes why some countries have achieved striking gains in democratization while others have experienced erosions. The book presents general theoretical arguments about what causes and sustains democracy in its analysis of nine theoretically compelling country cases.
The determinants of government responsiveness to its citizens is a key issue in political economy. Here we develop a model based on the solution of political agency problems. Having a more informed an politically active electorate strengthens incentives for governments to be responsive. This suggests that there is a role both for democratic institutions and the mass media in ensuring that the preferences of citizens are reflected in policy. The ideas behind the model are tested on panel data from India. We show that public food distribution and calamity relief expenditure are greater, controlling for shocks, where governments face greater electoral accountability and where newspaper circulation is highest.
Over the past two decades we have heard an historically unprecedented volume of talk about and praise of democracy, and many governmental, non-governmental, and international organizations have been engaged in democracy promotion. Democracy is a subject that crosses the boundaries in political science, and within my own field of political theory there has been a major revival of democratic theory. In political theory, argument about "democracy" is usually now qualified by one of an array of adjectives, which include cosmopolitan, agonistic, republican, and monitory. But the new form that has been by far the most successful is deliberative democracy. By 2007 John Dryzek could write that "deliberative democracy now constitutes the most active area of political theory in its entirety (not just democratic theory)." Not only is there an extremely large and rapidly growing literature, both theoretical and empirical, on deliberative democracy, but its influence has spread far outside universities.
Despite considerable normative support, analysts have failed to identify any systematic effects of democracy on domestic policy outputs. Building on a theory of the state as a monopoly producer of public services and establishing a common foundation for studying variations in regimes and their policy consequences, the authors hypothesize that democratic states will earn fewer monopoly rents and produce a higher level of services than autocracies. They test this hypothesis both cross-sectionally and over time for a variety of public health and education indicators. The statistical results strongly support their hypotheses. The authors conclude that democracy has real, substantively important effects on the daily lives and well-being of individuals around the globe.
We exploit differences in European mortality rates to estimate the effect of institutions on economic performance. Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with different associated institutions. In places where Europeans faced high mortality rates, they could not settle and were more likely to set up extractive institutions. These institutions persisted to the present. Exploiting differences in European mortality rates as an instrument for current institutions, we estimate large effects of institutions on income per capita. Once the effect of institutions is controlled for, countries in Africa or those closer to the equator do not have lower incomes. (JEL O11, P16, P51).
This article evaluates postelectoral conflicts in Mexico's Oaxaca state before and after the state government legally recognized usos y costumbres - local leader selection via traditional practices (rather than parties and secret ballots). Assessing usos y costumbres within the normative debate between multiculturalists and pluralists on incorporation of ethnic minorities, the article compares the level of postelectoral conflict in usos y costumbres and non-usos y costumbres municipalities. It argues that since such conflicts have increased in Oaxaca over the last decade while simultaneously diminishing dramatically in Mexico's other 31 states, the cause is probably unique to Oaxaca. Conflict may be at least partially attributed to perverse implementation incentives created by the law's provocation of conflicts requiring mediation (rather than judicial verdicts). While further research is needed to test normative claims that usos y costumbres increase governing institutions' credibility and foster positive group identities, the article concludes that while the customary practices "experiment" has failed at least by one criterion, it may warrant reconsideration if customary elections can be viewed as a set of evolving, instrumental processes, rather than as fixed, static, and essentialist conditions.
Despite considerable normative support, analysts have failed to identify any systematic effects of democracy on domestic policy outputs. Building on a theory of the state as a monopoly producer of public services and establishing a common foundation for studying variations in regimes and their policy consequences, the authors hypothesize that democratic states will earn fewer monopoly rents and produce a higher level of services than autocracies. They test this hypothesis both cross-sectionally and over time for a variety of public health and education indicators. The statistical results strongly support their hypotheses. The authors conclude that democracy has real, substantively important effects on the daily lives and well-being of individuals around the globe.
How have Mexico's community-based democratic institutions, known as Usos y Costumbres (UyC) or Uses and Customs systems, affected local and national politics? Although informal UyC practices exist throughout Mexico, the state of Oaxaca formally changed its electoral codes in 1995 to legalize UyC. Statistical analysis of national election results shows that Oaxacan municipalities that formally adopted UyC systems thereafter experienced higher first-place party margins and higher levels of abstention compared to non-UyC systems. That these systems helped local leaders engineer election outcomes while reducing participation, even in national elections, undermines arguments about their democratic benefits. UyC rules appear to help preserve local authoritarian enclaves, with negative consequences for national democracy.
This article suggests that a society's religious market structure can explain whether religion is “the opium of the people” or a major source of dissident secular mobilization. I present a simple model explaining why under monopolistic conditions, Catholic clergy in Latin America ignored the religious and social needs of poor rural indigenous parishioners but, when confronted by the expansion of U.S. mainline Protestantism, became major institutional promoters of rural indigenous causes. Catholic indigenous parishioners empowered by competition demanded the same benefits their Protestant neighbors were receiving: social services, ecclesiastic decentralization, and the practice of religion in their own language. Unable to decentralize ecclesiastic hierarchies, and facing a reputation deficit for having sided with rich and powerful elites for centuries, Catholic clergy stepped into the secular realm and became active promoters of indigenous movements and ethnic identities; they embraced the cause of the Indians as a member retention strategy and not in response to new doctrinal ideas emanating from Vatican II. Drawing on an original data set of indigenous mobilization in Mexico and on life histories and case studies, I provide quantitative and qualitative evidence of the causal effect of religious competition on the creation of the social bases for indigenous ethnic mobilization.
Political machines (or clientelist parties) mobilize electoral support by trading particularistic benefits to voters in exchange for their votes. But if the secret ballot hides voters' actions from the machine, voters are able to renege, accepting benefits and then voting as they choose. To explain how machine politics works, I observe that machines use their deep insertion into voters' social networks to try to circumvent the secret ballot and infer individuals' votes. When parties influence how people vote by threatening to punish them for voting for another party, I call this accountability. I analyze the strategic interaction between machines and voters as an iterated prisoners' dilemma game with one-sided uncertainty. The game generates hypotheses about the impact of the machine's capacity to monitor voters, and of voters' incomes and ideological stances, on the effectiveness of machine politics. I test these hypotheses with data from Argentina.
Since the publication of Horowitz's Ethnic Groups in Conflict, comparative political scientists have increasingly converged on their classification of ethnic identities. But there is no agreement on the definition that justifies this classification-and the definitions that individual scholars propose do not match their classifications. I propose a definition that captures the conventional classification of ethnic identities in comparative political science to a greater degree than the alternatives. According to this definition, ethnic identities are a subset of identity categories in which membership is determined by attributes associated with, or believed to be associated with, descent (described here simply as descent-based attributes). I argue, on the basis of this definition, that ethnicity either does not matter or has not been shown to matter in explaining most outcomes to which it has been causally linked by comparative political scientists. These outcomes include violence, democratic stability, and patronage.
Delivery of public goods varies significantly across the Indian states. This article argues that differences in state government expenditures are largely the result of differences in their party systems. Using macroeconomic data from 1967 to 1997 as well as postelection voter surveys, we demonstrate that states with two-party competition provide more public goods than states with multiparty competition, which, we argue, reflects differing mobilization strategies. In two-party systems, political parties require support from many social groups and therefore provide public goods to win elections. In multiparty systems, needing only a plurality of votes to win, parties use club, rather than public, goods to mobilize smaller segments of the population. In stressing the impact of party systems on state government performance in India, this article differs from recent political economy research, which has stressed either the effect of particular political parties or ethnic divisions on government performance and public goods delivery.
This article presents an overview of GeoDa™, a free software program intended to serve as a user-friendly and graphical introduction to spatial analysis for non-geographic information systems (GIS) specialists. It includes functionality ranging from simple mapping to exploratory data analysis, the visualization of global and local spatial autocorrelation, and spatial regression. A key feature of GeoDa is an interactive environment that combines maps with statistical graphics, using the technology of dynamically linked windows. A brief review of the software design is given, as well as some illustrative examples that highlight distinctive features of the program in applications dealing with public health, economic development, real estate analysis, and criminology.
In this article I test two competing visions about how democracy produces responsive government. Electoral theories of democracy posit that elected governments are responsive to public demands because citizens are able to sanction bad politicians and select good ones. Participatory theories attribute responsiveness to a citizenry's ability to articulate demands and pressure government through a wider range of political action. I test hypotheses derived from these two approaches, using an original dataset that combines electoral, socioeconomic, and public-financial indicators for Mexico's 2,400 municipalities, from 1989 to 2000. The data show that electoral competition has no effect on municipal government performance. But the results are consistent with the hypothesis that nonelectoral participation causes improved performance. Thus, I suggest that the quality of municipal government in Mexico depends on an engaged citizenry and cooperation between political leaders and their constituents, rather than the threat of electoral punishment. I recommend that scholars broaden the study of government responsiveness to account for participatory strategies of political influence and critically assess the claims of those who would promote elections as a cure-all for poor democratic performance.
The propensity score is the conditional probability of assignment to a particular treatment given a vector of observed covariates. Both large and small sample theory show that adjustment for the scalar propensity score is sufficient to remove bias due to all observed covariates. Applications include: (i) matched sampling on the univariate propensity score, which is a generalization of discriminant matching, (ii) multivariate adjustment by subclassification on the propensity score where the same subclasses are used to estimate treatment effects for all outcome variables and in all subpopulations, and (iii) visual representation of multivariate covariance adjustment by a two-dimensional plot.
This paper takes a fresh look at the trade-off between centralized and decentralized provision of local public goods. It argues that the sharing of the costs of local public spending in a centralized system will create a conflict of interest between citizens in different jurisdictions. When spending decisions are made by a legislature of locally elected representatives, this conflict of interest will play out in the legislature. Depending on precisely how the legislature behaves, the result may be excessive public spending or allocations of public goods characterized by uncertainty and misallocation across districts. The extent of the conflict of interest between districts is affected by spillovers and differences in tastes for public spending. Thus, the relative performance of centralized and decentralized systems depends upon spillovers and differences in tastes for public spending, but for different reasons than suggested in the existing literature.
This paper examines ethnic diversity and local public goods in rural western Kenya. The identification strategy relies on the stable historically determined patterns of ethnic land settlement. Ethnic diversity is associated with lower primary school funding and worse school facilities, and there is suggestive evidence that it leads to poor water well maintenance. The theoretical model illustrates how inability to impose social sanctions in diverse communities leads to collective action failures, and we find that school committees in diverse areas do impose fewer sanctions on defaulting parents. We relate these results to the literature on social capital and economic development and discuss implications for decentralization in less developed countries.
This paper examines the degree to which the corruption in developing countries may impair the ability of governments to redistribute wealth among their citizens. Specifically, I examine a large anti-poverty program in Indonesia that distributed subsidized rice to poor households. I estimate the extent of corruption in the program by comparing administrative data on the amount of rice distributed with survey data on the amount actually received by households. The central estimates suggest that, on average, at least 18% of the rice appears to have disappeared. Ethnically heterogeneous and sparsely populated areas are more likely to be missing rice. Using conservative assumptions for the marginal cost of public funds, I estimate that the welfare losses from this corruption may have been large enough to offset the potential welfare gains from the redistributive intent of the program. These findings suggest that corruption may impose substantial limitations on developing countries' redistributive efforts, and may help explain the low level of transfer programs in developing countries.
I develop a model of cooperation in small irrigation systems. I give conditions under which an equalizing redistribution of wealth increases the level of equilibrium cooperation, but also show that some redistributions that increase inequality can also increase cooperation. The distributive rule, a combination of arrangements for maintenance-cost sharing and water allocation, also affects the cooperation level. I estimate statistical models of cooperation for three maintenance indicators using field data from a study of Mexican irrigation societies. Social heterogeneity and landholding inequality are significantly associated with lower maintenance. Distributive rules that allocate water proportionally to landholding size likewise reduce maintenance.
This article examines how government policies affect ethnic relations by comparing outcomes across two nearby districts, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania, using colonial-era boundary placement as a "natural experiment." Despite similar geography and historical legacies, governments in Kenya and Tanzania have followed radically different language, education, and local institutional policies, with Tanzania consistently pursuing more serious nation building. The evidence suggests that nation building has allowed diverse communities in rural Tanzania to achieve considerably better local public goods outcomes than diverse communities in Kenya. To illustrate, while Kenyan communities at mean levels of diversity have 25 percent less local school funding than homogeneous communities on average, the comparable figure in the Tanzanian district is near zero. The Kenya-Tanzania comparison provides empirical evidence that serious reforms can ameliorate social divisions and suggests that nation-building should take a place on policy agendas, especially in Africa.
It is widely believed that current disparities in economic, political, and social outcomes reflect distinct institutions. Institutions are invoked to explain why some countries are rich and others poor, some democratic and others dictatorial. But arguments of this sort gloss over the question of what institutions are, how they come about, and why they persist. This book seeks to overcome these problems, which have exercised economists, sociologists, political scientists, and a host of other researchers who use the social sciences to study history, law, and business administration.
Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to improving ways of assessing the effectiveness of development interventions. This is to be welcomed, especially with regard to community-based or participatory aid projects, since considerable resources are currently being earmarked for these by almost all types of donor agencies, including large international organizations. Such projects are vulnerable to elite capture at local level, and this problem must be mitigated if most of the aid funds thus disbursed are to reach the intended beneficiaries. This article discusses several methods available to achieve that objective. In particular, it argues that the sequential and conditional release of aid funds may not be sufficient to keep elite capture well under control, making it necessary to resort to co-ordination mechanisms among aid agencies, such as multilateral reputation mechanisms. Even these are not going to be effective enough, however. In the end, an active role will have to be played by the ultimate purveyors of aid money, whether the taxpayers or the contributors in fund-raising campaigns.
The lack of "social capital" is frequently given as an explanation for why communities perform poorly. Yet to what extent can project design compensate for these community-specific constraints? I address this question by examining determinants of collective success in a costly problem for developing economies -- the upkeep of local public goods. It is often difficult to obtain reliable outcome measures for comparable collective tasks across well-defined communities. In order to address this I conducted detailed surveys of community-maintained infrastructure projects in Northern Pakistan. The findings show that while community-specific constraints do matter, their impact can be mitigated by better project design. Inequality, social fragmentation, and lack of leadership in the community do have adverse consequences but these can be overcome by changes in project complexity, community participation, and return distribution. Moreover, the evidence suggests that better design matters even more for communities with poorer attributes. The use of community fixed effects and instrumental variables offers a significant improvement in empirical identification over previous studies. These results provide evidence that appropriate design can enable projects to succeed even in "bad" communities.
Incluye bibliografía e índice
The essays in this book analyze and explain the crisis of democratic representation in five Andean countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. In this region, disaffection with democracy, political parties, and legislatures has spread to an alarming degree. Many presidents have been forced from office, and many traditional parties have fallen by the wayside. These five countries have the potential to be negative examples in a region that has historically had strong demonstration and diffusion effects in terms of regime changes. The Crisis of Democratic Representation in the Andes addresses an important question for Latin America as well as other parts of the world: Why does representation sometimes fail to work?
Although published works rarely include causal estimates from more than a few model specifications, authors usually choose
the presented estimates from numerous trial runs readers never see. Given the often large variation in estimates across choices
of control variables, functional forms, and other modeling assumptions, how can researchers ensure that the few estimates
presented are accurate or representative? How do readers know that publications are not merely demonstrations that it is possible to find a specification that fits the author's favorite hypothesis? And how do we evaluate or even define statistical properties
like unbiasedness or mean squared error when no unique model or estimator even exists? Matching methods, which offer the promise
of causal inference with fewer assumptions, constitute one possible way forward, but crucial results in this fast-growing
methodological literature are often grossly misinterpreted. We explain how to avoid these misinterpretations and propose a
unified approach that makes it possible for researchers to preprocess data with matching (such as with the easy-to-use software
we offer) and then to apply the best parametric techniques they would have used anyway. This procedure makes parametric models
produce more accurate and considerably less model-dependent causal inferences.
In this paper, we give a short overview of some propensity score matching estimators suggested in the evaluation literature, and we provide a set of Stata programs,which we illustrate using the National Supported Work (NSW) demonstration widely known in labor economics. Copyright 2002 by Stata Corporation.
According to official statistics, 20 percent of Uganda's total public expenditure was spent on education in the mid-1990s,
most of it on primary education. One of the large public programs was a capitation grant to cover schools' nonwage expenditures.
Using panel data from a unique survey of primary schools, we assess the extent to which the grant actually reached the intended
end-user (schools). The survey data reveal that during 1991–1995, the schools, on average, received only 13 percent of the
grants. Most schools received nothing. The bulk of the school grant was captured by local officials (and politicians). The
data also reveal considerable variation in grants received across schools, suggesting that rather than being passive recipients
of flows from the government, schools use their bargaining power to secure greater shares of funding. We find that schools
in better-off communities managed to claim a higher share of their entitlements. As a result, actual education spending, in
contrast to budget allocations, is regressive. Similar surveys in other African countries confirm that Uganda is not a special
case.
Famines often take place in situations of moderate to good food availability, without any significant decline of food supply
per head. The paper presents an alternative approach to famines, which does not concentrate on availability, but on people's
ability to command food through legal means available in the society (including the use of production possibilities, trade
opportunities, entitlements vis-à-vis the state, etc.). The approach is explained, focusing on exchange entitlement mappings,
fluctuations in which can lead to big shifts in the intergroup distribution of food command. The approach is then applied
to the Bengal famine of 1943, the Ethiopian famine in Wollo in 1973, and the Bangladesh famine in 1974, and some general conclusions
are drawn about the nature and classes of famines.
This paper presents an experiment where 48 Indonesian villages were randomly assigned to choose development projects through either representative-based meetings or direct election-based plebiscites. Plebiscites resulted in dramatically higher satisfaction among villagers, increased knowledge about the project, greater perceived benefits, and higher reported willingness to contribute. Changing the political mechanism had much smaller effects on the actual projects selected, with some evidence that plebiscites resulted in projects chosen by women being located in poorer areas. The results show that direct participation in political decision making can substantially increase satisfaction and legitimacy, even when it has little effect on actual decisions.
We investigate whether timing of the elections leads to riots or not within India. In other words, does timing of elections instigate riots? The theoretical underpinning is that an incumbent government and opposition parties exercises control over their agents to instigate communal mob violence and riots during the election years. The motto behind instigating riots is that it leads to polarization of voters and thus benefits the respective constituents (incumbent government & opposition parties). Using time series crosssectional data for 16 major Indian states for the period 1958 – 2004, we find that scheduled elections are associated with increase in riots. Also intensity of riots, proxied by rate of growth rate of riots increases in scheduled election years. We also find that riots and intensity of riots are responsive to the propinquity to an election year. Meaning, as incumbent government nears the elections, riots and intensity of riots keeps increasing, while this is exactly opposite during the early years of incumbent government in office. These results suggest that elections generate “riots cycle” in regionally, ethnically, culturally and socially diverse country like India.
This paper uses political reservations for women in India to study the impact of women's leadership on policy decisions. Since the mid-1990's, one third of Village Council head positions in India have been randomly reserved for a woman: In these councils only women could be elected to the position of head. Village Councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas. Using a dataset we collected on 265 Village Councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan, we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved Village Councils. We show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided. Specifically, leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders. Copyright The Econometric Society 2004.
Indigenous autonomy and insulation from electoral competition. Oaxaca, Mexico. Unpublished manuscript Path dependency and the allocation of public investment in Mexico
- M Cleary
- J Costa-Font
- E Oreggia
Cleary, M. (2008). Indigenous autonomy and insulation from electoral competition. Oaxaca, Mexico. Unpublished manuscript. Costa-Font, J., & Rodrí-Oreggia, E. (2006). Path dependency and the allocation of public investment in Mexico. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 24(2), 297–311.
Handcuffs on the grabbing hand? Media capture and government accountability. Mimeo, London School of Economics The logic of political survival
- T Besley
- A Prat
- B Bueno De Mesquita
- A Smith
- R Siverson
- J Morrow
Besley, T., & Prat, A. (2001). Handcuffs on the grabbing hand? Media capture and government accountability. Mimeo, London School of Economics. Bueno De Mesquita, B., Smith, A., Siverson, R., & Morrow, J. (2005). The logic of political survival. The MIT Press.
the logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups A general framework for analyzing sustainability of social–ecological systems
- M Olson
Olson, M. (1971). the logic of collective action: Public goods and the theory of groups. Harvard University Press. Ostrom, E. (2009). A general framework for analyzing sustainability of social–ecological systems. Science, 325(5939).
The success of India's democracy
- A Kohli
Kohli, A. (2001). The success of India's democracy. Cambridge University Press.
The elements of statistical learning: Data mining, inference and prediction Matching as nonparametric preprocessing for reducing model dependence in parametric causal inference
- T Hastie
- R Tibshirani
- J Friedman
- J Franklin
Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R., Friedman, J., & Franklin, J. (2005). The elements of statistical learning: Data mining, inference and prediction. Springer. Ho, D. E., Imai, K., King, G., & Stuart, E. A. (2007). Matching as nonparametric preprocessing for reducing model dependence in parametric causal inference. Political Analysis, 15(3), 199–236.
Making services work for poor people
- World Bank
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