Constitutions, Cleavages and Coordination: A Socio-Institutional Theory of Public Goods Provision.

Abstract

Why do some developing democracies outperform others in the provision of health and education? This dissertation explores a socio-institutional theory of why politicians choose to allocate resources either broadly across their country, or to narrow societal groups, be they ethnic-, religious-, class-, or regional-based. Relying on a mixed-methods research design, this dissertation first analyzes two countries with similar electoral rules, but vastly different social structures—Thailand (ethnically homogenous) and Mauritius (ethnically diverse). From this qualitative analysis, the dissertation develops a general theory and tests it, using original data on ethno-income and ethno-geographic cross-cuttingness, on health outcomes and spending categories in 43 developing democracies. The dissertation finds that ethnic diversity does not necessarily lead to under-provision of public goods. Appropriately designed electoral rules can lead to the creation of broad, national coalitions that allocate resources to the nation at large rather than to the ethnic group(s) of the government. Second, no single type of electoral rule is necessarily harmful to public goods provision; rather, depending on the type of society in which they operate, PR and majoritarianism can be beneficial or detrimental.