Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Poverty Alleviation in Developing Nations

减少贫困是新兴民主国家发展面临的主要挑战之一。许多这样的民主国家在制度薄弱的背景下运作，政策的实施受制于政治家的自由裁量权。本提案调查了针对私人利益的策略，以及选民获得利益如何影响他们的行为。本项目研究地方政治家追求党派目标策略的条件，以及选民何时可以规避这些策略。该项目由定量和定性方法相结合的三个部分组成，其中包括一个数据集，该数据集汇编了政府确定为贫困家庭的数量、发放福利的家庭数量、地方政府和州议会单位的党派组成等信息。这些数据被用来评估地方政府部门参与扶贫项目的家庭数量是否由政治特征决定。第二部分是对选民和地方政客的调查。这些数据用于测试个人层面的假设，包括党派目标偏见、用于获取利益的选民中介策略，以及政治家在党派背景下监督投票的能力。最后，将进行焦点小组来阐明定量结果中发现的机制。本研究的目的是提供一个微观层面的政党-选民联系和党派性分配策略的理解，适用于发展中国家的各种民主环境。这个项目的目标是确定反贫困项目的党派捕获的原因和后果，这个问题威胁到许多发展中民主国家减轻贫困的努力。除了提高对民主背景下的裙带关系策略的学术理解外，研究结果对致力于提高这些项目效率的发展和政策团体也很有用。最终，这项研究的核心目标是提供有助于打击地方腐败的分析，这是一个对穷人的生活造成毁灭性影响的问题。

Poverty reduction is one of the central challenges for development in new democracies. Many of these democracies operate in a context of weak institutions, where policy implementation is subject to the discretion of politicians, This proposal investigates the strategies used to target private benefits and how voters' access to benefits affects their behavior. This project studies the conditions under which local politicians pursue partisan targeting strategies and when voters can circumvent these strategies. This project consists of three components that combine quantitative and qualitative methods, including a dataset that compiles information on the number of families identified as poor by the government, the number of families issued benefits, the partisan composition of local governments and the state assembly units. These data are used to assess whether the number of households given access to anti-poverty programs across local government units is determined by political characteristics. The second component is a survey of voters and local politicians. These data are used to test individual-level hypotheses on partisan targeting bias, voter-intermediary strategies used to access benefits, and the ability of politicians to monitor votes across partisan contexts. Finally, focus group will be conducted to illuminate mechanisms found in the quantitative results. This research aims to provide a micro-level understanding of party-voter linkages and partisan strategies of clientelistic distribution that is applicable to a diverse range of democratic settings in the developing world.The goal of this project is to identify the causes and consequences of party capture of anti-poverty programs, a problem that threatens efforts to alleviate poverty in many developing democracies. In addition to improving scholarly understanding of clientelistic strategies in a democratic context, the results will also be useful to the development and policy communities who are focused on improving the efficiency of these programs. Ultimately, the core ambition of this research is to provide analyses that can contribute to the fight against local corruption: a problem that has devastating effects on the lives of the poor.