| Summary: | <p>Social protection schemes and cash transfer payments are playing an increasingly central role in the strategies of low-income countries to tackle poverty. However, weak systems of government delivery (especially in rural areas) continue to constrain the effectiveness of these programs in improving the lives of the world’s poorest people. In this context, a growing literature demonstrates that digital infrastructure, such as secure payments systems to distribute government transfers directly into financial accounts controlled by program recipients, can dramatically reduce diversion of social protection payments by local intermediaries, disrupt systems of political patronage and improve democratic accountability by creating transparency and empowering beneficiaries.</p>
<p>But this presents a puzzle: in environments where incumbents may benefit from delivery systems that are distorted by clientelism, rent-seeking or the politicisation of social protection programs, when and why would politicians choose to implement policy reforms that disintermediate partisan actors from the administration of social spending and forfeit potentially powerful sources of electoral advantage?</p>
<p>I offer and test a theory of variation in reform outcomes, arguing that the digitisation of entitlements is not simply a technocratic, politically-neutral solution to logistical issues of distribution that can be easily explained by levels of national economic development or technological savviness. Digital infrastructure can be an important form of state capacity that allows governments to directly reach their citizens, and its absence can be a strategic choice prolonging the access of incumbents to resources and power. I find that the interaction of political economy factors, namely electoral competition and pre-existing clientelism, can influence the timing and extent to which political actors will distribute benefits to citizens digitally: when clientelism is prevalent and competition is high, reform is less likely as incumbents attempt to preserve all sources of advantage when they compete with challengers for power.</p>
<p>At the subnational level, in addition to these dynamics, incumbents in federal democracies often face a trade-off between aligning with a central reformist government and disintermediating their own local networks of patronage. In these circumstances, the extent to which subnational politicians share the partisan identity of the central government significantly influences reform timing and implementation, as can the degree to which state-level incumbents are enmeshed with local networks of brokers.</p>
<p>I find empirical support for these hypotheses at the cross-country and subnational levels, exploring global variation as well as disparities in state-level outcomes in the context of the world’s largest social protection system in India. Using original data sets and mixed methods, I investigate whether politics matters in the adoption of digital infrastructure to improve government service delivery.</p>
|
|---|