Improving Public Policy for Survival

Lessons from Opposition-Led Subnational Governments in Bolivia

Abstract

Politicians make political survival strategies, but they have rarely been believed to choose programmatic policymaking in resource-rich countries. This argument, however, has been limited mainly to the national level, and little attention has been paid to the political competition between the central government and subnational oppositions. This work claims that subnational oppositions of resource-rich countries have incentives to improve governance in their jurisdictions when they face aggressive intervention with incomparable fiscal resources from their rival in the central government. This article draws upon a cross-municipal analysis and four cases in Bolivia to corroborate this logic. Some subnational oppositions in Bolivia were more apparently motivated to improve public services since 2010 when the Evo Morales government consolidated hegemony at the national level. Although their backgrounds are vastly different, interviews with leaders reveal a consistent similarity, as expected by the hypothesis.