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Governments frequently face distributive pressures that can lead them to allocate resources along partisan or ethnic lines. Such patterns of distribution can run counter to welfare maximization. It is therefore important to incorporate distributional concerns into the measurement of government performance. This paper outlines a method for doing so, adapting standard techniques for measuring government efficiency. The proposed method's utility is demonstrated with data from Tanzanian local governments. The application illustrates how failing to take distributional concerns into account can bias the measurement of performance. Assessing how well governments translate resources into outputs that equitably serve their citizens is important for a number of topics in political science, including decentralization, distributive politics, and government fragmentation. It can also inform efforts to promote aid effectiveness. The proposed approach is applicable to a wide range of contexts given the increasing availability of geo-coded data on public goods. Replication files are provided for those wishing to conduct their own analyses.

AbstractAid effectiveness is widely understood to suffer when multiple donors operate in the same space, but recent studies indicate benefits of fragmentation. We posit that these mixed findings may reflect differences across aid sectors — and also show how the level of implementation can condition the interpretation of results. Cross-national time-series analysis of 152 countries implies aid fragmentation can promote child survival and improve governance. However, analysis of subnational variation in Sierra Leone and Nigeria suggests the presence of more donors is associated with worse health outcomes, but better governance outcomes. Having more donors in a locality may thus be beneficial when they are working to improve the systems through which policies are implemented, but harmful if they target policy outcomes directly. A survey of Nigerian civil servants suggests potential mechanisms: fragmentation in health aid may lead to internal "brain drain" and pressure to alter projects, whereas diversity in governance aid might promote meritocratic behavior.

An extensive literature shows that democracies tend to do a better job of protecting the environment than autocracies. Much less work has been done to explain the considerable variation in environmental quality within many authoritarian settings. We help fill this gap with an empirical study of Vietnam – one of the world's most stable authoritarian regimes as well as one of the most environmentally vulnerable. We focus on the relationship between interest group activity and environmental outcomes (air and water quality) at the district level. While the participation of more actors in civic and political life has the potential to improve outcomes by enhancing scrutiny of government, interest groups may also promote economic interests to the detriment of environmental protection. Our analysis shows that districts characterized by higher levels of local interest group activity tend to have lower air and water quality. This result is consistent across a range of model specifications and estimation strategies. These findings imply that organization of local interests may be detrimental to environmental quality in authoritarian settings and that effective mobilization of actors who would benefit from high environmental quality (i.e., citizens) may be overshadowed by those of pro-business interests. As such, our findings highlight the limits of popular participation related to environmental protection in authoritarian regimes – particularly those that base their legitimacy on economic development.

Aid fragmentation is widely denounced, though recent studies suggest potential benefits. To reconcile these mixed findings, we make a case for studying differences across aid sectors and levels of analysis. Our cross-national time-series analysis of data from 141 countries suggests aid fragmentation promotes child survival and improves governance. However, just looking across countries has the potential to blur important within-country differences. We analyse subnational variation in Sierra Leone and Nigeria and find that the presence of more donors is associated with worse health outcomes, but better governance outcomes. This suggests that having more donors within a locality can be beneficial when they are working to improve the systems through which policies are implemented, but harmful when they target policy outcomes directly. A survey of Nigerian civil servants highlights potential mechanisms. Fragmentation in health aid may undermine civil servants' morale, whereas diversity in governance aid can promote meritocratic behaviour.

Data availability has long been a challenge for scholars of authoritarian politics. However, the promotion of open government data—through voluntary initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership and soft conditionalities tied to foreign aid—has motivated many of the world's more closed regimes to produce and publish fine-grained data on public goods provision, taxation, and more. While this has been a boon to scholars of autocracies, we argue that the politics of data production and dissemination in these countries create new challenges. Systematically missing or biased data may jeopardize research integrity and lead to false inferences. We provide evidence of such risks from Tanzania. The example also shows how data manipulation fits into the broader set of strategies that authoritarian leaders use to legitimate and prolong their rule. Comparing data released to the public on local tax revenues with verified internal figures, we find that the public data appear to significantly underestimate opposition performance. This can bias studies on local government capacity and risk parroting the party line in data form. We conclude by providing a framework that researchers can use to anticipate and detect manipulation in newly available data.