| Abstract: |
In the past decades, decentralization has become increasingly important in
both developing and developed countries. Based on the standard
decentralization theorem, policy makers believe that local governments are
closer to citizens and know more about local contexts and needs than the
national governments. Consequently, they can design policies leading to a more
efficient allocation of public goods. Moreover, when accompanied by
empowerment of local decision-makers, decentralization is supposed to make
local politicians more accountable to voters in a way that national
politicians are not. Yet, the effective implementation of decentralization
policies may heavily rely on local institutions. This thesis contributes to a
rising literature analyzing the political economics of decentralization, that
is the extent to which local political dynamics may reinforce or jeopardies
decentralization reforms, ultimately affecting the citizens' well-being. I
consider three countries that have devolved power to local politicians to a
different extent, and tackle three obstacles that may undermine the beneficial
effects of decentralization reforms: first, strong political competition at
the local level; second, the need for coordinating the provision of a local
public good; the interaction between political competition and coordination
needs on accountability and eventually the quality of a local public good.
Political competition may hinder the beneficial effects of decentralization on
stability in a post-war country like Burundi. After a long-lasting and
devastating civil war, in 2010 Burundi organized the first local elections,
with the hope of establishing political stability through democratic means.
However, together with two co-authors, I show that such political
decentralization partly failed. We use a unique dataset and geographic fixed
effects to show that violence was higher in municipalities characterized by
fierce political competition and acute polarization between demobilized rebel
groups. The former protagonists of the civil war used the elections as another
stage to engage in a stiff struggle for power, and used “specialists of
violence” to illicitly steer the electoral outcome.Political dynamics may
undermine the coordinated management of the local sewerage networks in Brazil.
I use geospatial data to proxy for the scope of coordination between
neighboring municipalities: municipalities that are close “enough” are those
more exposed to the spreading of water-borne diseases, which ultimately
justifies cross-boundary coordination of local sanitation networks. By
exploiting a Regression Discontinuity Design in close municipal elections, I
show that political alignment between neighboring mayors may lead to lower
access to sanitation networks of households. I argue that mayors co-managing a
public good have a stronger incentive to monitor each other and ensure
effective coordination when they come from different political parties,
essentially because of political competition. Mayors from the same party would
tend instead to be more lenient to each other, ultimately undermining the
quality of the local public good co-provided.Finally, I study the effect of
decentralization on the accountability of local politicians co-managing local
police in Belgium. In 2005, one of the regions of Belgium introduced the
direct election of mayors, while in the rest of the country mayors remained
appointed by the local city councils. Together with a co-author, I exploit
this reform to show that crime incidence in municipalities affected by the
reform decreased faster than anywhere else in the country. We argue that the
direct election of mayors increase the accountability of mayors and their
incentives to fight criminality. However, we find that the effects of the
reform decrease when an increasingly larger number of neighboring mayors has
to coordinate the local police. The need to coordinate the local police blur
accountability, mitigating the effects of the reform. To conclude, the
overarching message of the thesis is that local institutions matter for the
implementation of decentralization policies. Policy-makers redesigning the
distribution of power between levels of government need to take into account
pre-existing political and institutional dynamics that could jeopardize their
policy initiatives. In particular, policy-makers could envision
decentralization “at different speeds”, enabling local actors to identify
objectives of development together with the right tools to pursue them, and
finally decentralize accordingly. |