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" Disempowered: Electricity, Citizenship, and the Politics of Privatization in South Asia "
Haider, Erum Aly
Nooruddin, Irfan
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1054483
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| Doc. No
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TL53600
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| Main Entry
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Haider, Erum Aly
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| Title & Author
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Disempowered: Electricity, Citizenship, and the Politics of Privatization in South Asia\ Haider, Erum AlyNooruddin, Irfan
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| College
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Georgetown University
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| Date
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| student score
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2020
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| Note
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184 p.
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| Abstract
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The ability to maintain political control over public goods is at the heart of the debate on distributive politics. Scholarship on patronage suggests that citizens’ dependence on political representatives for selective benefits leads to a perverse form of accountability. The privatization of service delivery is offered as a potential solution to remove debilitating effects of political influence on economic distribution. However, I argue that privatization can diminish the ability of citizens to voice dissatisfaction with public goods, and to be substantively represented by the state. I find that the economic redistributive effects notwithstanding, the political effects of privatization are under-theorized. This study uses the case of electricity privatization in Pakistan to answer the question - what happens to the relationship between citizens and their representatives, when the latter no long influence distributive outcomes? I suggest first that privatization diminishes the ability of citizens to use political representatives to lobby for better provision. Next, I argue that being “stuck” in low-provision neighborhoods makes individuals less likely to exercise their political power overall, even for non-privatized public goods. Finally, I propose that the mechanism by which this happens is the diminishing of inter-personal and institutional trust, as a consequence of households blaming their neighbors, and not the state or its subsidiaries, for poor service delivery. Over twelve months of qualitative research in Karachi, Pakistan, are used to generate these hypotheses and identify potential causal mechanisms. A unique spatial dataset of 25,000 service delivery clusters across the city, and an original survey and survey experiment (N~1000) are used to quantitatively test each part of my theory. I find that a virtuous cycle of trust between private institutions and consumers can create efficiencies in the consumption of scarce resources, and provide important psychic benefits. Conversely, a cycle of mistrust can create uncertainty that spills over into the political sphere. This work joins emergent scholarship that suggests that patronage in hyper-local contexts, far from being a one-way relationship between powerful state actors and powerless clients, is an important feedback loop for citizens to express priorities, preferences and satisfaction within and beyond the electoral cycle.
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| Descriptor
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Energy
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Political science
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South Asian studies
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Nooruddin, Irfan
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Georgetown University
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