Electronic Democracy, Public Accountability and Public Service Information Provision

Electronic Democracy, Public Accountability and Public Service Information Provision

Does Privatising Public Service Provision Reduce Accountability?

This paper studies how privatising service provision (shifting control rights and contractual obligations to providers) a ects accountability. There are two main e ects. (1) Privatisation demotivates governments from investigating and responding to public demands, since providers then hold up service adaptations. (2) Privatisation demotivates the public from mobilising to pressure for service a...

Public good provision under dictatorship and democracy

The allocation of a government budget between a public good and transfers is modeled under different systems of government. The relatively even distribution of political power among groups in a democracy favors spending on nonexclusive public goods. The more concentrated pattern of political power in a dictatorship favors spending on transfers targeted to powerful groups. The hypothesis on publ...

Public Service and Liberal Democracy

The debate on television’s "public service"obligations can only make full sense if integrated in the broader context of the debate on the best political model for society. In fact, the classic "public service"rationale is based in a normative conception of good and in a suspicious view of the average citizen that is largely tributary of a Platonic or Elitist approach to the political organizati...

Democracy and Light: Electoral Accountability and the Provision of Public Goods

Do democracies provide more public goods than autocracies? Clear answers to this question have been hampered by inconsistent, unreliable, or missing data. To address the shortcomings of self-reported government data, I propose a novel method to generate unbiased estimates of the provision of electrical infrastructure across the entire globe using satellite imagery of nighttime lights. After dem...