Broadening Minds: Social Structure, Constituency Breadth and Public Goods Provision in Developing Democracies.

The political science field has developed a good understanding of how political institutions shape policymaking incentives. This paper investigates whether these incentives differ given underlying societal preferences. Analyzing the provision of public goods, I begin capturing preferences with a measure of ethnic fractionalization. However, I modify this rudimentary conceptualization by adding a measure of how ethnicity is distributed amongst income groups, what I call ethnic-income cross-cuttingness (in reference to the term cross-cutting cleavages). The paper first introduces this new measure and accompanying cross-national dataset. It then builds a socio-institutional theory of the policymaking process. Specifically, following the Horowitz school, I argue that when society is highly ethnically fractionalized and lowly cross-cutting, that small, majoritarian districts generate better incentives for politicians to cater to broader segments of society and provide more broadly-targeted public goods. This stands in contrast to the traditional institutional wisdom (Lijphart school) that large, PR districts are always best for public goods provision. I test my theory with a dataset of 40-odd developing democracies between 1970-2000. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]