Abstract
When and how do governments deliver public goods and services in response to citizen preferences? We review the current literature on government responsiveness, with a focus on public goods and service delivery in developing countries. We identify three types of actors that are commonly present in these accounts: politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens. Much of this literature examines interactions between dyads of these actors. The study of electoral accountability and constituency services emphasizes relationships between citizens (or voters) and politicians. Studies of bureaucratic incentives and political oversight of bureaucrats emphasize interactions between politicians and bureaucrats. Finally, studies of bureaucratic embeddedness and citizen oversight of bureaucrats elaborate the interactions between bureaucrats and citizens. We argue that an emerging literature that considers interactions between all three types of actors provides rich theoretical and empirical terrain for developing our understanding of responsiveness and accountability in low- and middle-income countries and beyond.
Highlights
When do governments deliver outputs that are responsive to citizen preferences? This question motivates a large body of literature in many contexts spanning different regime types, levels of development, and a wide array of political institutions
We focus on the processes and interactions through which government actors are more likely to create or implement policies congruent with citizen preferences
In light of the growing recognition of the difficulty citizens face in holding politicians to account, a natural question arises: can citizens pressure service providers directly to improve service provision? In a so-called “short-route” to accountability, better service provision is achieved through various forms of collective action, individual appeals, or other forms of social pressure of bureaucrats (Kosack and Fung, 2014)
Summary
A growing literature considers more quotidian interactions between politicians and citizens as a tool that citizens use to induce government responsiveness. Studies of government responsiveness in autocracies suggests that constituency services is especially valuable when politicians’ policymaking role is constrained or when weak (or non-existent) electoral institutions limit electoral accountability (Distelhorst and Hou, 2017; York, 2020). Efforts to expand related complaint systems have motivated several recent experiments, exploring who uses these services and testing whether communication technologies affect service delivery. Hunnicutt, and Komakech (2021) report null results for a new ICT complaint system implemented by Kampala’s municipal government These works serve as models for future efforts to disentangle the distributional implications of complaint systems at a micro level and explore the conditions under which they may improve service delivery. Adoption of a civil service system may change politicians’ allocation of funds over time. Bostashvili and Ujhelyi (2019) suggest that pre-election cycles of spending on roads (infrastructure) were eliminated subsequent to the adoption of civil-service systems in US states
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