Does Competition Increase Pro-poor Responsiveness in Partisan Brokers?

• In Event: Emerging Trends in the Study of Bureaucracy in the Developing World

Abstract

Do local partisan brokers change their distributive preferences when faced with competition from non-partisan actors? This paper measures local partisan intermediaries’ distributive preferences in 112 villages embedded in a larger field experiment conducted in Mexico. The field experiment randomly introduces a non-partisan facilitator trained to inform and assist citizens in formally requesting government resources, a task that usually falls to the partisan intermediary. Partisan brokers in the treatment group express more progressive distributive preferences as measured through a conjoint analysis.

Authors

• Tesalia Rizzo, University of California, Merced

• Mark Allan Schneider, University of Pennsylvania