The project analyzes the joint effect of political clientelism and party competition on social policy and poverty reduction at the sub-national level in Mexico. Three central questions motivate this investigation. First, what explains sub-national variation in government performance in improving the conditions of the less advantaged members of society? Second, to what extent do political constellations at the provincial and local levels confound institutional designs intended to improve social welfare? And third, what role do voters play in demanding specific goods from multi-tiered governments? By exploring these questions, the proposed project intends to advance the understanding of the determinants of policy choice and implementation at the sub-national level. To accomplish this, the project entails three major components. First, the analysis explores the determinants of resource allocation by state or second-tier governments to municipalities. Second, the research analyzes the factors affecting municipal government performance with respect to social policy and poverty alleviation. The third component of the research focuses upon the individual level of analysis and entails a survey of voter perceptions regarding changes in poverty alleviation in their communities, attribution of responsibility for those changes, and clientelistic practices. One central hypothesis drives this research: poverty reduction is most likely to be observed when resources are allocated in accordance with the logic of policy-based rather than clientelistic party competition, both at the state and municipal levels of governance.
By looking beyond policy formation at the national level, the proposed research has broader impacts by enriching the understanding of the conditions under which democracy and decentralization yield policies considered to be beneficial for the poor. Whereas decentralization has been portrayed as a panacea for the problems of development, especially for poverty alleviation, undemocratic practices at the sub-national level may be reinforced by political decentralization, thus undermining the welfare of citizens. The proposed research will establish a basis for understanding the widely varying and often disappointing results that different strategies of decentralization have yielded not only across countries but across state and local governments. The research also generates new datasets that can contribute to the limited pool of quantitative data on sub-national policy choice and performance and provide scholars with new information about citizen perceptions of local governance, political accountability, and clientelism that they can use to study other questions related to economic development in the developing world.
