Politics and Public Service Provision in Africa’s New Democracies

Abstract

In developing democracies with fledgling institutions, the provision of basic public services is often deeply political. In this paper, we investigate the effect of one political driver of basic service delivery: the degree of partisan affinities among voters. We argue that strong partisanship undermines public service delivery in at least two ways: first, it reduces public officials’ incentive to exert effort in providing quality basic services to citizens; second, it weakens accountability of frontline service providers. Data from a UNICEF project in Ghana provide strong support for this argument. We find that the quantity and quality of basic public services is significantly lower in strongly partisan districts. Initiatives like the UNICEF project that gather and publicize information about governments’ service delivery performance could potentially enhance basic service provision in these contexts. Public awareness is likely to pressure poor performers to improve; awareness among citizens may also spur collective action to demand better services from their governments.