The politics of service quality. Power shortages in a developing democracy.

In this project we analyze distributional causes and consequences of the quality of electricity service. First, we consider service quality as an outcome of government responsiveness to different social groups. We seek to answer questions such as how do governments distribute high quality services to different income groups (i.e., progressivity) and whether these decisions are linked to political representation, electoral competition, and partisan politics. Second, we also analyze whether negative shocks in electricity service access may explain citizens’ political behavior and attitudes.