Managing the "Water Pressure": The Political Economy of Urban Service Provision

Abstract

What ensures that basic urban services are decently provided? The quality of service delivery dictates whether we have clean water to drink and wash with; electricity to keep our homes lit and our appliances running; modes of transit to reliably travel to our schools or places of work; and waste removal to keep our communities sanitary. Yet in large cities in democracies, where we hope that electoral mechanisms will encourage politicians to offer high quality services, governments often fail to provide decent, reliable public services. In this dissertation, I argue that mediocrity in public service provision is emblematic of a larger dynamic in political economy: one in which hard-to-solve problems are kept off the political agenda — both through citizens’ own actions and by wary incumbents. I consider piped water provision in Mexico City, where millions of residents experience intermittent, infrequent, or unreliable water service, despite having access to the grid. In the spirit of Culpepper’s “Quiet Politics,” I reveal a set of decisions which occur (only just) beneath the surface of traditional electoral politics, and preserve the status quo of low service quality. In a series of four closely related papers, I (at times, with coauthors) attempt to answer four questions: 1. Why do so many citizens seem complacent about the low quality of public services? 2. Which citizens will organize around service-related problems? 3. Why doesn’t public service quality make the electoral agenda? 4. Why do citizens reward incumbents who only “firefight” problems instead of investing in improvements? After a brief introduction, Chapter 2, coauthored with David Palma, Ana Bernal, Faith Cole, and Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, investigates how citizens live with water scarcity, drawing on ethnographic interviews. We find that citizens facing scarcity adapt by investing in household storage infrastructure, conserving water, or purchasing their drinking water separately. After these adjustments, residents tend to assess their water as “enough,” despite intermittency. In Chapter 3, Kaitlyn Chriswell and I consider collective action in neighborhood problem solving. The collective action and social movements literatures often treat social capital as fixed; we suggest instead that initial organizing around a large-enough local problem can create “collective action infrastructure” that facilitates future organizing. We test this hypothesis using an original survey, 2sls analysis of post-earthquake organizing, and a survey experiment. In Chapter 4, I describe how and why politicians might “play defense” to keep public service quality off of the electoral agenda. I propose that, in order to avoid public service claims escalating to a crisis that could influence other voters’ beliefs about incumbent competence, mayors 1) take proactive steps to preempt claim-making around service problems, and 2) try and nip claims from noisy opposition neighborhoods in the bud. I examine these hypotheses with qualitative evidence as well as survey and social media data on citizen complaints and politicians’ responses. Finally, in Chapter 5, I return to the direct electoral effects of mayors’ responses to citizens’ public service problems. I ask why voters are willing to reward politicians who just firefight — responding to citizen problems — instead of demanding more intensive improvements to the underlying water infrastructure. I argue that if citizens are vulnerable and clarity of responsibility is blurry, voters may choose to reward a responsive mayor even if they cannot be certain that the mayor did not play a role in causing the problem. I corroborate this argument with survey data and an instrumental variables analysis of elections results, in which I use geography and historic rainfall to predict water rationing. This dissertation attempts to offer an explanation for why, even in a place like Mexico City, with a robust civil society and a population that is more able to freely and fairly engage in elections than ever before, the needle still does not move on public service quality. In doing so, I hope to link politicians’ and bureaucrats’ everyday decisions to larger questions of public service quality, decentralization, and accountability, building on a long tradition of contentious politics scholarship, and shedding light on the challenges that bureaucrats and politicians face when “governing beyond capacity.”