Abstract
What determines a government’s level of public goods provision? Most scholarship tends to focus on the “demand side” of public goods provision, highlighting how varying patterns of social preferences shape the provision of public goods. In an analysis of municipal hospitals and infant health clinics in Germany’s 84 largest cities in 1912, this article uses an original dataset to test a variety of hypotheses to introduce an alternative logic centered around the institutional capability of local governments. The findings suggest a supply-side theory of public goods provision in which the fiscal resources of cities and the professionalism of local government officials are important determinants of the level of public goods. The implications of these findings are two-fold: first, in federal political systems, highly capable local governments—with resources, expertise and professionalism—might represent a “decentralized” or “bottom-up” path for achieving higher overall levels of state infrastructural power in a political system. Second, public health threats might serve as a crucial trigger for the development of local capacity and hence state infrastructural power more broadly.
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Notes
For a discussion of the conditions under which federations can achieve this balance, see Jenna Bednar, The Robust Federation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Note that this “decentralized path” to infrastructural power faces many barriers. In her piece on American political development, Margaret Weir notes that it was “unreformed” states governments that served as a barrier to the broader national project of the New Deal. See Margaret Weir, “States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism” Studies in American Political Development 19 (2) (2005): 157–172.
n = 62 and the mean for this sample 4.0 with a SD of 1.70.
For purposes of robustness for each of the variables for which I have multiple measures (see Table 1 above), I substituted alternative measures for the variables, but have not reported them here since the findings were not significantly affected.
One possibility is that the “preference variables” might themselves not only directly affect public goods provision but also may operate indirectly by shaping the level of governmental capacity. To probe this idea, I conducted an additional set of analyses in which my measures of “institutional capacity” were the dependent variables. Here, the only statistically significant finding was that socioeconomic development and left-party power had a slight positive impact on institutional capacity (significance at the p < 0.1 level), suggesting evidence that these variables might also indirectly affect public goods provision by increasing the capacity of local governments.
See Daniel Rodgers (1998) for examples of this in the United States.
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Ziblatt, D. Why Some Cities Provide More Public Goods than Others: A Subnational Comparison of the Provision of Public Goods in German Cities in 1912. St Comp Int Dev 43, 273–289 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-008-9031-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-008-9031-y