Nuanced Accountability: Voter Responses to Service Delivery in Southern Africa

Abstract

Various theories of democratic governance posit that citizens should vote for incumbent politicians when they provide good service, and vote for the opposition when service delivery is poor. But does electoral accountability work as theorized, especially in developing country contexts? Studying Southern African democracies, where infrastructural investment in basic services has expanded widely but not universally, we contribute a new empirical answer to this question. Analyzing the relationship between service provision and voting, we find a surprising negative relationship: improvements in service provision predict decreases in support for dominant party incumbents. Though stronger in areas where opposition parties control local government, the negative relationship persists even in those areas where local government is run by the nationally dominant party. Survey data provide suggestive evidence that citizen concerns about corruption and ratcheting preferences for service delivery may be driving citizen attitudes and behaviors. Voters may thus be responsive to service delivery, but perhaps in ways that are more nuanced than extant theories previously recognized.

Elliott Green: Public goods and national identification

“…The finding that the presence of paved roads is associated with lower levels of national identification using both a cross‐sectional and panel data approach is striking. But, this finding is consistent with recent research from De Kadt and Lieberman (), who use panel data to examine the relationship between public goods provision and support for the incumbent party in southern Africa. They find that improving the quality of access to piped water, toilets and refuse collection is correlated with lower levels of support for the incumbent ANC in South Africa, which they explain partially through the ways in which greater service provision acts to ratchet up citizen expectations.…”

Getting the basic nature of systemic corruption right: A reply to Marquette and Peiffer

“…Mungiu‐Pippidi & Dadasov, ). In a similar vein, academic research reveals that the introduction of competitive elections in countries plagued by rampant corruption has not had the expected effect in terms of reducing corruption (Bäck & Hadenius, ; De Kadt & Lieberman, ; Lindberg & Morrison, ; Sung, ).…”

The political cost of public–private partnerships: Theory and evidence from Colombian infrastructure development

“…This makes them a centerpiece of the “hollowing” of states, or the replacement of traditional public management with contracts and partnerships with nonstate actors (Milward & Provan, ). Recent work contends that the contractual nature of PPPs (Bertelli, ) and the involvement of private firms from abroad (Woodhouse, ) can undermine their value in a strategy of pork‐barrel politics, consistent with arguments about other service improvements (De Kadt & Lieberman, 2020). We continue this line of inquiry by considering whether the past performance of infrastructure PPPs influences domestic distributive politics.…”

“…Voters' experience with PPPs does not help incumbents in Colombia, where these aggregate patterns suggest a willingness to change parties where a new PPP is promised. Beyond Colombia, evidence reveals that the visibility—or “attributability” (De Kadt & Lieberman, 2020)—of projects makes them more likely to influence vote shares . These patterns motivate our claim that negative experiences with PPPs introduce a sociotropic turn in individual voting (Kinder & Kiewiet, , ), namely, that poorly perceived experience crowds out the possibility that promising a new project will improve a voter's own welfare.…”