Citizen political knowledge and accountability: Survey evidence on devolution in Kenya

Abstract

Devolution complicates citizens’ ability to assign responsibility for the provision of public goods and services to different tiers of government. Misattribution of responsibility limits the effectiveness of electoral accountability in the nested principal–agent relationships comprising voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. This raises two important questions. First, how do citizens learn about the functions of different tiers of government under devolution? Second, how do levels of political knowledge condition citizens’ evaluations of subnational governments? Using cross‐sectional and panel survey data from Kenya (2014–2018), this article shows that voters accumulate knowledge through exposure to government services, and that gender and partisanship mediate knowledge accumulation. In addition, exposed citizens are more likely to give positive evaluations of subnational politicians, despite the fact that such exposure may reveal subnational governments’ low capacity, ineffectiveness, and governance gaps. These findings advance our understanding of the dynamics of political accountability under devolution.

Does Accountability Undermine Service Delivery? The Impact of Devolving Agriculture in Ghana

“…This suggests that this low visibility service can only be appreciated by those who directly benefitted from receiving the knowledge shared by extension agents. Opalo (2020) uncovered similar dynamics in Kenya whereby those who were most likely to be exposed to the healthcare system, namely women of childbearing age, were most likely to prefer healthcare services to be a devolved function. Faguet (2014, p. 24) laments that many decentralization studies become pre-and post-reform 'exercises in comparative statics' but fail to examine the underlying policy processes.…”

“…Importantly, the devolution process was sectorally sequenced and for legal reasons, the education and health sectors had not been devolved during the time period of this study. Similar to Opalo's (2020) study on Kenya's devolution process, where policy autonomy has proceeded unevenly, this variation in sequencing allows for comparisons across time within the same sectors as well as between devolved and deconcentrated sectors.…”

Formalizing clientelism in Kenya: From Harambee to the Constituency Development Fund

“…The average age of respondents in the survey is 37.8 years; 40 per cent of the respondents are female, with the modal respondent having some secondary education; 32.6 per cent of respondents reside in urban areas. Following (Opalo 2020a), I use knowledge of the fact that health is a devolved function as a measure of political knowledge (an understanding of how government works); 39.6 per cent of respondents incorrectly attribute responsibility over health to the national government, a sign of low levels of political knowledge. Like their counterparts in other low-income countries, Kenyan legislators operate in a context marked by both the preponderance of personalized targeted forms of clientelism and high electoral turnover.…”

“…functional legislatures) in contexts where state capacity renders programmatic electoral promises incredible. By linking the persistence of clientelism to institutional variables that define the political marketplace and influence voters' expectations, this paper synthesizes and contributes to different strands of literature, including works on constituency influence (Barkan 1979;Fenno 1978;Mayhew 1974), state capacity and policy implementation (Dasgupta and Kapur 2020;Williams 2017), the politics of attribution and citizen demands (Calvo and Murillo 2004;Kruks-Wisner 2018;Opalo 2020a;Tromborg and Schwindt-Bayer 2018), and clientelism, patronage, and distributive politics (Bussell 2019;Golden and Min 2012;Hicken 2011;Stokes et al 2013;Wantchekon 2003). legislators tends to be informal (e.g.…”

The mobile phone technology, gender inclusive education and public accountability in Sub-Saharan Africa

“…Notably, extant contemporary public accountability literature has fundamentally concentrated on inter alia: emphasis on public accountability and public policy changes through voters' reaction to changes in tax policy (Mörk & Nordin, 2019); design framework for public accountability in the educational reform (Hutt & Polikoff, 2020); relationship between transparency and ethical accountability (Herrera & Mahecha, 2018); empirical perception of forms of public accountability (Reddick, Demir, & Perlman, 2020); the relevance of anti-corruption measures for accountability performance (Heinrich & Brown, 2017); establishing citizen political knowledge for accountability (Opalo, 2020); an assessment of public accountability, public expenditure and financial accountability (Loozekoot & Dijkstra, 2017); investigating the nexuses of political trust and armed conflict underpinning accountability (Gates & Justesen, 2020); the determinants of information disclosure to foster accountability for sustainable transnational governance (Schleifer, Fiorini & Auld, 2019); and the importance of digital transparency in the convergence of public accountability (Ramírez & Tejada, 2019).…”