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Governance Indicators and the Level of Analysis Problem: Empirical Findings from South America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2012

Daniel W. Gingerich
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Abstract

Studies of the link between state capacity and development often utilize national-level governance indicators to explain fine-grained development outcomes. As capacity in some bureaucratic agencies matters more for these outcomes than capacity in others, this work proxies for capacity within the set of relevant agencies by using a measure of ‘mean’ capacity across all agencies in a polity. This practice is problematic for two reasons: (1) within-country, cross-agency diversity in capacity often overwhelms the variation encountered across public sectors considered in their entireties; (2) national-level reputations for capacity are not particularly informative about differences in capacity in functionally equivalent agencies in different countries. The article draws on the author's survey of public employees in Bolivia, Brazil and Chile to establish these points.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 505 - 540
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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Footnotes

*

Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (email: [email protected]). The author would like to thank Jorge I. Dominguez, Peter Hall and Steven Levitsky for advice and support in carrying out this project. The helpful comments of John Echeverri-Gent, Eddy Malesky, David Waldner and three anonymous referees are greatly appreciated. In Bolivia, thanks go to Andrés Zaratti, Giovanna Mendoza, Walter Guevara Anaya, George Gray Molina, Juan Antonio Morales and René Antonio Mayorga; in Brazil, to David Fleischer, Paulo Calmon, Yves Zamboni Filho, Anali Cristino Figueirido and Gustavo Freitas Amora; in Chile, to Claudio Fuentes, Gonzalo Biggs, Alejandro Ferreiro, Steven Reifenberg and the late Luciano Tomassini. The data utilized in this study are available from the author upon request. Additional material is to be found in an appendix online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007123412000403

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