CInSt Research Seminar "Voice, Exit, and Co-production. Political Economy of Citizen Engagement": Leonid Polishchuk (HSE University)

Abstract
In co-production, society joins government in the provision of public goods and services. In her groundbreaking studies of co-production, Elinor Ostrom emphasized the “technological” importance of complementarity between government and society’s inputs as a condition for synergy that co-production could yield. We take this argument a step further by emphasizing the political significance of such complementarity, which strengthens government performance incentives. If instead society substitutes for insufficient government input, it adversely affects the performance incentives of government, which can free-ride on the society's involvement. We propose a political economy theory of co-production, which incorporates communities’ capacities for political and apolitical self-organization, and show that social efficiency of co-production depends in an inverse U-shaped manner on the society's ability to hold government accountable. We bring to bear data on urban activism and self-organization in contemporary Russia to illustrate and confirm the theory’s main findings.

Presentation

Speaker: Leonid Polishchuk, Professor, Leading Research Fellow (HSE University)

Date: December 5th, 2019, 18:10-19:30.  
Location: K416, 11 Pokrovsky Boulevard, Moscow.
Working language: English.    
All welcome. If you don't have an HSE ID, please register before 2:00 PM on December 5th: cinst.hse.ru/register.