Abstract

Governance reforms like decentralization and performance-based management aim to improve public services by increasing accountability among street-level bureaucrats: bureaucrats may be held to account by communities, supervisors, intermediary organizations, or all of these. To assess the relationship between accountability and bureaucratic effort, we utilize data from a lab-in-the-field behavioral experiment conducted with Honduran health workers across decentralized and centrally administered municipalities. We presented health workers with an incentivized effort task that included instructions that were neutral, had a bottom-up political accountability prompt, or a top-down bureaucratic accountability prompt. Our results show that administrative context moderates the accountability-to-effort relationship. With neutral instructions, civil servants in decentralized systems exert greater quality effort than their counterparts under centralized administration. Importantly, both accountability prompts increase quality effort in centrally administered settings to levels comparable with those in decentralized settings. These findings support multiple accountability as a potentially important mechanism linking decentralization reform to improved service delivery.

摘要

权力下放和基于绩效的管理等治理改革旨在通过增加基层官僚的问责制来改善公共服务：社区、监管者、中介组织或所有这些都可能追究官僚的责任。为了评估问责制和官僚主义努力之间的关系，我们利用了与洪都拉斯卫生工作者在分散和中央管理的城市进行的现场实验室行为实验的数据。我们向卫生工作者提出了一项激励性工作任务，其中包括中立的指示、自下而上的政治问责提示或自上而下的官僚问责提示。我们的结果表明，行政环境调节了责任与努力的关系。用中立的指示，分散系统中的公务员比集中管理下的公务员付出更高质量的努力。重要的是，这两种问责制都将集中管理环境中的质量努力提高到与分散环境中的水平相当的水平。这些调查结果支持多重问责制作为将权力下放改革与改善服务提供联系起来的潜在重要机制。