44849 Public Disclosure Authorized LOCAL GOVERNANCE & ACCOUNTABILITY SERIES Paper No. 111 / July 2008 Public Disclosure Authorized Electoral Institutions and Local Government Accountability: A Literature Review Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized Daniel Packel Social Development Papers LOCAL GOVERNANCE & ACCOUNTABILITY SERIES Paper No. 111 / July 2008 Electoral Institutions and Local Government Accountability Daniel Packel This Working Papers Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage discussion and exchange of ideas social development issues. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The series is edited by the Community Driven Development team in the Social Development Department of the Sustainable Development Network of the World Bank. This paper has not undergone the review accorded to official World Bank publications. 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To request copies of the paper or for more information on the series, please contact the Social Development Department Social Development The World Bank 1818 H Street, NW Washington, DC 20433 Fax: 202-522-3247 E-mail: [email protected] Printed on Recycled Paper Table of Contents Acknowledgments .....................................................................................................................................ii Acronyms ...................................................................................................................................................iii Summary Findings....................................................................................................................................iv Introduction ................................................................................................................................................1 Key Electoral Variables .............................................................................................................................3 Partisan vs. Non-Partisan Electoral Systems......................................................................................3 Electoral Systems....................................................................................................................................4 Nomination Rules...................................................................................................................................6 Competitiveness .....................................................................................................................................9 Re-election and Recall..........................................................................................................................10 Affirmative Action ...............................................................................................................................12 Conclusions...............................................................................................................................................14 Discussion..............................................................................................................................................14 Research Questions and Hypotheses.................................................................................................14 References .................................................................................................................................................17 i Acknowledgments This paper benefited from the comments and suggestions of Jesse Ribot, Varsha Venugopal, and Serdar Yilmaz. ii Acronyms BPL Below Poverty Line FPTP First-Past-the-Post PR Proportional Representation SC/ST Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe iii Summary Findings In studies of decentralized governance in the developing world, electoral institutions have largely been overlooked as explanatory factors for the performance of local governments. Instead, much of the current research on accountability and performance in local governments has focused on macro-social factors as determinants of accountability in local governments. This paper does not discount the importance of these macro-social variables, but it proposes an institutional focus on local government success, examining the role of local electoral arrangements on accountability. The paper argues that even if electoral institutions cannot compensate for social forces that are hostile to the exercise of downward accountability; given favorable social conditions, certain electoral arrangements will likely improve accountability and provision of public goods in local communities. Through evaluating results from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, the paper argues that the mixed findings surrounding the relationship between degree of electoral competition and public goods provision in local governments illustrates the secondary importance of electoral institutions. The paper identifies rules surrounding partisanship in elections, nomination rules, term-limits, and recall provisions as key variables likely to influence accountability and performance in local governments. The paper also examines local electoral systems (proportional representation vs. first-past-the-post systems), the degree of competition in local elections, and rules surrounding affirmative action in local elections. iv Introduction Across the developing world, within the last several decades, decentralization has been touted as a strategy for countering corruption and inefficiency and improving the provision of public goods. However, empirical work in a variety of national contexts has shown that the formal establishment of local governments does not necessarily lead to the improvements outlined above. Consequently, current research has become more concerned with accountability in local governments and with the conditions under which decentralized governance succeeds in providing public goods, from services like sanitation, water, and other types of infrastructure development to maintenance and development of local natural resources. Much of this research has focused macro-social factors and their influence on accountability and efficacy in local governments. A vibrant civil society is one key factor that has been linked to the success of decentralized governance in meeting the expectations outline above; a prominent example of this relationship is the state of Kerala, in India (Heller 2000). Elsewhere, central and regional states have succeeded in taking steps to empower civil society at the local level, thus strengthening the capability of local governments, as illustrated by Tendler (1997) with regard to Northeast Brazil. Indeed, a concern with the substantive dimension of democracy rather than the process dimension of democracy has dominated recent research interrogating the conditions under which decentralization succeeds or fails. More attention has been focused on the social factors that determine whether individuals at the local level have the capabilities to engage in democratic decision-making and whether local institutions have substantive powers than has been focused on the actual procedures for exercising voice, specifically, rules surrounding elections for local councils.1 Scholars of decentralization do assert that fair, competitive and regular elections compel local politicians to exercise power in such a way that decentralized institutions provide efficient and fair outcomes (Echeverri-Gent 1993; Crook and Manor 1998; Blair 2000), but few provide any systematic insight into whether certain electoral arrangements produce better outcomes than other arrangements. While elections may be only one of several instruments of downward accountability (Ribot 2003), little attention has been devoted to how specific electoral mechanisms fare in delivering accountability, or even whether elections are used by voters to hold officials accountable for certain policy decisions (Rodden 2004). While this lacuna is indicative of a fuller understanding of democratic decentralization that recognizes the insufficiency of a sole focus on formal institutions, the general literature on elections does show that differing electoral arrangements shape how citizens exercise influence on policy makers (Powell 2000). This oversight regarding local elections is not just the case in the literature on democratic decentralization, but also in the even larger literature on electoral systems. These studies are almost entirely concerned with electoral rules at the national level, with a particular focus on the relationship between electoral systems and national party systems. Even where electoral procedures differ between national and local levels (for example, certain countries ban parties 1 In a way, this tendency can be seen as a response to previous trends in the study of democratization in the developing world that over-emphasized formal institutions of democracy and failed to capture how social factors often eroded democratic authority. See O’Donnell (1993) and Heller (2000) for more details on this phenomenon. 1 from participating in local elections), electoral studies still focus almost entirely on the national level. As one example of how local elections are frequently overlooked in the existing literature, the chapter length