Friday, February 01, 2008

The impact of local government

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, “The Local Connection: Local Government Performance and Satisfaction With Democracy in Argentina.” Comparative Political Studies 41, 3 (March 2008): 285-308.

Abstract: In light of extensive decentralization in much of the world, analyses of citizen satisfaction with democracy that treat citizens as subjects of their national governments alone are incomplete. In this article, the author uses regression analysis of unique survey data from Argentina to explore the relationship between local government performance and citizen satisfaction with democracy. She demonstrates that there is indeed an important link between local government performance and citizen system support but also that citizens distinguish between qualitatively different types of government performance. Certain measures of local government performance, such as corruption, have ramifications for citizens' evaluations of the functioning of their democracy and even for citizens' faith in democracy per se. At the same time, other types of local government performance, such as local bureaucratic inefficiency, do not reverberate beyond the local sphere. These results suggest mixed implications for future democratic stability in Latin America.

So local government performance plays a very important role in determing an individual’s support for democracy (i.e. Tip O’Neill’s “All politics is local”) but not all local issues are of the same magnitude. She also differentiates between support for the country’s democratic institutions and democracy in the abstract.

Merely getting bad service (measured here with the variable long line) probably upsets local residents, but the results shown in Tables 1 and 2 suggest that this alone is unlikely to alter a resident’s evaluation of how her government works or her democratic beliefs. At the other extreme, local government corruption seems to decrease an individual’s satisfaction with how democracy works in her country and is even capable of shaking her faith in democratic government. In between, substantively important (but not criminal or morally questionable) government behavior such as poor information provision is correlated with how a citizen evaluates her government’s performance but not the value she places on the principles underlying that system of government.

This made me wonder about a slightly different line of inquiry that would be worth an empirical study: what aspects of local government performance affect presidential approval ratings? Which local variables most/least affect an individual’s perception of a particular president, as opposed to democracy writ large? To some degree—I am not sure how much—this could help explain persistently high approval ratings in the face of national scandal, but perhaps also dropping approval even when the national scene is free of serious problems. We would also have to control for whether the party of the local government was different from that of the president.

Posted by Greg Weeks at 7:27 AM
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5 comments:

boz,  11:42 AM  

I imagine another variable is how involved the national government is perceived in being in local issues. In a country with a strong executive, you might assign blame differently for the pothole in your street than a country that has a strong federal tradition. I'd imagine there would be very different answers in Brazil or Venezuela than in Argentina.

Bosque,  6:18 PM  

I can only see it making a difference if a local Mayor is known to have requested assistance in some important matter from the Presidential level and the request has either been met or not met.

Greg Weeks,  7:15 AM  

I don't fully agree. You don't necessarily have to make a request for people for form an opinion about whether politics is working for them locally, and then perhaps by extension what they feel about the president. However, if such a request was made and then ignored, then maybe it would have an even greater impact.

As per Boz's comment, we might indeed need to control for unitary vs. federal systems, which changes people's perceptions of who is responsible.

boz,  11:22 AM  

It may not even be federal vs. unitary system, but something about presidential styles.

If you look at Chavez or Uribe, compared to their predecessors, they are much more involved in local politics. Chavez does his regular programs from locations around the country and often address local issues (and offers local handouts). Uribe takes his cabinet around the country for the local townhall meetings and micromanages his security down to a very local level.

I would think both would be more affected by local problems and both could take more credit for local successes than a president with a less locally focused style.

Tambopaxi,  7:37 AM  

Bosque's right in that Presidential images suffer at the local level to the extent that central government funds for such things as infrastructure, etc., do not flow down to the local level.

Greg's right in that funds flows are not the only nexus between Presidents and local governments. There are other factors in play ranging from simple things like Presidential visits to towns around the country (Correa does weekly radio programs from the hustings just like Chavez, and not surprisingly, the locals like that) to changes in admin stuctures extant between national, provincial (or departmental) and local governments, such that decision making authorities flow down.

This latter issue - distribution of decision making powers - is tricky business and in more than one country, Presidents have gained or lost on poll points, depending on how they play it with the locals and the intermediate (provinical or departmental) governments.

On this last point, many people tend to forget and/or downplay the role of the intermediate governments, and in small countries like those of CA, that's understandable. In SA, though, where the countries are bigger, some of those mid-level governments can take on importance quite similar to that of States within the U.S. system. In those cases, a study of the sort contemplated by Greg would have to take those governments into account as well..

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