From Public Service Access to Service Quality: The Distributive Politics of Piped Water in Bangalore

The local public goods and distributive politics literatures focus overwhelmingly on government spending and service access. Yet service quality can vary dramatically and be targeted strategically. We provide one of the first analyses of a key dimension of service quality: intermittency, which affects vital services like water and electricity for hundreds of millions of people. We illustrate how to study it by highlighting both the specific facets of intermittency that are salient to citizens and that may be manipulated separately, and how infrastructure network structure shapes allocation. The existing literature shows that access to water connections (like access to many other local public goods) is typically associated with higher socio-economic status and residence in strategically important electoral districts. In contrast, we find that 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 distinct phenomena.