Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Who Gets Public Goods? The Politics of Public Service Provision in India

当预算限制需要配给时，政府如何分配基本公共服务？该项目通过以前所未有的地理精确度研究过去二十年印度北方稀缺电力的供应来解决这一关键问题。印度的缺电人口比世界上任何其他国家都多，尤其是在北方邦，估计有5000万人没有连接到电网。本研究利用一组新颖的夜间灯光卫星图像、政府关于电力分配的官方数据，并利用地理信息系统技术和统计方法来识别随时间变化的模式，分析了过去四个州选举周期中北方邦电力供应的变化。通过观察这一社会和政治急剧变化的时期，评估了贫穷公民通过投票站改善公共服务提供的能力。在一个州议会选区密集的实地考察和访谈，旨在证实统计分析的结果，并阐明因果机制。其结果是详细而精确地分析了一项综合公共服务是如何在一个世界上贫困程度最高的民主地区分布的，该项目的学术价值在于它对发展中民主国家基本公共服务是如何分布的进行了理论研究。由于电力和其他基本服务对经济发展至关重要，这项研究对世界穷人的生活前景具有重要意义。通过测试一个理论的可观察影响，该理论将选举竞争力的变化与选民对地方公共产品的价值联系起来，印度的研究旨在明确地与一个更广泛的项目联系起来，该项目考察了整个发展中国家的地方公共产品的提供情况。该项目还通过向学者和政策制定者介绍政治机构调解交付的方式，产生了更广泛的影响为穷人提供公共服务。这项研究对所有发展中民主国家都有意义，因为这些国家的政府面临着在公民中分配稀缺资源的挑战。此外，该项目通过大量验证卫星图像作为电气化指标的使用，还为研究世界其他地区的电力供应提供了新的机会。鉴于我们根本不知道在许多国家谁得到公共服务，这项技术的应用为社会科学研究做出了重大贡献

How do governments apportion basic public services when budget constraints necessitate their rationing? This project engages this critical question by examining the provision of scarce electrical power in northern India over the last two decades at an unprecedented level of geographic precision. More people in India lack electricity than any other country in the world, and nowhere more so than in the state of Uttar Pradesh where an estimated 50 million people are unconnected to the power grid. Drawing on a novel set of satellite imagery of nighttime lights, official government data on electricity distribution, and harnessing geographic information systems technology andstatistical methods to identify patterns of change over time, this research analyzes variations in electricity provision across Uttar Pradesh over the last four state election cycles. By observing this period of dramatic social and political change, the ability of poor citizens to garner improvements in public service delivery via the polling booth was evaluated. Intensive fieldwork and interviews within one state assembly constituency were designed to substantiate the results of the statistical analysis and elucidate causal mechanisms. The results are a detailed and precise analysis of how an integral public service is distributed in a democratic region with one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the world.The project's intellectual merit lies in its theoretical investigation of how basic public services are distributed in developing democracies. Since electricity and other basic services are requisites for economic development, this research has critical implications for the life prospects of the world's poor. By testing the observable implications of a theory that links variations in electoral competitiveness and the value placed on local public goods by voters, the research in India is designed to explicitly connect with a broader project that examines the provision of local public goods across the entire developing world.The project also has broader impacts by informing scholars and policy makers of the ways in which political institutions mediate the delivery of public services to the poor. The study is relevant to all developing democracies in which governments face the challenge of allocating scarce resources among their citizenry. In addition, by intensively validating the use of satellite imagery as an indicator of electrification, the project also opens new opportunities for the study of electricity provision in the rest of the world. Given that we simply do not know who gets public services in many countries, the application of this technology makes a significant contribution to social sciences research