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Public Services, Geography, and Citizen Perceptions of Government in Latin America

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Abstract

One of the linchpins of democratic accountability runs through service quality. Because citizens are sensitive to the quality of basic services, they can translate (dis)satisfaction into assessments of incumbent politicians. Yet, although previous research has shown that both access to, and the quality of, basic services decline in rural settings, this seems not to translate into increased dissatisfaction with incumbents. In this paper we seek to understand why. We theorize four potential mechanisms that might underpin the weaker accountability for poor service outcomes in more remote settings. To test these mechanisms, we use data from 34,514 geocoded survey respondents across 19 countries in Latin America. We show that the likelihood of translating dissatisfaction with services into discontent with elected officials decreases as distance to urban centers increases. We find some evidence that a low sense of political efficacy and deference to hierarchy mediate the relationship between remoteness, service quality and accountability. Nevertheless, some of the direct relationship between distance and attitudes towards elected officials persists in the face of our mediation analysis, suggesting that more work needs to be done on the relationship between remoteness, service quality and accountability.

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Code Availability

Replication files are available here https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QQXXVV.

Data Availability

This study relies on publically available data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP). However, a dataset which contains a selection of variables from the 2014 LAPOP survey, along with some other variables generated by the authors is available here https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QQXXVV.

Notes

  1. World Development Indicators accessed January 7, 2020.

  2. Labor force participation in agriculture come from World Development Indicators.

  3. In Online Appendix B, however, we replicate our analysis using a dichotomous urban/rural measure and a measure of rurality based on population.

  4. Direct analysis of household locations is not possible given the anonymity promised to respondents. Geolocating to the centroid of the nearest population center of 1000 introduces (random) error, but it maintains a great deal of spatial variation while preserving the anonymity. A total of 86.65\(\%\) of the respondents from these 19 countries were successfully geolocated, which reduces our sample from 39,832 to 34,514 observations.

  5. All distances were calculated as geodesic distances, employing the Geonear package in Stata 14.2. The file with locations of towns with populations greater than 15,000 can be retrieved from http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/cities15000.zip. The file used in the present analysis was accessed on September 6th, 2016.

  6. LAPOP relies on each country’s census definition to code respondents as living in urban or rural areas. Thus, utilizing an urban/rural dummy would involve comparing apples and oranges to some extent.

  7. Our results, however, hold in unitary and federal countries alike.

  8. A more complete study of remoteness and accountability would also include citizens’ assessments of the performance of locally elected officials in cases where the responsibility for provision of a given public service falls on them rather than on nationally elected officials. The best we can do, however, is to presents results using trust in the municipal government as dependent variable (Online Appendix Fig. A3).

  9. More information on LAPOP’s weighing schemes can be obtained here: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/docs/AmericasBarometer_weighting_scheme_all_years_of_AB_v2.pdf.

  10. Though it is not the subject of our investigation, we find mixed evidence that satisfaction with public services significantly decreases with distance from urban centers as one might expect from previous research showing that service quality does decline with distance. Nevertheless, we do not aim to explore the link between service quality and service satisfaction per se. Instead, we seek to understand why remote citizens are less likely than urban citizens to translate their dissatisfaction with public services into disapproval of their president/prime minister, irrespective of the source of their dissatisfaction. Thus, our argument does not rest on the claim that service satisfaction must be lower in rural areas.

  11. 35 km is roughly the mean distance to a city of 15,000 individuals plus one standard deviation.

  12. The gap is not statistically significant at the 5% level in the case of public education, but it is significant at the 10% level.

  13. It is important to note that the pattern uncovered is not simply a product of the chosen functional form. Online Appendix Fig. A4 shows plots of the relation between satisfaction with public services and approval of the president/prime minister at high and low distance from urban centers, fitting a LOWESS curve. Far away from urban centers, the relation between service satisfaction and approval of the president/prime minister is flatter than closer to cities. In other words, the closer citizens are to urban centers, the more responsive their approval of their president/prime minister is to changes in their perceptions of the quality of public services.

  14. See Online Appendix Tables B3 and B4.

  15. Once again, distances were calculated as geodesic distances, employing the Geonear package in Stata 14.2. The file with locations of towns with populations greater than 5000 can be retrieved from http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/cities5000.zip.

  16. 16 km is roughly the mean distance to a city of 5000 individuals plus one standard deviation.

  17. Neither La Paz (administrative capital) nor Sucre (judicial capital) is the largest city in Bolivia.

  18. To the geographical center of the capital city, to be more precise. Coordinates were obtained using Google maps.

  19. 8% of respondents were interviewed in places classified as rural within national capitals and cities of all sizes.

  20. Online Appendix C presents the list of questions used in the creation of each of the indices.

  21. As an alternative, we report in Online Appendix C.1 on the survey-based measure of state reach across territory developed by Luna and Soifer (2017), which was included in the 2014 LAPOP survey. Their other questions that tap into state capacity—the state’s capacity to impose taxes and enforce property rights—were asked in a much smaller set of countries.

  22. The same holds true when using Luna and Soifer’s (2017) measure of state presence (see Online Appendix Table C1).

  23. Since both of our outcome variables are not rare (i.e. more than 10\(\%\) of respondents approve of or trust the president/prime minister of their country), it would be ideal to estimate (1) by way of a log-binomial model. The models, however, did not converge, which is a well-known issue with such models (McNutt et al. 2003).

  24. The variable takes the value of one for respondents who considered issues of crime, drug trafficking, safety, road quality, and/or access to and quality of education and healthcare as the main problem in their country.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Pablo Beramendi, David Dow, Serkant Adiguzel, Ana Montoya, Soomin Oh, Jeremy Springman, Joan Timoneda, and members of DevLab@Duke for their invaluable feedback. We would also like to thank the team at LAPOP, and particularly Carole Wilson and Liz Zechmeister for help with the geocoding of the LAPOP data.

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  1. RTI International, Durham, NC, USA

    Gary Bland, Derick Brinkerhoff & Anna Wetterberg

  2. Political Science Department, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Diego Romero & Erik Wibbels

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We would like to thank Pablo Beramendi, David Dow, Serkant Adiguzel, Ana Montoya, Soomin Oh, Jeremy Springman, Joan Timoneda, and members of DevLab@Duke for their invaluable feedback. We would also like to thank the team at LAPOP, and particularly Carole Wilson and Liz Zechmeister for help with the geocoding of the LAPOP data. Replication files are available here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QQXXVV.

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Bland, G., Brinkerhoff, D., Romero, D. et al. Public Services, Geography, and Citizen Perceptions of Government in Latin America. Polit Behav 45, 125–152 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09691-0

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