Abstract
Political competition is widely recognized as a mediator of public goods provision through its salutary effect on incumbents’ electoral incentives. We argue that political competition additionally mediates public goods provision by reducing the efficiency of legislative bargaining. These countervailing forces may produce a net negative effect in places with weak parties and low transparency—typical of many young democracies. We provide evidence of a robust negative relationship between political competition and local public goods using panel data from Mali. Tests of mechanisms corroborate our interpretation of this relationship as evidence of legislative bargaining inefficiencies. To explore the generalizability of these findings, we analyze cross-country panel data and show that political competition leads to better (worse) public goods provision under high (low) levels of party system institutionalization. The paper sheds light on why political competition is only selectively beneficial, and underscores the importance of considering both the electoral and legislative arenas.
Highlights
Political competition is widely recognized as a mediator of public goods provision through its salutary effect on incumbents’ electoral incentives
Parties can align with their ideological neighbors or rely on historical relationships with other parties (Laver 1989). While these insights may be true for established democracies, we argue that parties in the young and often weak party systems found in most democracies of the developing world have less access to such strategies; they are less likely to have distinct ideological attachments (Conroy-Krutz and Lewis 2011), are newer and frequently split, or enter or exit the system (Gottlieb and Larreguy 2016), making historical coalitions a weaker predictor of future coalition formation
We presented an argument that introduces two ways in which political competition can moderate public goods provision—electoral incentives and legislative
Summary
Political competition is widely recognized as a mediator of public goods provision through its salutary effect on incumbents’ electoral incentives. Our theory and evidence provide one explanation for mixed findings in the existing literature: younger, lowerincome democracies face the dual burdens of exhibiting weaker electoral accountability, due in part to poor access to information, and more inefficient legislative bargaining due to weak party systems and particularistic politics. Together, these features of developing democracies may mean that political competition leads to worse instead of better policy outcomes
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