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

Who Gets Public Goods? Democracy and the Provision of Electrification in the Developing World

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...

Online Community and Democracy

The debate over the contribution of the Internet to democracy is farfrom settled. Some point to the empowering effects of online discussionand fund raising on recent electoral campaigns in the US to argue thatthe Internet will restore the public sphere. Others claim that the Internetis just a virtual mall, a final extension of global capitalism into everycorner of our lives. This paper argues f...

Electronic Democracy, Public Accountability and Public Service Information Provision

Democracy, redistributive taxation and the private provision of public goods

Article history: Received 16 October 2009 Received in revised form 6 June 2010 Accepted 11 June 2010 Available online 19 June 2010 The paper studies in a simple, Downsian model of political competition the private provision of public goods embedded in a system of democracy and redistributive taxation. Results show that the positive effect of inequality on production of public goods, to which Ol...

Tax Earmarking and Grass-roots Accountability

We ask whether tax earmarking can foster accountability in public provision of goods and services when consumers can privately monitor provision. We show that earmarking can raise the stakes that consumers have in monitoring public provision independently of how taxes are earmarked, because it introduces a more direct linkage between monitoring and taxes paid.