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

为什么一些地方政府机构表现良好，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，结果是那些有政治人脉的人比其他人更能利用政府服务？该项目通过发展政府绩效理论，并收集在阿根廷各城市实施食品分配方案时直接衡量政府绩效的数据，向理解政府为什么这样做迈出了重要的一步。现有的关于政府绩效的文献并没有直接解决为什么政府绩效的质量会有差异的问题。一些作者认为政治家总是试图创造高绩效的官僚机构，而另一些作者则持相反的观点，他们认为政客们通过战略性地提供政府服务来优先发展委托人网络或政党机器。在这个项目中，首席研究员发展了一个政府绩效理论，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要，即确定关于我们应该在什么情况下看到政府表现更好或更差的可测试假设。它进一步创新，不仅分析了可能陷入赞助人-客户网络的个人的行为，也分析了这些网络之外的人的行为，从而突出了糟糕的政府绩效带来的不同人口阶层对支持的权衡。此外，虽然大多数现有文献只关注大选竞争，但这里发展的理论也研究了党内竞争如何以初选的形式对政府绩效产生单独的影响。在阿根廷城市政府社会福利实施质量的原始数据集上对本文提出的理论进行了检验。这一地方政府做法的数据集是根据向三个不同省份的100多个城市的社会福利政策负责人发放的原始问卷编制的，广泛代表了阿根廷的社会和政治状况。这项研究使用了问卷回复的统计分析，并辅之以选定的案例研究，以检验政治竞争的性质与政府绩效质量之间的关系。调查问卷可作为在不同国家和区域收集类似数据的模板。在拉丁美洲经历了近20年的新自由主义改革和权力下放之后，地方政府在公民生活中发挥着越来越重要的作用，特别是对该地区依赖政府支持来满足许多基本需求的穷人来说。这篇论文的发现将提高我们对为什么一些地方政府表现优于其他地方政府的理解，从而使我们能够更好地评估拉丁美洲和发展中世界其他地区未来分权浪潮可能产生的后果。

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.