The Sources of Democratic Responsiveness in Mexico

Chapter Four. Testing Hypotheses about Responsiveness: The Public Services Approach

c h a p t e r f o u r Testing Hypotheses about Responsiveness The Public Services Approach in previous chapters i generated two basic hypotheses about the political causes of democratic responsiveness. According to the first, government is more responsive where elections are more competitive. According to the second, government is more responsive where participation is more frequent. I have also discussed several ways in which the two independent variables in question (electoral competition and participation) might have an interactive effect on responsiveness . In principle, these hypotheses are applicable to any level of government, in any country in the world.1 But my specific concern in this book is to understand whether these hypotheses are true of Mexico, particularly at the local level. Thus I proceed as follows. First I generate more specific hypotheses about the determinants of variation in local government performance in Mexican municipalities . Next I introduce a data set including several measures of the main variables of interest, I discuss the advantages and limitations of the main measures, and I link them to testable implications of the hypotheses. Finally I present a series of statistical tests. The results support the contention that participation generates democratic responsiveness in Mexico; the data show rather convincingly that electoral competition does not. 81 82 The Sources of Democratic Responsiveness in Mexico Democratic Responsiveness and Municipal Government Performance in Mexico As I mentioned above, these hypotheses about the political causes of democratic responsiveness might be applied to any number of situations . In principle we might test them by comparing the quality of community policing in Chicago and San Diego; by asking whether Russian government under Putin is more responsive to the public interest than it was under communism; or by asking whether efforts toward local development are more effective in Brazilian cities that use participatory budgeting. Here I choose to test these hypotheses by analyzing government performance in Mexican municipalities. I do so both because of an inherent desire to understand contemporary Mexican politics and because the Mexican case happens to offer an auspicious opportunity to get analytical leverage on the practical complications that bedevil most attempts to discover the sources of democratic responsiveness . Mexico offers an ideal opportunity to study democratic responsiveness because its protracted transition to democracy has produced useful variation on several key dimensions. As I discussed in chapters 2 and 3, many municipalities in Mexico became increasingly democratic in the 1980s and 1990s. Multiparty elections replaced single-party dominance, ordinary citizens began to participate in politics more often (and with greater autonomy from the corporatist hierarchy), and local governments became more responsive and efficient. But these changes occurred haltingly, unevenly, and in some places not at all, so that by the late 1990s municipalities varied widely in terms of their level of electoral competition, political participation, and government responsiveness. In this chapter and the next, I exploit this variation to test several propositions regarding the sources of democratic responsiveness in Mexico. This method is best described as a subnational comparative research design , which compares cases within a country (see Menéndez-Carrión and Bustamante 1995; Snyder 2001b). Here the cases are municipalities, which are at the lowest level of Mexico’s three-tiered federal system. Municipalities are useful for this analysis because there are many of them, good data exist on relevant municipal characteristics, and the Testing Hypotheses: Public Services 83 nature of Mexico’s federal arrangement makes responsiveness relatively easy to measure at the municipal level. In many situations, responsiveness is exceedingly hard to define and operationalize because citizens (and analysts) disagree about what responsive policies would look like. Some disagreement is a result of empirical complexity: Will tax cuts really “pay for themselves” by spurring economic growth sufficiently to offset the effects of lower social spending , resulting in a net benefit for society? It is difficult to know, so even citizens who share preferences for economic expansion and social welfare may disagree on policy. One might take refuge in public opinion, defining responsive policies as those that match (or move toward) the median voter’s position. But public preferences about policy are often incongruent with the public’s own long-term interests, so in practice it is not always easy to condemn a politician for acting against public opinion (or to praise one for acting with it; see Stokes 2001). Responsiveness is further complicated by purely normative disagreements that create zero...