Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The quality of government performance in Argentine municipalities

为什么一些地方政府官僚机构表现良好，平等地向所有公民提供商品和服务，而在其他城市，获得政府服务是一项艰巨的任务，结果是那些有政治联系的人比其他人更能利用政府服务？本项目通过发展政府绩效理论和收集阿根廷城市食品分配项目中直接衡量政府绩效的数据，在理解政府绩效为何如此方面迈出了重要一步。现有的关于政府绩效的文献并没有直接解决政府绩效质量为何存在差异的问题。一些作者认为政治家总是寻求建立高效的官僚机构，而另一些人则持相反的观点，认为政治家通过战略性地提供政府服务，优先考虑发展客户网络或政党机器。在这个项目中，首席研究员发展了一种政府绩效理论，明确地将绩效质量视为一种政治选择。它满足了其他研究人员强调的需求，即确定关于我们应该期望看到更好或更差的政府表现的条件的可测试假设。它进一步创新，不仅分析了可能陷入庇护-客户网络的个人的行为，还分析了这些网络之外的人的行为，因此突出了政府表现不佳所带来的不同部门人口支持的权衡。此外，尽管大多数现有文献只关注大选竞争，但本文发展的理论还研究了党内竞争（以初选的形式）如何对政府绩效产生单独的影响。从经验上看，现有文献中很少有直接衡量政府绩效的方法。本文发展的理论在阿根廷城市政府社会福利实施绩效质量的原始数据集上进行了测试。这个地方政府实践的数据集是根据对三个不同省份的100多个城市的社会福利政策负责人的原始调查问卷开发的，这些城市广泛代表了阿根廷的社会和政治状况。这项研究采用调查表答复的统计分析，辅以选定的个案研究，以检验政治竞争的性质与政府绩效质量之间的关系。问卷可以作为在不同国家和区域环境中收集类似数据的模板。拉丁美洲经过近二十年的新自由主义改革和权力下放，地方政府在公民的生活中发挥着越来越重要的作用，特别是对该地区依靠政府支持满足许多基本需求的穷人来说。本论文的研究结果将提高我们对为什么一些地方政府比其他地方政府表现得更好的理解，从而可以更好地评估拉丁美洲和其他发展中国家未来权力下放浪潮的可能后果。

Why do some local government bureaucracies perform well, delivering goods and services to all citizens equally, while in other cities accessing government services is a difficult task, with the result that those with political contacts are better able to take advantage of government services than others? This project took an important step towards understanding why governments perform as they do by developing a theory of government performance and collecting data on a direct measure of that performance in the implementation of a food distribution program in Argentine cities. The existing literature on government performance has not directly addressed the question of why there is variation in the quality of government performance. Whereas some authors assume politicians always seek to create high-performing bureaucracies, others take the opposite view and assume that politicians prioritize the development of clientelist networks or party machines through the strategic provision of government services.In this project, the principal investigator developed a theory of government performance that explicitly treats the quality of performance as a political choice. It met the need, highlighted by other researchers, to identify testable hypotheses concerning the conditions under which we should expect to see better or worse government performance. It further innovates by analyzing the behavior not only of individuals potentially enmeshed in patron-client networks, but also of those outside such networks, and therefore highlights the trade-offs in support from different sectors of the population that poor government performance entails. Furthermore, whereas most existing literature focuses on general election competition only, the theory developed here also examines how intra-party competition, in the form of primary elections, may exercise a separate effect on government performance.Empirically, there are very few direct measures of government performance in the existing literature. The theory developed in the dissertation was tested on an original dataset of the quality of Argentine city government performance in social welfare implementation. This dataset of local government practices was developed from an original questionnaire administered to the head of social welfare policy in over 100 cities across three different provinces broadly representative of Argentine social and political conditions. The research employed statistical analysis of questionnaire responses, supplemented by selected case studies, to test for a relationship between the nature of political competition and the quality of government performance. The questionnaire can serve as a template for the collection of similar data in different country and regional settings. After nearly two decades of neo-liberal reform and decentralization in Latin America, local governments play an increasingly important role in the lives of citizens, especially for the region's poor who rely on government support to meet many of their basic needs. The findings of this dissertation will improve our understanding of why some local governments perform better than others and thereby allow for a better assessment of the likely consequences of future waves of decentralization in Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world.