Essays on the political economy of service provision

Abstract

Service provision has often been studied as an outcome of political decisions and processes. This dissertation examines how the distribution of service provision and its electoral outcomes are also contingent on local social structures. It contributes to theoretical knowledge on the political economy of service provision by introducing novel arguments that explain spatial and temporal variations in state capacity and government services, non-state services, and electoral returns to service provision. The first paper develops a theory based on bureaucratic efficiency and argues that bureaucratic efficiency increases with social proximity among bureaucrats. I find that social proximity, as proxied by geographic proximity, increases bureaucratic efficiency. However, in line with theoretical expectations, geographic proximity is less likely to lead to high bureaucratic efficiency in socially fragmented network structures or when there are ethnic divisions between bureaucrats.

To test this theory, I leverage a spatial regression discontinuity design and novel data from Turkey's over 35,000 villages. The second paper explores the origins of non-state service provision, with a focus on Islamist political movements. Exploiting the spatial variation in an Islamist service provision network across Turkey's 970 districts, this study shows that service allocation by non-state actors is highly dependent on a group's ability to marshal local resources, specifically through the associational mobilization of local business elites. The findings rely on an original district-level dataset that combines data from over sixty government decrees, archival data, and other novel administrative data.

The third paper introduces a theory suggesting that electoral returns to local public goods will increase with their excludability, i.e., the degree to which they are used only by the local population, as the local population will see them as "club goods" and as a signal of favoritism. Using a panel dataset that contains information on all public education and health investments in Turkey since the 1990s and mobility measures that rely on mobile call data, this study finds that electoral returns to public good investments are higher when they have a club good nature, although the effect is weaker in secular districts, where a perception of favoritism is less likely to develop due to the cleavages with the conservative incumbent party.