Examines the fundamental issue of how citizens get government officials to provide them with the roads, schools, and other public services they need by studying communities in rural China. In ...authoritarian and transitional systems, formal institutions for holding government officials accountable are often weak. The state often lacks sufficient resources to monitor its officials closely, and citizens are limited in their power to elect officials they believe will perform well and to remove them when they do not. The answer, Lily L. Tsai found, lies in a community's social institutions. Even when formal democratic and bureaucratic institutions of accountability are weak, government officials can still be subject to informal rules and norms created by community solidary groups that have earned high moral standing in the community.
Trust in government has long been viewed as an important determinant of citizens' compliance with public health policies, especially in times of crisis. Yet evidence on this relationship remains ...scarce, particularly in the developing world. We use results from a representative survey conducted during the 2014–15 Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) epidemic in Monrovia, Liberia to assess the relationship between trust in government and compliance with EVD control interventions. We find that respondents who expressed low trust in government were much less likely to take precautions against EVD in their homes, or to abide by government-mandated social distancing mechanisms designed to contain the spread of the virus. They were also much less likely to support potentially contentious control policies, such as “safe burial” of EVD-infected bodies. Contrary to stereotypes, we find no evidence that respondents who distrusted government were any more or less likely to understand EVD's symptoms and transmission pathways. While only correlational, these results suggest that respondents who refused to comply may have done so not because they failed to understand how EVD is transmitted, but rather because they did not trust the capacity or integrity of government institutions to recommend precautions and implement policies to slow EVD's spread. We also find that respondents who experienced hardships during the epidemic expressed less trust in government than those who did not, suggesting the possibility of a vicious cycle between distrust, non-compliance, hardships and further distrust. Finally, we find that respondents who trusted international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) were no more or less likely to support or comply with EVD control policies, suggesting that while INGOs can contribute in indispensable ways to crisis response, they cannot substitute for government institutions in the eyes of citizens. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for future public health crises.
•Large representative survey conducted during the Ebola crisis in Monrovia, Liberia.•One of few quantitative studies on trust and public health in the developing world.•Shows that Liberians who distrusted government took fewer precautions against Ebola.•Those who distrusted government were also less compliant with Ebola control policies.•Demonstrates the deadly role distrust can play in exacerbating public health crises.
Why would government officials in authoritarian and transitional systems where formal democratic and bureaucratic institutions of accountability are often weak ever provide more than the minimum ...level of public goods needed to maintain social stability? Findings from a unique combination of in-depth case study research and an original survey of 316 villages in rural China indicate that even when formal accountability is weak, local officials can be subject to unofficial rules and norms that establish and enforce their public obligations. These informal institutions of accountability can be provided by encompassing and embedding solidary groups. Villages where these types of groups exist are more likely to have better local governmental public goods provision than villages without these solidary groups, all other things being equal.
In learning from older and past collective governance practices, we must design new institutions with an ethos that underscores our roles not only as descendants from past innovators but also as ...ancestors who have a responsibility to provide such legacies for the future. Governance archaeology can only realize its full moral and generative potential when it is practiced in a way that acknowledges our responsibility to future humans as well as past ones. This essay thus argues for the need to include future humans in the “we” of collective governance for distributive equity as well as procedural justice.
How does punishment of corruption help to build public support in authoritarian regimes? We outline two primary mechanisms. Instrumentally, the ability to pursue anticorruption initiatives to the end ...signals government capacity. Deontologically, anticorruption punishment signals moral commitments. Through a novel experiment design for mediation analysis embedded in a series of conjoint experiments conducted in China, we find individual-level evidence to support both mechanisms. Specifically, we find that Chinese citizens positively view local government officials who punish their corrupt subordinates and that this positive view arises out of the perception that these officials are both competent in their jobs and morally committed to citizens’ value. The preference for anticorruption punishment is substantial compared to other sources of public support in authoritarian regimes—economic performance, welfare provision, and institutions for political participation—suggesting that it could become a popular strategy among autocrats.
Few political systems are completely closed to citizen participation, but in nondemocratic systems and developing democracies, such participation may come with risks. In these contexts where fear and ...uncertainty may be high, why do some citizens still take action and make complaints to authorities? The resource mobilization model identifies the importance of time, money, and civic skills as resources that are necessary for participation. In this paper, we build on this model and argue that political connections—close personal ties to someone working in government—can also constitute a critical resource, especially in contexts with weak democratic institutions. Using data from both urban and rural China, we find that individuals with political connections are more likely to contact authorities with complaints about government public services, despite the fact that they do not have higher levels of dissatisfaction with public service provision. We conduct various robustness checks, including a sensitivity analysis, and show that this relationship is unlikely to be driven by an incorrect model specification or unobserved confounding variables.
Bringing in China Tsai, Lily L.
Comparative political studies,
03/2017, Letnik:
50, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
What do comparativists have to gain by reading recent work on China? In this article, I focus specifically on the ways in which scholarship on China can contribute to the task of theory building in ...comparative politics. I identify two areas that could reap particularly high benefits from considering scholarship on China—comparative political development and the political behavior of development—and I discuss some of the specific contributions that China scholarship can make to building comparative theory in these areas.
•We study a large-scale intervention promoting citizen action toward improving learning.•We employ a post-treatment, matched village research design in two Kenyan districts.•No evidence of a ...treatment effect on private or public citizen actions.•We identify key conditions necessary for information to generate citizen activism.
We study a randomized educational intervention in 550 households in 26 matched villages in two Kenyan districts. The intervention provided parents with information about their children’s performance on literacy and numeracy tests, and materials about how to become more involved in improving their children’s learning. We find the provision of such information had no discernible impact on either private or collective action. In discussing these findings, we articulate a framework linking information provision to changes in citizens’ behavior, and assess the present intervention at each step. Future research on information provision should pay greater attention to this framework.
How can governments in low-trust settings overcome their credibility deficit when promoting public welfare? To answer this question, we evaluate the effectiveness of the Liberian government’s ...door-to-door canvassing campaign during the 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic, which aimed to persuade residents to voluntarily comply with policies for containing the disease. Combining data from an original representative survey of Monrovia during the crisis with variation in the campaign’s reach and using multiple identification strategies, we find that the informational campaign was remarkably effective at increasing adherence to safety precautions, support for contentious control policies, and general trust in government. To uncover the pathways through which the campaign proved so effective, we conducted over 80 in-depth qualitative interviews in 40 randomly sampled communities. This investigation suggests that local intermediaries were effective because their embeddedness in communities subjected them to monitoring and sanctioning, thereby assuring their fellow residents that they were accountable and thus credible.
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