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

更多的选举竞争本质上是否有利于发展？本文进一步加深了我们对近期民主国家选举竞争如何与经济不平等相互作用的理解，从而影响家庭获得水、卫生和教育等基本服务的可能性。它使用墨西哥新的家庭层面的数据和市一级的原始不平等措施来分析州和市层面竞争的影响。智力优点：了解新民主国家提供基本服务的动态对于理解和减少贫困​​至关重要。然而，这一领域的研究存在两个经常性的缺点。迄今为止，它一直以跨国分析为主，这种分析假设了重要的国家特定和地区差异。它还缺乏对公职人员如何看待公共产品提供的深入、直接的理解。本研究利用原始的地方数据，研究市级和州级的选举竞争如何与收入不平等相互作用，从而解决了后一个缺点。通过这样做，它挑战了民主党竞争本质上和同质化更有利于发展的隐含观念，提供了证据表明政党竞争会根据政府水平、贫困和不平等产生不同的影响。统计结果将与政客们自己在“现场”所感受到的困境的描述相结合。这将为文献提供对新民主国家中这些困境急需的第一手描述。墨西哥提供了一个宝贵的机会，原因有三个：它在地方一级的选举竞争、公共产品的提供和不平等方面存在很大差异；可用的原始人口普查数据量非常适合解决这些广泛的理论问题；研究人员与市、州和联邦官员建立了良好的网络，这将降低获得采访的成本。 更广泛的影响：了解各级政府之间的政党竞争、收入和不平等的异质性影响对于近期民主国家的稳健发展政策以及以前遭受战争蹂躏的民主国家的发展项目的有效分配至关重要。该项目将为代表性不足的群体提供培训机会。生成的信息将广泛传播到其他有用的科学界（例如美国各地的拉丁美洲研究中心）。通过与海量数据集的学术存储库建立合作伙伴关系，使用海量数据集的手册应该有助于社会科学家转向海量数据范式。

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.