Money Can’t Buy You Love
(…but Integrity and Performance Can)
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” (Niccolo Machiavelli)
GOVERNMENTS HAVE every incentive in the world to improve citizens’ lives. Otherwise, sooner rather than later voters get their payback day at elections. And yet, status quo and inaction are often the rule.
Despite spending the past six decades doing research on this puzzle, we political scientists still know very little about what explains governments’ willingness to take risks to improve the quality of public services. The “tools” and “technologies” to enhance the functioning of government and the delivery of public services are widely known and available nowadays, but we still can’t predict when governments are likely to take risks in the implementation of complex public sector reforms which might end with unionized civil servants armed with torches and sticks of the reformer’s door. Another winter of discontent. Or, more frequently, fellow party members can choose to recreate [once again] the Ides of March with the reform-minded leader as main character in the play.
One prerequisite for any government attempting to implement substantive changes is that it has sufficient political capital. Governments and politicians seeking trust and legitimacy try to win or buy approval, but they do not always succeed in winning anything approaching legitimacy. Political scientists around the world are still grappling with how to objectively measure the extent to which governments are effective and even demonstrate that citizens are good judges in perceiving and distinguishing good-performers from bad-performers, or in translating that perception into political endorsement or trust.
Our argument here is that a government that shows early returns from public sector management reforms —in terms of delivering better public services, showing fairness in the interactions with citizens, and enhancing the quality and performance of its street-level bureaucracy— will build the necessary political capital to undertake more far-reaching and politically costly public sector reforms at a later stage. Further, these improvements are likely to increase citizens’ trust in governmental authority and their willingness to comply with government taxes and regulations, which in turn will improve a government’s capacity to become more effective and to evoke deference, which will further enhance the credibility of future reform packages.
Using survey data, we analyze the sources of political capital, specifically trust and legitimating beliefs, in a wide variety of settings: Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Our findings suggest that the source of this capital comes from service delivery, bureaucratic competence and honesty and procedural fairness. Across Africa, when evaluating governments, citizens’ perceptions of procedural fairness and the honesty of the bureaucrats swamp governments’ service delivery activities.
In Latin America in particular, we found that governments were able to rapidly re-build trust in government institutions at the local level, by focusing on delivering quick improvements in sectors which were very visible and a priority for citizens. For example, these early gains allowed, Sergio Fajardo, the Mayor of Medellin to gain enough political capital to break with past clientelistic politics, and to introduce a new public management framework based on the delivery of services and responsiveness to citizens’ needs. He had to play chess against entrenched local interests, drug cartels, corrupt party colleagues and rivals, a demotivated local bureaucracy.
But Fajardo’s bet was in identifying peoples’ top priorities, and attack the issues with these public services one by one, starting by those most visible to everybody, like transport to the remote slums, opportunities for the youth, and bringing not just the pipes and electricity cables to the impoverished neighborhoods, but also culture, sports, libraries and —more important— generating a sense of pride and belonging to a single community. At last, many people in marginalized communities, which had been traditionally ignored by the local elites except for quick votes, felt taken care of, and not like a second-class or ignored citizen.
Not less important, Fajardo’s innovative government opened up data on the performance of every local public service, while civil society groups ran annual surveys to capture satisfaction levels and evolving priorities of the [still incredulous] Medellin citizens. His calculations were right: investing in improving very visible, relevant public goods, and making an extra effort to share the results with citizens paid off. He left office with 90 percent approval, without having to resort to clientelism as usual.
A couple of young Princeton researchers tell the full story beautifully. The Guardian does it too.
Thus, reforms focused on improving the internal machinery of government are more likely to generate short-term positive political returns and longer-term gains for a government if it is able to improve perceptions of its bureaucracy’s competence and the fairness of government procedures. We found that bureaucrats sticking to fair rules and treating everybody equally (called procedural fairness in the jargon) elicits support for governments, regardless of government’s performance. That’s a strong finding of a large body of empirical research. How we are to promote procedural fairness is compatible with public sector reforms: good public servants and transparency combined with institutional arrangements to provide effective voice and grievance procedures to those who experience discrimination. We also know from experiences around the world that governments are more likely to elicit its citizens’ approval when bureaucrats —including teachers, nurses, policemen and tax collectors— treat those individuals with whom they interact on a day-to-day basis with dignity and provide services with a manageable amount of red tape and corruption. Ideally zero, that’s it.
That said, successful cases like the one in Medellin might indeed be more the exception than the rule, because the contextual factors and requirements for citizens to give credit to good public managers are just daunting.
In most places, while improving services may not harm an incumbent government’s popularity, enhancing service delivery is unlikely to directly generate any significant short-term political returns for a government. Why is this the case? Introducing service-enhancing reforms in a clientelist context is costly and may trigger rent-seeking. In addition, because the public has limited information about what exactly the government does and how, individuals may not assign credit to government for service delivery improvements even when the credit is due. Rather, citizens may be attributing the improvements to other actors including other levels of government where our favorite party rules, the private sector, NGOs and community-based groups, religious institutions, the previous government managed by our favorite party, traditional leaders, or international organizations. From looking at the results in our two pieces of research, we conclude that politicians will only engage in reforms to improve the provision of public goods when the chances of receiving credit and political capital are high. Therefore, we argue that projects which involve visible government agencies and address citizens’ top priorities will increase the chances that citizens correctly attribute improvements in welfare to the better performance of government.
If this is the case, and politicians are only going to be tempted to follow the risky path of reform when the gains are feasible, then the question is that whether open government initiatives —including those coming from start-ups and civil society groups— be able to help us overcome all these information asymmetries that we citizens suffer regarding what the government does and how is it doing it now. If we find ways to ensure that good performing governments at least receive the credit when it’s fairly due, the motivation of well-minded politicians to push for the common good will likely be stronger. And that’s a much better world.
(…at least, that’s what our empirical analysis in three continents suggest)
*A similar version of this post was originally published here and co-authored with the awesome Audrey Sacks.
