Governance reforms like decentralization and performance-based management
aim to improve public services by increasing accountability among
street-level bureaucrats: bureaucrats may be held to account by communities,
supervisors, intermediary organizations, or all of these. To assess the
relationship between accountability and bureaucratic effort, we utilize data
from a lab-in-the-field behavioral experiment conducted with Honduran
health workers across decentralized and centrally administered municipalities.
We presented health workers with an incentivized effort task that
included instructions that were neutral, had a bottom-up political accountability
prompt, or a top-down bureaucratic accountability prompt. Our
results show that administrative context moderates the accountability-to-effort
relationship. With neutral instructions, civil servants in decentralized
systems exert greater quality effort than their counterparts under centralized
administration. Importantly, both accountability prompts increase
quality effort in centrally administered settings to levels comparable with
those in decentralized settings. These findings support multiple accountability
as a potentially important mechanism linking decentralization
reform to improved service delivery.
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Decentralization Can Increase Cooperation among Public Officials
Collective action among public officials is necessary for the effective delivery of many social services, but relatively little is known about how it can be fostered through policy reforms. In this article, we compare cooperation among public officials within decentralized versus centrally‐administered municipalities in Honduras. Leveraging a quasi‐experiment in health sector reform, coupled with behavioral games and social network surveys, we find that decentralization is associated with greater cooperation. When they are able to communicate, health sector workers in decentralized municipalities contribute more to a public good than their centrally‐administered counterparts. This increase in cooperative behavior results in part from the decentralization reform engendering greater numbers of interactions and stronger ties across different levels of government. These findings indicate that institutional reforms like decentralization can favorably reconfigure patterns of social interactions across public organizations, which is an important component of administrative capacity in developing countries.
more » « less- PAR ID:
- 10226517
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Journal of Political Science
- Volume:
- 66
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0092-5853
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 554-569
- Size(s):
- p. 554-569
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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