IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bwp/bwppap/esid-018-13.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Institutions, incentives and service provision: Bringing politics back in

Author

Listed:
  • Brian Levy
  • Michael Walton

Abstract

This paper outlines a conceptual framework for analyzing the politics of service provisioning. The approach uses as its point of departure the 'accountability framework' of relations between citizens, clients and service providers, laid out in the World Bank's 2004 World Development Report. That framework highlights two distinctive ways of governing public service provision – a performance-oriented top-down hierarchy with goals shaped by the overall political process, and participatory approaches which link clients and providers. But a focus on these two polar approaches deflects attention from the vast spaces in the middle: the many countries where governance falls well short of 'good', but is better than disastrous; and the many layers within a specific sector in-between the top-levels of policymaking and the service provision front line. A central hypothesis of this paper is that these in-between spaces are major domains of political, stakeholder and organizational behaviour. These are sources both of within-country and across-country variation in the quality of public service provision and also provide the locus where many opportunities for achieving gains in performance are to be found.

Suggested Citation

  • Brian Levy & Michael Walton, 2013. "Institutions, incentives and service provision: Bringing politics back in," Global Development Institute Working Paper Series esid-018-13, GDI, The University of Manchester.
  • Handle: RePEc:bwp:bwppap:esid-018-13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.effective-states.org/wp-content/uploads/working_papers/final-pdfs/esid_wp_18_levy-walton.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Rao, Vijayendra, 2005. "Symbolic public goods and the coordination of collective action : a comparison of local development in India and Indonesia," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3685, The World Bank.
    2. Lant Pritchett & Michael Woolcock & Matt Andrews, 2013. "Looking Like a State: Techniques of Persistent Failure in State Capability for Implementation," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(1), pages 1-18, January.
    3. Elinor Ostrom, 2010. "Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(3), pages 641-672, June.
    4. Oliver E. Williamson, 2000. "The New Institutional Economics: Taking Stock, Looking Ahead," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 38(3), pages 595-613, September.
    5. North,Douglass C. & Wallis,John Joseph & Weingast,Barry R., 2013. "Violence and Social Orders," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107646995.
    6. Robert H. Bates & Avner Greif & Margaret Levi & Jean-Laurent, 1998. "Analytic Narratives," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 6355.
    7. repec:unu:wpaper:wp2012-63 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Ritva Reinikka & Jakob Svensson, 2005. "Fighting Corruption to Improve Schooling: Evidence from a Newspaper Campaign in Uganda," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 3(2-3), pages 259-267, 04/05.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Stergios Skaperdas, 2011. "Proprietary Public Finance: On Its Emergence and Evolution Out of Anarchy," Working Papers 101110, University of California-Irvine, Department of Economics.
    2. Licht Amir N., 2008. "Social Norms and the Law: Why Peoples Obey the Law," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 4(3), pages 715-750, December.
    3. Yochanan Shachmurove, 2012. "Failing Institutions Are at the Core of the U.S. Financial Crisis," PIER Working Paper Archive 12-040, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania.
    4. Prateek Goorha & Vijay Mohan, 2016. "Toward a theory of Smart Institutions," Journal of Economic Structures, Springer;Pan-Pacific Association of Input-Output Studies (PAPAIOS), vol. 5(1), pages 1-23, December.
    5. Sacchetti, Silvia & Tortia, Ermanno, 2012. "The internal and external governance of cooperatives: the effective membership and consistency of value," AICCON Working Papers 111-2012, Associazione Italiana per la Cultura della Cooperazione e del Non Profit.
    6. Susana López‐Bayón & Marta Fernández‐Barcala & Manuel González‐Díaz, 2020. "In search of agri‐food quality for wine: Is it enough to join a geographical indication?," Agribusiness, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 36(4), pages 568-590, October.
    7. van Bavel, Bas, 2016. "The Invisible Hand?: How Market Economies have Emerged and Declined Since AD 500," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199608133.
    8. Andrew T. Young, 2021. "The political economy of feudalism in medieval Europe," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 32(1), pages 127-143, March.
    9. Agata Gurzawska & Markus Mäkinen & Philip Brey, 2017. "Implementation of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) Practices in Industry: Providing the Right Incentives," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(10), pages 1-26, September.
    10. Ashok Chakravarti, 2012. "Institutions, Economic Performance and the Visible Hand," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 14751.
    11. Ménard, Claude & Kurdin, Alexander & Shastitko, Andrey, 2020. "Out by the door, in through the window: Politics and natural gas regulation in Russia," Utilities Policy, Elsevier, vol. 64(C).
    12. Marta Gancarczyk & Óscar Rodil-Marzábal, 2022. "Fintech framing financial ecologies: Conceptual and policy-related implications," Journal of Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation, Fundacja Upowszechniająca Wiedzę i Naukę "Cognitione", vol. 18(4), pages 7-44.
    13. Charis Vlados & Nikolaos Deniozos & Demosthenes Chatzinikolaou & Michail Demertzis, 2018. "Perceiving Competitiveness under the Restructuring Process of Globalization," International Journal of Business and Management, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 13(8), pages 135-135, June.
    14. ROUGIER Eric, 2015. ""The parts and the whole”: Unbundling and re-bundling institutional systems and their effect on economic development," Cahiers du GREThA (2007-2019) 2015-12, Groupe de Recherche en Economie Théorique et Appliquée (GREThA).
    15. Luis Alfonso Dau & Jiatao Li & Marjorie A. Lyles & Aya S. Chacar, 2022. "Informal institutions and the international strategy of MNEs: Effects of institutional effectiveness, convergence, and distance," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 53(6), pages 1257-1281, August.
    16. Jiao Luo & Aseem Kaul, 2019. "Private action in public interest: The comparative governance of social issues," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(4), pages 476-502, April.
    17. Trent J. MacDonald, 2019. "The Political Economy of Non-Territorial Exit," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 18871.
    18. Ran Abramitzky, 2015. "Economics and the Modern Economic Historian," NBER Working Papers 21636, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Massimiliano Vatiero, 2018. "Transaction and transactors’ choices: what we have learned and what we need to explore," Chapters, in: Claude Ménard & Mary M. Shirley (ed.), A Research Agenda for New Institutional Economics, chapter 11, pages 97-108, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    20. Graca-Gelert, Patrycja & Sulejewicz, Aleksander, 2021. "The measurement of transaction costs in Poland, 1996-2014," MPRA Paper 108833, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bwp:bwppap:esid-018-13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Rowena Harding (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/wpmanuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.