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Social Network Structures and the Politics of Public Goods Provision: Evidence from the Philippines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2020

CESI CRUZ Open the ORCID record for CESI CRUZ [Opens in a new window] ,
JULIEN LABONNE Open the ORCID record for JULIEN LABONNE [Opens in a new window]  and
PABLO QUERUBÍN Open the ORCID record for PABLO QUERUBÍN [Opens in a new window]
CESI CRUZ*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
JULIEN LABONNE*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
PABLO QUERUBÍN*
Affiliation:
New York University
*
*Cesi Cruz, Assistant Professor, Vancouver School of Economics and Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, cesi.cruz@ubc.ca.
†Julien Labonne, Associate Professor, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, julien.labonne@bsg.ox.ac.uk.
‡Pablo Querubín, Associate Professor, Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University, pablo.querubin@nyu.edu.
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Abstract

We study the relationship between social structure and political incentives for public goods provision. We argue that when politicians—rather than communities—are responsible for the provision of public goods, social fractionalization may decrease the risk of elite capture and lead to increased public goods provision and electoral competition. We test this using large-scale data on family networks from over 20 million individuals in 15,000 villages of the Philippines. We take advantage of naming conventions to assess intermarriage links between families and use community detection algorithms to identify the relevant clans in those villages. We show that there is more public goods provision and political competition in villages with more fragmented social networks, a result that is robust to controlling for a large number of village characteristics and to alternative estimation techniques.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 2 , May 2020 , pp. 486 - 501
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2020 

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Footnotes

A previous version of this paper circulated under the title Village Social Network Structures and Electoral Competition. We thank Klaus Desmet, Nick Eubank, James Fowler, Yana Gorokhovskaia, Saad Gulzar, Steph Haggard, Alex Hughes, Matias Iaryczower, Franziska Keller, Stuti Khemani, Alexander Kustov, Kai Ostwald, Anja Prummer, Laura Schechter, Sarah Shair-Rosenfeld, Jake Shapiro, and Francesco Trebbi for helpful suggestions. We are also grateful to seminar and workshop participants at ASOG, Barcelona Summer Forum, Barcelona’s Workshop on the Political Economy of Development and Conflict, Emory University, LSE-NYU Conference, Moscow Political Economy and Development Workshop, University of Oslo, Princeton Political Economy Workshop, Ryerson University, University of Virginia, University of British Columbia, University of California, San Diego, University of Pennsylvania, University of the Philippines School of Economics, Warwick, University of Wisconsin AAE, and World Bank ABCDE for feedback. All remaining errors are ours. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/B9U5BH.

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