"Inhibitory Institutions: The Bureaucratic Politics of Public Goods Quality.”

Governments often invest in public goods that citizens don’t want.  Comparative research emphasizes that voters hesitate to kick out politicians who build useless projects or profit from their provision.  I introduce the concept of inhibitory institutions, or rules that allow state or societal actors to review, obstruct or veto public goods before they are approved, and argue that they are critical to the selection and execution of high-quality public goods.  Inhibitory institutions come at a price, however: they delay projects and sap the associated rents.  I illustrate the tradeoffs between project quality and quantity by focusing on how institutional enforcement varies with partisan alignments.  When partisan divisions exist, inhibitory institutions are more likely to bind, reducing project expenditures and improving their quality.  I illustrate these dynamics through quantitative data on 16,300 subnational infrastructure projects in Colombia and qualitative case studies comparing subway projects in Colombia’s largest cities.  The evidence suggests the rich, and largely neglected, politics that occur to raise the quality of local public goods before they reach citizens.  

Alisha C. Holland, Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University, studies the comparative political economy of development with a focus on Latin America. Her first book, Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America, examines the politics of law enforcement against the poor. She is working on a new book on the institutional determinants and challenges of infrastructure investment in Latin America.

Sponsored by the UVA Department of Politics Lansing Lee / Bankard International Relations Seminar Series and the Karsh Institute of Democracy's Local Equity and Democracy (LEAD) working group.