Is more electoral competition intrinsically better for development? This dissertation furthers our understanding of how electoral competition in recent democracies interacts with economic inequality to shape the probability that households will have access to basic services: water, sanitation and education. It uses novel household-level data for Mexico and original inequality measures at the municipal level to parse the effects of competition at the state and municipal levels.
Intellectual Merit: Understanding the dynamics of the provision of basic services in new democracies is essential for understanding and reducing poverty. However, research in this area has two recurrent shortcomings. It has been hitherto dominated by cross-national analysis which assumes away important country-specific and regional differences. It also lacks a deep, direct understanding of how public officials perceive the provision of public goods.
This research addresses the latter shortcomings by looking at how electoral competition at the municipal and state levels interact with income inequality, using original subnational data. By doing so it challenges the implicit notion that democratic party competition is intrinsically and homogeneously better for development, providing evidence that party competition has different effects dependent on the level of government, poverty and inequality. The statistical results will be paired with a description of the dilemmas that politicians themselves perceive "in the field". This will provide the literature with a much needed first-hand description of these dilemmas in a new democracy. Mexico presents an invaluable opportunity for three reasons: it has high variation at the subnational level in terms of electoral competition, the provision of public goods and inequality; the amount of available raw census data is perfect to engage these broad theoretical questions; and the researchers have an established network with municipal, state and federal officials that will reduce the costs of obtaining the interviews.
Broader Impacts: Understanding the heterogeneous effects of party competition across levels of government, income and inequality is crucial for solid development policy in recent democracies, and for an efficient allocation of development projects in democracies previously ravaged by war. The project will involve training opportunities for under-represented groups. The information generated will be widely circulated to other scientific communities that will find it useful (e.g. Centers for Latin American Studies across the U.S.). By establishing a partnership with academic repositories of massive datasets, the manual for using massive datasets should aid social scientist shift to a massive-data paradigm.
