Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Electoral Competition, Income Inequality and Public Goods: A Subnational Assessment

更多的选举竞争是否本质上更有利于发展？本论文进一步加深了我们对最近民主国家的选举竞争如何与经济不平等相互作用，以塑造家庭获得基本服务（水，卫生和教育）的可能性的理解。它使用新的家庭层面的数据为墨西哥和原来的不平等措施，在市政一级解析竞争的影响，在州和市一级。智力优点：了解在新的民主国家提供基本服务的动态是理解和减少贫困至关重要。然而，这一领域的研究有两个经常性的缺点。迄今为止，它一直以跨国分析为主，这种分析排除了重要的国别和区域差异。它也缺乏对公职人员如何看待提供公共产品的深刻、直接的理解。这项研究解决了后者的缺点，看看在市和州一级的选举竞争如何与收入不平等的互动，使用原始的国家以下的数据。通过这样做，它挑战了民主政党竞争在本质上和一致地更有利于发展的隐含概念，证明政党竞争具有不同的影响，取决于政府的级别，贫困和不平等。统计结果将与对政治家自己在“实地”所感受到的困境的描述相结合。这将为文学提供一个急需的第一手描述这些困境在一个新的民主。墨西哥提供了一个宝贵的机会，原因有三：在选举竞争、公共产品的提供和不平等方面，墨西哥在国家以下一级存在很大差异;现有的原始人口普查数据量非常适合研究这些广泛的理论问题;研究人员与市、州和联邦官员建立了网络，这将降低采访的成本。了解政党竞争在各级政府、收入和不平等方面的异质性影响，对于近年来民主国家制定坚实的发展政策至关重要，对于曾遭受战争蹂躏的民主国家有效分配发展项目也至关重要。该项目将为代表人数不足的群体提供培训机会。所产生的信息将被广泛分发给其他科学界，这些科学界会发现它是有用的（例如美国的拉丁美洲研究中心）。通过与大规模数据集的学术知识库建立伙伴关系，使用大规模数据集的手册应该帮助社会科学家转向一个独立的数据范式。

Is more electoral competition intrinsically better for development? This dissertation furthers our understanding of how electoral competition in recent democracies interacts with economic inequality to shape the probability that households will have access to basic services: water, sanitation and education. It uses novel household-level data for Mexico and original inequality measures at the municipal level to parse the effects of competition at the state and municipal levels.Intellectual Merit: Understanding the dynamics of the provision of basic services in new democracies is essential for understanding and reducing poverty. However, research in this area has two recurrent shortcomings. It has been hitherto dominated by cross-national analysis which assumes away important country-specific and regional differences. It also lacks a deep, direct understanding of how public officials perceive the provision of public goods. This research addresses the latter shortcomings by looking at how electoral competition at the municipal and state levels interact with income inequality, using original subnational data. By doing so it challenges the implicit notion that democratic party competition is intrinsically and homogeneously better for development, providing evidence that party competition has different effects dependent on the level of government, poverty and inequality. The statistical results will be paired with a description of the dilemmas that politicians themselves perceive "in the field". This will provide the literature with a much needed first-hand description of these dilemmas in a new democracy. Mexico presents an invaluable opportunity for three reasons: it has high variation at the subnational level in terms of electoral competition, the provision of public goods and inequality; the amount of available raw census data is perfect to engage these broad theoretical questions; and the researchers have an established network with municipal, state and federal officials that will reduce the costs of obtaining the interviews.Broader Impacts: Understanding the heterogeneous effects of party competition across levels of government, income and inequality is crucial for solid development policy in recent democracies, and for an efficient allocation of development projects in democracies previously ravaged by war. The project will involve training opportunities for under-represented groups. The information generated will be widely circulated to other scientific communities that will find it useful (e.g. Centers for Latin American Studies across the U.S.). By establishing a partnership with academic repositories of massive datasets, the manual for using massive datasets should aid social scientist shift to a massive-data paradigm.