Democracy, visibility and public good provision

Mani, Anandi; Mukand, Sharun W.

doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2005.06.008

Cited by 165 publications

(108 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…The influence of party loyalties is described by Bardhan and Mookherjee (2002), who assume that a higher level of voter loyalty reduces electoral competition, increasing capture and decreasing government accountability. As a consequence, Mani and Mukand (2002) demonstrate that politicians who maximize their political support have strong incentives to focus on targeted and visible policies at the cost of broad social services. First, this situation occurs because only a small number of voters have enough specific and substantial information to evaluate whether policies have actually contributed to better quality services.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Voter Behavior and Government Performance in Malawi: An Application of a Probabilistic Voting Model

Henning¹,

Seide²,

Petri³

2017

Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development

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Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Voter Behavior and Government Performance in Malawi: An Application of a Probabilistic Voting Model

Henning¹,

Seide²,

Petri³

2017

Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development

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“…According to Mani and Mukand (2007), public goods are less visible if it is hard to assess governmental competence based on their observed outcome.…”

Section: Assessing Politicians' Capabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…σ 2 a, i < σ 2 b, i . Mani and Mukand (2007) provided two reasons for visibility differences. First, the outcome of some goods is intrinsically harder to directly observe or measure (e.g.…”

Section: Assessing Politicians' Capabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dress-Up Contest: A Dark Side of Fiscal Decentralization

Wang

2013

SSRN Journal

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A `dress-up contest' is a competition for the best public image, and fiscal decentralisation can lead to such contests between local governments. In this paper we model the dress-up contest and investigate how it a effects social welfare. We show that yardstick competition (due to fiscal decentralisation) forces local governments to allocate more resources to more visible public goods (such as cash assistance) than less visible goods (such as vendor payments) and thus starts dress-up contests. The resulting distortion of resource allocation causes a structural bias in public expenditure and further hurts social welfare. To empirically verify our theoretical model, we employ U.S. state-level data from 1992 to 2008, and we estimate the panel data model using various econometric approaches. The empirical results provide strong evidence that fiscal decentralisation can lead to distortion in public expenditure arising from dress-up contests. We also find that this distortion increases the regional poverty rate.JEL Codes: D72, H75, H77

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“…Where politicians face serious political competition they have incentives to use public resources or policy concessions to win elections or maintain support (Block, Ferree, & Singh, 2003;Gandhi & Przeworski, 2007;Stein & Bickers, 1994), whereby their spending often takes the form of public goods that are both observable or measurable and whose benefits are easy to trace back to the politicians who created them (Mani & Mukand, 2007). In particular 'pork' or club goods -i.e., patronage that is publicly and legally allocated to a group of citizens in the form of government policies 6 -are highly visible, inasmuch as they are 'clearly seen as evidence of political patrons fulfilling their promises to clients' (Keefer & Khemani, 2005, p. 12).…”

Section: Visibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Patronage as Institutional Choice: Evidence from Rwanda and Uganda

Green¹

2011

comp polit

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Abstract:An increasingly large literature on patronage and clientelism has developed within political science in recent years. Yet this body of scholarship has heretofore failed to develop theories that explain variation in patronage allocation across countries. Here I develop such a theory based on the logic of institutional choice, whereby political leaders allocate patronage in accordance with the political threats they face. Specifically, I argue that patronage allocation can be explained by varying political geographies and time horizons. I test this theory through a comparative case study of Rwanda and Uganda, whose current regimes are remarkably similar in origin and structure. I also extend my analysis to previous regimes in both countries, including the analysis of counterfactual or off-path behavior. In all cases I find strong support for the theory. Organisation pour la démocratie populaire -mouvement du travail (ODP-MT)(Organization for Popular Democracy -Labour Movement)Name of ruling party in Burkina Faso, 1989-1996 Office de distribution du pain; mange et tais-toi (Office for Bread Distribution -Eat and Shut Up) Popular wordplay on ODP-MT (Harsch, 1998, pp. 636-637)

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Democracy, visibility and public good provision

Cited by 165 publications

References 17 publications

Voter Behavior and Government Performance in Malawi: An Application of a Probabilistic Voting Model

Voter Behavior and Government Performance in Malawi: An Application of a Probabilistic Voting Model

Dress-Up Contest: A Dark Side of Fiscal Decentralization

Patronage as Institutional Choice: Evidence from Rwanda and Uganda

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