Which local governments are first to adopt new technology to improve public service delivery? We develop a bureaucracy-driven account, arguing that agencies are constrained by their size, resources, and employee motivations. This means that efforts to adopt new technologies are more likely to succeed in larger agencies. We assess support for this argument by examining the adoption and use of online scheduling information for public transit (the General Transit Feed Specification [GTFS]), which makes transit far easier to use. In California, we find that large agencies where internal champions faced fewer technical and resource constraints outpaced smaller ones. Interview and survey evidence provide support for the mechanisms underpinning our theory. These results underscore the importance of studying organizational drivers of technology and policy adoption more broadly. They also suggest caveats to the decentralization and federalism literatures, which emphasize the citizen oversight and influence is typically greater in smaller jurisdictions.

Most global population growth over the next two decades is projected to occur in small- and medium-sized cities in low- and middle-income countries. Expectations derived from the literature on fiscal federalism suggest that this is a cause for concern, as larger cities are thought to deliver public goods more effectively than smaller ones owing to economics of scale. Drawing on detailed cross-sectional data from Brazil and Indonesia, we show that smaller municipalities tend to possess more basic public health clinics and schools per capita, scattered throughout their territory, than larger cities. We theorize that the greater prevalence of such facilities in small cities reflects a relative lack of non-state alternatives, fewer concerns regarding "urban" problems faced in larger cities, and politicians' greater ability to secure and claim credit for such facilities. We illustrate the logic of this argument in case studies of otherwise-similar cities of different sizes in Brazil, and with shadow cases from Indonesia. Our analysis underscores how jurisdiction size and non-state service provision can affect government services.

Traditionally, urban political science has employed variables-oriented approaches with cities or neighborhoods as units of analysis in sets of paired case studies or regression analyses. In a small-N studies, the "most similar systems" approach involves comparing cases that are almost identical with the exception of a factor the scholar hypothesizes may explain variation in outcomes across cases. The literature on multi-level governance has long explored the interactions between tiers of government, examining how higher tiers of government can constrain or enable actors within cities, and cities have become collective actors on the international stage. Traditional approaches to small-N comparison and regression analysis describe relationships between variables of interest through analyzing correlations in small or large datasets. The last two decades have witnessed important shifts in the use of comparison as an analytic technique within urban political science.

Informality is often studied by scholars of urban studies but has received comparatively little attention by political scientists. This is surprising given the fact that large portions of the world’s population live, work, or transfer funds informally. The conventional wisdom is that the informal economy—the portion of the economy operating outside the regulatory reach of the state—is not very political because informal sector workers are relatively atomized and find collective action to be costly. The three books reviewed here, however, demonstrate that the informal sector is not only characterized by important forms of political organization but also affects politics within government institutions—and can even contribute to regime downfall. Calla Hummel’s Why Informal Workers Organize and Shelby Grossman’s Politics of Order in Informal Markets examine organization among informal sector workers, with Hummel probing the circumstances under which organization occurs and Grossman when such organizations are effective. In Black Markets and Militants , Medani takes the opposite perspective, examining how informal financial flows and networks affect state regulatory capacity. These three books marshal significant amounts of original data, pointing to how future research on these important dynamics can be conducted.

AbstractAlthough it was reported in 2012 that 89% of the world’s population had access to piped water, it is estimated that at least one billion people receive this water for fewer than 24 h per day. Intermittency places a variety of burdens upon households, including inadequate quantities of supply at the household level, unpredictability of water utilities in making water available, and a disproportionate time burden on poorer households. For many intermittent water systems, the availability of water is controlled by valvemen who turn access on/off to various portions of their service area. Using this information, NextDrop sends notifications via mobile phones to customers as to when water is likely to be available. Although a pilot of NextDrop was successfully implemented in Hubli-Dharwad in India, NextDrop faced significant challenges when expanding to Bangalore. This case study investigates how a breakdown in the information pipeline, as well as corresponding human factors, prevented adoption of NextDrop in Bangalore. Specifically, randomized controlled trials found that valvemen sent reports of their activities to NextDrop only 70% of the time. Even when NextDrop passed messages onto customers, only 38% of customers reported receiving notifications, primarily because either the household “waiters” for water, usually women, did not have daytime access to the mobile phone registered with NextDrop or the notifications are buried under the many other solicitations and informational messages regularly received via SMS. Valvemen were further studied through observation and semi-structured interviews to understand their incentives for complying with NextDrop.

Public service access in low-and middle-income countries is shaped by how much governments spend on services and where they choose to prioritize delivery. Accordingly, the local public goods and distributive politics literatures are largely focused on government spending and patterns of access. We argue that, even after access is granted, service quality can vary dramatically, and may vary with socioeconomic and political characteristics. We provide one of the first analyses of a key dimension of service quality: intermittency, which affects vital services such as water and electricity for hundreds of millions of people. We illustrate how to study it by highlighting the specific facets of intermittency that must be managed within the network; we show that these dimensions may be manipulated separately, and that infrastructure network structure shapes the allocation of intermittency. The literature from urban India shows that access to water connections (like access to many other local public goods) is typically associated with higher socio-economic status. In contrast, we find that in our study sites in Bangalore, water flows through pipes more frequently and predictably in low-income areas-thereby underscoring the importance of studying intermittency, and service quality more generally, as phenomena distinct from access. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Public institutions are facing natural and manmade hazards of increasing frequency and severity. While the costs of disasters can be greatly reduced when individuals prepare, successfully encouraging preparation is difficult for governments, given the low salience of such risks. We examine whether the increased salience of other types of risks can influence individual willingness to prepare for natural and manmade hazards, and whether message impact varies with recipients' levels of trust in their source. We capitalize upon a rare policy experiment-the staged rollout of COVID-19 lockdowns in California-to assess if increases in the salience of the pandemic were associated with greater willingness to store water for earthquake-induced system outages. We find that experiences of a disaster in a different domain (public health) and higher levels of trust in message source both increase willingness to store water. This suggests that public agencies should encourage preparedness during actual emergencies, or "not let a crisis go to waste." (C) 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Most urban residents in high-income countries obtain piped and treated water for drinking and domestic use from centralized utility-run water systems. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), however, utilities work alongside myriad other service providers that deliver water to hundreds of millions of city-dwellers. Hybrid modes of water delivery in urban areas in low- and middle-income countries are systems in which a variety of state and nonstate actors contribute to the delivery of water to households, schools, healthcare facilities, businesses, and government offices. Historically, the field has evolved to include within-utility networks and outside-the-utility provision mechanisms. Utilities service the urban core through network connections, while nonstate, smaller-scale providers supplement utility services both inside and outside the piped network. The main reform waves since the 1990s—privatization and corporatization—have done little to alter the hybrid nature of provision. Numerous case studies of nonutility water providers suggest that they are imperfect substitutes for utilities. They reach millions of households with no access to piped water, but the water they deliver tends to be of uncertain quality and is typically far more expensive than utility water. Newer work on utility-provided water and utility reforms has highlighted the political challenges of private sector participation in urban water; debates have also focused on the importance of contractual details such as tariff structures and investor incentives. New research has produced numerous studies on LMICs on the ways in which utilities extend their service areas and service types through explicit and implicit relationships with front-line water workers and with supplemental nonstate water suppliers. From the nonutility perspective, debates animated by questions of price and quality, the desirability or possibility of regulation, and the compatibility (or lack thereof) between reliance on small-scale water providers and the human right to safe water, are key areas of research. While understanding the hybrid nature of water delivery is essential for responsible policy formulation and for understanding inequalities in the urban sphere, there is no substitute for the convenience and affordability of universal utility provision, and no question that research on the conditions under which particular types of reforms can improve utility provision is sorely needed.

ABSTRACT The politics of public policy is a vibrant research area increasingly at the forefront of intellectual innovations in the discipline. We argue that political scientists are best positioned to undertake research on the politics of public policy when they possess expertise in particular policy areas. Policy expertise positions scholars to conduct theoretically innovative work and to ensure that empirical research reflects the reality they aim to analyze. It also confers important practical advantages, such as access to a significant number of academic positions and major sources of research funding not otherwise available to political scientists. Perhaps most importantly, scholars with policy expertise are equipped to defend the value of political science degrees and research in the public sphere.

As cities throughout the developing world grow, they often expand more quickly than the infrastructure and service delivery networks that provide residents with basic necessities such as water and public safety. Why do some cities deliver more effective infrastructure and services in the face of rapid growth than others? Why do some households and communities secure better services than others? Answering these questions requires studying the large, politicized bureaucracies charged with providing urban services, especially the relationships between frontline workers, agency managers, and citizens in informal settlements. Researchers investigating public service delivery in cities of the Global South, however, have faced acute data scarcity when addressing these themes. The recent emergence of crowd-sourced data offers researchers new means of addressing such questions. In this paper, we draw on our own research on the politics of urban water delivery in India to highlight new types of analysis that are possible using crowd-sourced data and propose solutions to common pitfalls associated with analyzing it. These insights should be of use for researchers working on a broad range of topics in comparative politics where crowd-sourced data could provide leverage, such as protest politics, conflict processes, public opinion, and law and order.

Many policies and programs based on informational interventions hinge upon the assumption that providing citizens with information can help improve the quality of public services, or help citizens cope with poor services. We present a causal framework that can be used to identify leaks and blockages in the information production and dissemination process in such programs. We conceptualize the "information pipeline" as a series of connected nodes, each of which constitutes a possible point of blockage. We apply the framework to a field-experimental evaluation of a program that provided households in Bangalore, India, with advance notification of intermittently provided piped water. Our study detected no impacts on household wait times for water or on how citizens viewed the state, but found that notifications reduced stress. Our framework reveals that, in our case, noncompliance among human intermediaries and asymmetric gender relations contributed in large part to these null-to-modest results. Diagnostic frameworks like this should be used more extensively in development research to better understand the mechanisms responsible for program success and failure, to identify subgroups that actually received the intended treatment, and to identify potential leaks and blockages when replicating existing programs in new settings. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The last 20 years have witnessed an impressive outpouring of comparative politics research examining urban politics in the developing world. This research advances our understanding of phenomena such as clientelism, law and order, and local public goods provision. Scholarship could be strengthened, however, through more careful attention to how the urban setting of this research affects the politics examined. This article proposes two distinct ways in which urban politics can be conceptualized: politics taking place in urban agglomerations, characterized by large, diverse populations settled at high densities; or politics taking place within the boundaries of city jurisdictions, possessing legal powers and responsibilities distinct from those at other tiers of government or in rural areas. Adopting either of these conceptualizations illuminates new avenues for empirical work, theoretical innovation, and improved measurement. This article also shows that recent scholarship has neglected important, and fundamentally political, topics such as urban political economy, land markets, and environmental harms. Engaging with these areas would allow political scientists to revisit classic questions regarding the institutional influences on economic growth, the politics of redistribution, and the determinants of collective action.

Contemporary urbanization in the Global South merits greater attention from scholars of comparative politics. Governance, associational life, and political behavior take distinctive forms in the social and institutional environments created by rapid urbanization, particularly within informal settlements and labor markets. In this special issue, we examine forms of collective action and claims-making in these spaces. We also consider how the state assesses, maps, and responds to the demands of informal sector actors. Tackling questions of citizen and state behavior in these informal urban contexts requires innovative research strategies due to data scarcity and social and institutional complexity. Contributors to this symposium offer novel strategies for addressing these challenges, including the use of informal archives, worksite-based sampling, ethnographic survey design, enforcement process-tracing, and crowd-sourced data.

Significant development funding flows to informational interventions intended to improve public services. Such “transparency fixes” often depend on the cooperation of frontline workers who produce or disseminate information for citizens. This article examines frontline worker compliance with a transparency intervention in Bangalore's water sector. Why did compliance vary across neighborhoods, and why did workers exhibit modest rates of compliance overall? Drawing on ethnographic observation and an original data set, this article finds that variation in workers' family responsibilities and financial circumstances largely explains variation in compliance with the intervention. Furthermore, workers often prioritize long-standing responsibilities over new tasks seen as add-ons, leading to modest rates of compliance overall. Perceptions of “core” jobs can be sticky—especially when reaffirmed through interactions with citizens. This article represents one of the first multimethod companions to a field experiment, and illustrates how the analysis of qualitative and observational data can contribute to impact evaluation.

Can providing citizens with information compensate for unreliable public services? We present a field-experimental evaluation of a program that provided households in Bangalore with advance notification of intermittently provided piped water. The implementers expected that increasing service predictability would reduce coping costs, increase transparency, and improve state-citizen relations. Our study, however, detected no impacts on household welfare or state-citizen relations. Non-cooperation by street-level bureaucrats charged with supplying water timing information undermined the program’s viability. These findings suggest that greater attention be paid to how frontline workers drive experimental findings. We introduce a framework for analyzing “information pipelines” to enable such efforts.

There is a growing recognition that the state is not the sole provider of “local public goods” such as water and education in the developing world. Mainstream approaches to the study of local public goods provision, however, have yet to incorporate these insights. We offer a descriptive typology of hybrid local public goods regimes, or systems in which both state and non-state actors contribute to provision. It emphasizes two dimensions: the type of state involvement (direct versus indirect provision), and the degree of formal state penetration. The politics of producing local public goods, we argue, takes on distinct forms in each cell. The framework allows scholars to develop more accurate and precise explanations of variation in service quality and access, and to choose more appropriate outcome measures. We illustrate the utility of this framework by analyzing distinct hybrid regimes for water and sanitation, and mass transit in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Author(s): Flom, H; Post, AE | Abstract: Democratization originally inspired hope that new regimes would privilege human rights. However, progressive reforms to the criminal code have been insufficient to stem dramatic increases in incarceration rates, and developing democracies have made little headway reforming their ineffective police forces. How can we explain the stability and enforcement of punitive criminal justice policies and the erosion of police reforms? We offer a novel theoretical explanation of these contrasting patterns through a comparison of these two policy areas in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Incentives to avoid blame for salient crimes discourage politicians from repealing punitive criminal justice policies and incentivize judges to enforce them. Responsibility for failed police reforms, however, is harder to assign, giving the police and their allies opportunities to undermine them.

Many developing countries privatized utilities during the 1990s. Their weak institutional environments, however, make them prone to crises that generate incentives for governments to renege on contractual commitments to investors. To understand variation in post-crisis regulatory outcomes in such contexts, scholars must consider investors' prior choices regarding portfolio structure. Investors facing high reputational costs from exit are more likely to remain following expropriation, and those holding diverse assets in their contract jurisdiction, to secure compensation. These factors account for significant unexplained within-sector and subnational variation, for which we provide qualitative and quantitative evidence from Argentina's water and electricity sectors following the 2001 crisis. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.