Tuğba Bozçağa

Most studies that examine subnational variations in public services associate low government performance with a lack of accountability. As distinct from these approaches, I offer a capacity-based explanation, in which transaction costs associated with the production process of public services play the key role. Specifically, I argue that transaction costs within bureaucracy decrease with \textit{social proximity among bureaucrats}, bureaucrats’ informal ties with the other bureaucrats in their jurisdiction, because informal ties do not only serve communication or socialization purposes but also provide channels for informal information exchange and cooperation. Testing the observable implications of this theory, I find that social proximity, as proxied by geographic proximity, increases bureaucratic efficiency. Second, in line with theoretical expectations, geographic proximity is less likely to lead to high bureaucratic efficiency in socially fragmented community structures. Empirically, I show that the effect of geographic proximity is heterogeneous across provinces with different levels of social fragmentation, as measured by network indicators. I leverage a geographical regression discontinuity design to test my theory. Six months of fieldwork in regions of Turkey with different political and ethnic geographies inform the descriptive inferences underlying the theory and its observable implications. My empirical tests employ novel administrative data from 30,000 villages and 970 districts in Turkey, geospatial indicators constructed using spatial analysis tools and satellite images, and antenna-level mobile call detail records. This study advances research on public goods provision by studying local public services outside of the accountability framework that emphasizes citizen sanctioning, and revealing instead capacity-driven sources of government performance. In addition, by demonstrating that state capacity can vary by the local social context, it extends the literature on state capacity.

Links: Paper  |  Poster  |  Podcast

Islamist political movements are broadly known to win over citizen support through service provision. Yet, Islamist social service networks show substantial variation at the subnational level, which is often attributed to their strategic decisions or to low state capacity. We show that Islamist service provision is also highly dependent on the movement’s ability to mobilize local resources, specifically through associational mobilization by local business elites, while we establish no role for the level of state capacity. We exploit spatial variation in Islamist service provision across Turkey’s 971 districts in the country’s largest Islamist political group, the Gulen movement. Our inferences rely on multiple methods, including an instrumental variable design, which relies on the effect of state-induced associations during the early 20th century, and a panel data analysis. We use novel data on the Erdoan government’s purge of over 100,000 civil servants to map the structure of the Gulen movement, along with other novel data sources on business associations, endowments, banks, and public service infrastructure.

Theories of democratic governance assume that citizens hold politicians accountable for their performance in providing public services. This study expands the existing debate by shifting the focus to subnational heterogeneities in electoral returns to government performance and incumbent support. I introduce a theory suggesting that when political and geographical boundaries overlap, the excludability of local public goods will increase because they will be used only by the local population. Due to their excludability, the local population will see them as "club goods" and as a signal of favoritism. This, in turn, will translate to higher reciprocity and electoral returns among the local electorate, except in minority communities where a perception of favoritism is not likely to develop. Using a comprehensive panel dataset that contains information on all public education and health investments in Turkey since the 1990s and mobile call data showing across-district mobility patterns, this study shows that whether government investments have a club good nature or not conditions the electoral returns to health and education investments. However, political geography does not condition the degree of electoral returns in Kurdish districts, although investments are rewarded in general. By revealing that electoral returns to government investments are conditional on the characteristics of the community structure, this paper advances the electoral accountability literature. 

Over the past 7 years, the needs of the three and a half million Syrian refugees have shifted from emergency response to programs focused on their integration. Using D4R call detail records (CDRs), this chapter focuses on questions derived from the relevant academic literature and explores whether and how local context and service provision affect refugee integration. Unlike existing studies, we address multiple factors in a single analysis, accounting for potential confoundedness between different factors that might otherwise bias results. Our analysis supplements D4R with an array of original data sources related to refugee integration and service provision and employs linear regression and regularization techniques. We find that social integration is affected by multiple socioeconomic, welfare, and geography-related factors such as economic activity, availability of health facilities and charity foundations, network centrality, and district location. In terms of mobility, long-term over-time movement of refugees appears to be motivated by the availability of scarce welfare resources such as health clinics, as well as economic activity and the availability of religious facilities in a district. Our results suggest that policy-makers concerned with social integration of refugees must readily take into account the role of service provision in that process.

Links: Paper | Poster  

Cities are complex regulatory environments.  Attempts to regulate urban behavior create opportunities for politicians to manipulate enforcement to win votes and reward supporters.  While some politicians choose not to enforce regulations, or forbearance, others undercut their intent, or dilution. Empirical research on enforcement has lagged behind due to the identification challenges in distinguishing weak state capacity from political manipulations. Wedevelop a structured approach to process tracing that follows enforcement decisions sequentially across bureaucracies and specifies statistical distributions as counterfactuals to identify the causes of limited enforcement.  We illustrate these strategies through original data on enforcement against squatters in urban Colombia and the provision of building permits in urban Turkey. Enforcement process tracing helps to document a form of distributive politics that is common to cities in the developing world.

Links: Paper

My next major project, which will be an extension of my first dissertation paper, will be a book project and focus on the following questions: how do bureaucrats’ ties with each other vary across different social contexts, and what are the implications of this for state capacity and government performance in public services? The core argument of the book is that informal ties among bureaucrats create positive externalities that reduce the transaction costs commonly seen in local governance and increase bureaucratic efficiency. The book will test two major implications of this theory: i) we should observe high bureaucratic efficiency in contexts with high social proximity between bureaucrats, and ii) we should see lower bureaucratic efficiency in socially fragmented districts because social fragmentation makes it more difficult to establish social ties and reduces the reachability of any given individual in the community, including bureaucrats. 

I will examine the roots of bureaucratic efficiency in Turkey, a Muslim-majority country characterized by a centralized state structure, which will allow me to examine a diverse set of community structures with varied sectarian, ethnic, and political compositions as well as to rule out potential alternative explanations such as inequalities in government resources, commonly seen in federal systems. The empirical analyses in the book will employ quasi-experimental designs; geocoded data from tens of thousands of villages, schools, and health infrastructure projects in Turkey; and satellite, network, and original administrative data at the district level. 

The book will be divided into five main parts. First, I will present the theoretical framework that links social proximity to bureaucratic transaction costs, which stem from informational asymmetries and weak enforcement (e.g., opportunistic behavior, allocative inefficiency, red tape and time costs), and bureaucratic efficiency. Second, I will illustrate each step of the theoretical framework developed in the preceding chapter, drawing on over 170 structured interviews (including closed-ended questions) conducted with officials in more than 6 months of fieldwork across Turkey. The third chapter will present the empirical evidence for the first key implication of the theory: social proximity between bureaucrats, as captured by geographic proximity, increases bureaucratic efficiency. The fourth chapter will present evidence for the second testable implication of the theory by demonstrating that bureaucratic efficiency is likely to decrease in socially fragmented community structures, with a focus on network measures and the ethnic, sectarian, and hometown composition of districts. Finally, the fifth chapter will explain the comparative implications of the theory by discussing how the (positive) impact of lessening bureaucratic transaction costs vary across space and across different types of public goods.