Who Gets Public Goods? Political Favoritism in Ethnically Diverse Societies

1. Who Gets Public Goods?Political Favoritism in Ethnically Diverse Societies Brian Min bmin@ucla.edu EITM University of California, Los Angeles July 18, 2007

3. Who Gets Public Goods? • Universalism vs. targeted recipients • Core supporters (Cox & McCubbins 1986) vs. marginal supporters (Lindbeck & Weibull 1987; Dixit & Londregan 1996) • Favored minorities(Myerson 1993) • Co-ethnics(Bates 1974)

4. The Blotto Game Colonel A 10 regiments Colonel B 10 regiments

5. The Blotto Game Colonel A 2 2 2 2 2 4 3 3 0 0 B wins B wins B wins A wins A wins Colonel B

6. The Blotto Game Colonel A 4 3 3 0 0 0 4 4 1 1 A wins B wins B wins B wins B wins Colonel B

7. Key Research Questions • Do politicians favor their core supporters with disproportionate levels of state goods? • Is favoritism widespread or does it exist only in a few of the world’s most polarized countries? • How do electoral rules and institutional incentives affect the likelihood of such outcomes?

8. Empirical Strategy • Use satellite images of the earth at night to identify electrified areas • Identify newly electrified areas around the world from 1992–2003 • Focus on middle-income, ethnically divided societies • Compare newly electrified regions with underlying ethnic distribution of voters and political leaders • Compare variations across regimes and electoral institutions

9. Electrification Rates by Region % household electrification Source: International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2002

10. Electrifying America, 1920-1956 NONFARMS FARMS Creation of REA Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1975

11. The Earth at Night • DMSP-OLS satellites have captured images of the entire earth every night since the 1970s • Reveals concentrations of outdoor lights, fires, and gas flares • High resolution images (43,200 x 21,600 pixels at a resolution of 2.7 km per pixel) • Annual images created by overlaying all nightly images and dropping problematic images (cloud cover, aurora, solar glare) and ephemeral lights (fires, fishing boats, other noise) • Annual time-stable light images available from 1992 to 2003

12. Lights and Electrical Infrastructure, 1995 N=127 countries. Source: DMSP-OLS; World Bank/Canning Database of World Infrastructure Stocks

13. Lights and Population by Regime Type AUTOCRACIES DEMOCRACIES ln (total light intensity per cell) ln (population per cell)

14. Village Electrification Rates in India’s States, 2005 ELECTRIFIED UNELECTRIFIED thousands of villages Source: India Ministry of Power

15. India 2003 1992 1998 Source: NOAA NGDC

16. Lucknow/Kanpur Source: Population counts from LandScan 2005; district shapefiles from http://data.geocomm.com/catalog/IN/datalist.html; lights from DMSP-OLS

17. Lucknow/Kanpur, Lights 1992

18. Lucknow/Kanpur, Lights 2003

19. Key Outputs • Global dataset on new electrification at the sub-national level (linked to UN Second Administrative Level Boundaries Dataset) • Cross-national test and validation of theories of government resource distribution • Empirical evaluation of claims of ethnic favoritism