Political Dividends of Digital Participatory Governance : Evidence from Moscow Pothole Management
This study takes advantage of a publicly salient policy sphere -- road quality -- in the Russian Federation's capital city to explore the use of digital technologies as means of aggregating information and demonstrating government capacity and...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2020
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/169891603200854580/Political-Dividends-of-Digital-Participatory-Governance-Evidence-from-Moscow-Pothole-Management http://hdl.handle.net/10986/34653 |
| Summary: | This study takes advantage of a publicly
salient policy sphere -- road quality -- in the Russian
Federation's capital city to explore the use of digital
technologies as means of aggregating information and
demonstrating government capacity and effectiveness. It
focuses on the potential linkage between road quality based
on citizens' complaints and electoral outcomes in two
rounds of Moscow mayoral elections in 2013 and 2018. The
data on more than 200,000 online potholes’ complaints were
collected and combined with local election data. The causal
relationship between these two processes is established,
making use of an arguably exogenous variation in the
differences across local weather conditions during the
heating season that differentially affects pothole creation
but is uncorrelated with electoral outcomes. The results
indicate that greater use of digital technologies (measured
by pothole complaints) results in an increased number of
votes and a higher margin of victory for the incumbent. They
highlight digital technologies' role as a tool to
create participatory governance mechanisms and convey to the
public an image of a transparent, responsive, and capable government. |
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