Doctoral Dissertation Research: Traditional Institutions and the Modern State

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Mayors of some rural municipalities in Latin America have only limited revenue to produce infrastructural projects, but they can sometimes compensate for this dearth of resources by partnering with leaders of communal landholding institutions, or communities which operate at the sub-district level. Community leaders can mobilize unpaid labor from community members through traditional institutions called "labor corvees." Through collaboration with these leaders, mayors can provide public works more efficiently by avoiding the highest input cost for infrastructure projects' labor, and using the resources of the municipality, community leaders can provide higher quality public works for their communities. Despite the potential benefits for both sides, such cooperation has become increasingly rare. This project examines the conditions under which these cooperative arrangements emerge, focusing specifically on the strategic interaction between community leaders and mayors. The proposed research contributes to a long-standing debate in political science on whether traditional and state institutions substitute for or complement one another. This research develops a theoretical framework that reconciles these two approaches, showing the conditions under which states and traditional institutions are complements as opposed to substitutes. In contrast to much of the existing literature on this topic, which relies heavily on qualitative and observational data, the work uses field experiments and natural experiments to evaluate the theory. More broadly, the results of this research will shed light on causes of intra-district inequality. Communities have varying levels of access to the local government and its resources, and this project will shed light on important sources of this inequality. A deeper understanding of these dynamics may assist central governments globally in targeting programs and resources to areas that are not normally prioritized by, or accessible to, local state officials. This project examines the conditions under which states reinforce or undermine traditional institutions. An early literature on the subject argued that state institutions would either crowd out or mostly disrupt traditional institutions. A separate literature, which is more recent, has argued that traditional and state institutions are complementary, and that through cooperation or delegation, state officials can take advantage of opportunities presented by traditional institutions. This project develops a theoretical framework that attempts to reconcile these two approaches by examining when cooperative relationships emerge between state officials and leaders of traditional institutions. To explore this question, the study uses two main strategies. First, it exploits a natural experiment from early twentieth century in Peru to test how variation in initial exposure to state institutions affected the long-term persistence of traditional institutions of unpaid labor. Second, the study uses a regression kink design with contemporary data to examine when mayors direct state resources to traditional institutions of unpaid labor. To supplement these analyses of main effects and to test for mechanisms, the author relies on a multi-method strategy, which includes archival research, interviews with state officials and community leaders, a field experiment with over 100 mayors, and a conjoint experiment and behavioral game with over 300 current and former community presidents. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.