https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7518-4583
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Abstract
The resource curse literature argues that oil production reshapes the fiscal contract between citizens and the state: politicians become less responsive to citizen taxpayers and more likely to use public revenues for their own benefit. This paper examines whether and how bureaucrats influence this breakdown of the fiscal contract. Analysing results of a survey experiment conducted with government employees in Ghana and Uganda, we find that, when primed to think about oil revenue, bureaucrats do not generally express attitudes indicating that they contribute to the resource curse. Although oil revenue does lead some Ghanaian bureaucrats to become less interested in responding to taxpayers, this finding does not operate as predicted, i.e. by bureaucrats expressing greater partiality towards the ruling elite. Instead, we attribute this outcome to ‘disgruntled employees’ – political outsiders with low salaries – who, unlikely to benefit from oil revenue, become disaffected from citizen service. The results shed new light on processes through which resource extraction changes state institutions.
Acknowledgement
Pre-Analysis Plan available at EGAP: http://egap.org/registration/2661. We are grateful to Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai, Leonard Anaman, Daniel Appiah, Immaculate Apio Ayado, Valeriya Mechkova and the many enumerators in Ghana and Uganda who contributed to the implementation of the survey. We also thank Jan Pierskalla, attendees at the 2020 APSA annual meeting, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary Material
Supplementary Materials are available for this article which can be accessed via the online version of this journal available at https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2021.2013468.
Notes
1. In Ghana, oil production began less than 10 years ago. In Uganda, oil was discovered in 2006 but is not yet in production.
2. The concept of the rentier state comes from Mahdavy (Citation1970), who defines it as ‘those countries that receive on a regular basis substantial amounts of external rents’ (428).
3. Bureaucrats could also be coerced into supporting the political principal, an issue we bracket for now but return to in Section 7.
4. Constraints are lessened because (1) bureaucrats are not held accountable because they have information about the wrong-doing of their superiors or (2) bureaucrats shift their beliefs about service when seeing leaders steal and abuse.
5. This table is copied, with some edits for clarity and data availability, from the pre-analysis plan.
6. Ghana’s Public Interest and Accountability Committee tracks oil revenue spending. See http://www.piacghana.org/portal/29/36/the-abfa.
7. A growing body of research shows that resource endowments can generate expectations about future behaviour, such that resource discoveries can shape attitudes before production actually begins (Cappelen et al., Citation2018; Frynas, Wood, & Hinks, Citation2017).
8. In our survey only one-third of respondents, distributed evenly across both countries, said they were worried about being dismissed for political reasons and only 6 per cent of respondents, again evenly distributed across both countries, said that they regularly ‘feel worried that someone from the ruling party will not approve of my work.’
9. Given the absence of accurate government employee registers, there are significant logistical challenges in obtaining a random sample of public officials in these countries.
10. Managers are classified as anyone who indicated in the survey that one of their job responsibilities is to supervise other public servants. Technical/professional staff are those that, as part of their jobs, provide technical or professional services such as programme design, planning, or budgeting. Administrative positions are those who provide administrative support for the day-to-day running of the various offices across the public service.
11. The number of respondents assigned to each group are as follows. Ghana: control = 512, treatment = 539, placebo = 557. Uganda: 503, 516, 485, respectively. In order to test if the random assignment to treatment is balanced on observables, we regress treatment status on a number of covariates. We find that treatment status is generally not predicted by respondents’ membership in the groups described in Section 2.2, nor by gender (see Table S9 in Section E of the supplementary material). We can therefore be relatively confident that the treatment was in fact randomly assigned.
12. This is based on oil prices in 2013–2014, which have since declined, risen, and declined again.
13. In , it is apparent that Ugandans are driving the negative result for Hypothesis 2 whereby treated respondents have unexpectedly lower levels of agreement with the statement about political spending than those in the control group. Because This result is in the opposite direction as our hypotheses, and therefore does not support the idea that bureaucrats contribute to the resource curse, we do not explore it further here. We do, however, examine this result in a separate paper. See [Harris et al Citation2020].
14. The technical/managerial control group and the low-salary control group have very similar baseline responses to the taxpayer responsiveness statement: 1.40 for the former and 1.54 for the latter.
15. If we interact connections with having a technical/managerial position, we find that there is a positive effect, but this is also the case with regards to interacting connections and administrative position.