Uneven policy implementation and outcomes are commonplace both across policy areas, such as healthcare or basic infrastructure, as well as the same policy across subnational political units. What explains variation in the capacity to implement policies within the same country? This project makes two key contributions to understanding state capacity. Empirically, the project systematically maps variation in capacity throughout Brazil. This will be done first at the federal level by a comparison across four ministries, Health, Education, Social Development and Energy, followed by a within-ministry analysis tracking programs across the states of Bahia, Minas Gerais and São Paulo. By using a multi-method approach to measure four major components of state capacity, defined as resources, quality of the bureaucracy, institutional design, and territorial reach, the project provides a richer and more nuanced picture of state capacity. Theoretically, this research will highlight how subnational political actors, specifically governors, mayors, and state-level bureaucrats, affect sub-national variation in the capacity to implement federal policy.
The intellectual merit of this project stems from the careful use of mixed methods, including focused surveys, in-depth interviews, archival research, as newly-developed Geographic Information System (GIS) tools to systematically map the presence of state infrastructure across the country. The empirical knowledge generated through extensive fieldwork will provide a nuanced understanding of the subnational variation in state capacity, thereby advancing the academic discussion beyond national-level discussions and providing a more thorough measure as well. While focusing on Brazil, this project also speaks more broadly to issues of building state capacity in large federal systems, and as such, is potentially generalizable to other countries, like Russia, India, and to a smaller extent, the United States.
The value of the project is broader than its immediate academic contribution. First, by publishing its results and making the original data available to the scientific community around the world, the project has the potential to enhance our scientific understanding of state institutional capacity, and can be used as a component of future comparative studies. This project will also develop a partnership between US and Brazilian universities (specifically, Brown University and the Center for Public Policy Research (NEPP) at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), and share data with independent research institutions abroad, such as CEBRAP (Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento). Ultimately, however, the main goal of this project is to provide potential benefits to society in the form of better public service provision. By isolating the key processes and mechanisms behind the development of institutional capacity, this study will have clear implications for superior design of public bureaucracy, infrastructure, and federal programs. As such, it is the goal of the research to make the results available not only in research circles, but also to public agencies and nonacademic publications as well.
