CP Workshop – Jessica Gottlieb, Texas A&M University

DateFebruary 6, 2017

Time12:30pm to 2:00pm

Location
4357 Bunche Hall 

Contact

Abstract: Contrary to much of the empirical literature, we find that increases in political competition in one new democracy actually decrease the provision of publicly-provided goods. This result is not especially surprising in light of the widespread consensus that parties in new democracies often campaign on clientelistic transfers – which can be a substitute for programmatic outcomes. However, we find no evidence that this is driving the negative result in our empirical context of Mali. Instead, we find evidence for a novel mechanism: an increased likelihood of coordination failures among elected local councilmembers in more competitive districts. We develop a model that generates predictions about when the coordination costs induced by political competition are likely to result in worse publicly-provided goods outcomes: namely, when competition increases coordination costs at a relatively faster rate than it decreases political rent-seeking. In-depth interviews with local politicians inform our theory, while panel data on local publicly-provided goods provision and election outcomes and a large-scale phone survey of politicians allow for a rigorous test of the impacts of competition on publicly-provided goods outcomes and of the mechanisms driving these impacts. We expect coordination failures to be important in many contexts where local policymaking requires the engagement of a broad coalition of potentially diverse actors and where governance is relatively non-transparent.Full paper can be found here

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