Alison Post

University of California, Berkeley, Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies, Faculty Member

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Papers by Alison Post

Engineering Predictable Water Supply: The Humans Behind the Tech

Springer eBooks, Sep 9, 2022

format_quoteNextDrop showed null effects on most household welfare measures, except reduced stress, highlighting ineffective information delivery in Bangalore.format_quote

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Voter Willingness to Address "Public Bads": How to Alter Citizen Perceptions of the Risks Posed by Natural and Manmade Hazards

This survey experiment tests two messaging strategies on voter willingness to support bond measur... more This survey experiment tests two messaging strategies on voter willingness to support bond measures for water utility risk mitigation programs. It also seeks to measure how experience with other on-going hazards, such as wildfires and the Covid-19 pandemic, influence support for these bond measures.

How Bureaucracies Address "Public Bads": Hierarchies, Silos, and Risk Prioritization in Public Infrastructure Agencies

This study will leverage a large survey experiment to understand drivers of risk mitigation behav... more This study will leverage a large survey experiment to understand drivers of risk mitigation behaviors at a large water utility in California. Specifically, we test whether particular messaging interventions, such as highlighting the gains or losses associated with disaster preparation at the organizational or individual level, increase individuals' self-reported willingness to engage in those preparation activities.

Message Framing and Risk Behaviors: An mTurk Survey Natural Experiment

Pre-Analysis Plan The Household Welfare and Political Impacts of Increasing Service Predictability: An Experimental Intervention in Bangalore's Water Sector

Throughout the developing world, intermittency and unpredictability are the hallmarks of public s... more Throughout the developing world, intermittency and unpredictability are the hallmarks of public service delivery: buses do not run on a standard schedule, water supplies are variable in terms of arrival times, and electricity blackouts occur unexpectedly. Surprisingly, the causes and consequences of unpredictable urban services have received much less attention than patterns of access to, or government expenditures on, these services. While addressing the underlying causes of service unpredictability tends to be very costly (e.g., replacing leaky water pipes or increasing capacity to improve water pressure levels), low-cost informational interventions can potentially help households to cope with service unpredictability. Alleviating coping costs may also change the way in which citizens relate to their local governments. Through a cluster-randomized experiment in Bangalore, we evaluate a text-message based notification scheme providing households with advance warning of the timing o...

Benchmarking “Smart City” Technology Adoption in California: Developing and Piloting a Data Collection Approach

Research Papers in Economics, 2021

Author(s): Frick, Karen Trappenburg, PhD; Kumar, Tanu, PhD; Mendonca Abreu, Giselle Kristina; Pos... more Author(s): Frick, Karen Trappenburg, PhD; Kumar, Tanu, PhD; Mendonca Abreu, Giselle Kristina; Post, Alison, PhD | Abstract: In recent years, “smart city” technologies have emerged that allow cities, counties, and other agencies to manage their infrastructure assets more effectively, make their services more accessible to the public, and allow citizens to interface with new web- and mobile-based operators of alternative service providers. This project reviews the academic literature and other sources on potential strengths, weaknesses, and risks associated with smart city technologies. No dataset was found that measures the adoption of such technologies by government agencies. To address this gap, a methodology was developed to guide data collection on the adoption of smart city technologies by urban transportation agencies and other service providers in California. The strategy used involved webscraping; interviews with experts, public agency, and senior level staff; and consultatio...

format_quoteData collection revealed differences in technology adoption rates between public agencies serving various sectors, indicating sector-specific dynamics in smart city technology uptake.format_quote

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Transparency Fixess for Local Public Services: Field Experimental Evidence from Bangalore's Water Sector

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017

Can providing citizens with information compensate for unreliable public services? We present a f... more Can providing citizens with information compensate for unreliable public services? We present a field-experimental evaluation of a program that provided households in Bangalore with advance notification of intermittently provided piped water. The implementers expected that increasing service predictability would reduce coping costs, increase transparency, and improve state-citizen relations. Our study, however, detected no impacts on household welfare or state-citizen relations. Non-cooperation by street-level bureaucrats charged with supplying water timing information undermined the program’s viability. These findings suggest that greater attention be paid to how frontline workers drive experimental findings. We introduce a framework for analyzing “information pipelines” to enable such efforts.

State, Society, and Informality in Cities of the Global South

Studies in Comparative International Development, 2018

Contemporary urbanization in the Global South merits greater attention from scholars of comparati... more Contemporary urbanization in the Global South merits greater attention from scholars of comparative politics. Governance, associational life, and political behavior take distinctive forms in the social and institutional environments created by rapid urbanization, particularly within informal settlements and labor markets. In this special issue, we examine forms of collective action and claims-making in these spaces. We also consider how the state assesses, maps, and responds to the demands of informal sector actors. Tackling questions of citizen and state behavior in these informal urban contexts requires innovative research strategies due to data scarcity and social and institutional complexity. Contributors to this symposium offer novel strategies for addressing these challenges, including the use of informal archives, worksite-based sampling, ethnographic survey design, enforcement process-tracing, and crowd-sourced data. Keywords Cities. Urbanization. Urban politics. Informality. Governance. Complexity. Informal institutions. Methods. Developing world Rapid urbanization raises important questions for our understanding of politics in the Global South. As of 2014, almost half of the developing world's population resides in urban areas (United Nations 2015, p. 21); Latin America has been majority urban since the 1970s, and urban majorities are predicted for Africa and Asia by 2030 (Montgomery 2008,

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Informality and Politics in the Global South: Three Perspectives

Perspectives on Politics

Informality is often studied by scholars of urban studies but has received comparatively little a... more Informality is often studied by scholars of urban studies but has received comparatively little attention by political scientists. This is surprising given the fact that large portions of the world’s population live, work, or transfer funds informally. The conventional wisdom is that the informal economy—the portion of the economy operating outside the regulatory reach of the state—is not very political because informal sector workers are relatively atomized and find collective action to be costly. The three books reviewed here, however, demonstrate that the informal sector is not only characterized by important forms of political organization but also affects politics within government institutions—and can even contribute to regime downfall. Calla Hummel’s Why Informal Workers Organize and Shelby Grossman’s Politics of Order in Informal Markets examine organization among informal sector workers, with Hummel probing the circumstances under which organization occurs and Grossman when...

format_quoteGrossman's survey of 199 markets reveals variations in market governance linked to membership in associations and government interaction.format_quote

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Replication Data for "Flows, leaks and blockages in informational interventions: A field experimental study of Bangalore's water sector

Many policies and programs based on informational interventions hinge upon the assumption that pr... more Many policies and programs based on informational interventions hinge upon the assumption that providing citizens with information can help improve the quality of public services, or help citizens cope with poor services. We present a causal framework that can be used to identify leaks and blockages in the information production and dissemination process in such programs. We conceptualize the “information pipeline” as a series of connected nodes, each of which constitutes a possible point of blockage. We apply the framework to a field-experimental evaluation of a program that provided households in Bangalore, India, with advance notification of intermittently provided piped water. Our study detected no impacts on household wait times for water or on how citizens viewed the state, but found that notifications reduced stress. Our framework reveals that, in our case, noncompliance among human intermediaries and asymmetric gender relations contributed in large part to these null-to-modest results. Diagnostic frameworks like this should be used more extensively in development research to better understand the mechanisms responsible for program success and failure, to identify subgroups that actually received the intended treatment, and to identify potential leaks and blockages when replicating existing programs in new settings

Hybrid Regimes for Local Public Goods Provision: A Framework for Analysis

Perspectives on Politics, 2017

There is a growing recognition that the state is not the sole provider of “local public goods” su... more There is a growing recognition that the state is not the sole provider of “local public goods” such as water and education in the developing world. Mainstream approaches to the study of local public goods provision, however, have yet to incorporate these insights. We offer a descriptive typology of hybrid local public goods regimes, or systems in which both state and non-state actors contribute to provision. It emphasizes two dimensions: the type of state involvement (direct versus indirect provision), and the degree of formal state penetration. The politics of producing local public goods, we argue, takes on distinct forms in each cell. The framework allows scholars to develop more accurate and precise explanations of variation in service quality and access, and to choose more appropriate outcome measures. We illustrate the utility of this framework by analyzing distinct hybrid regimes for water and sanitation, and mass transit in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

format_quoteOutcome measures differ when state services are supplemented by non-state providers, complicating traditional assessments.format_quote

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Blame Avoidance and Policy Stability in Developing Democracies: The Politics of Public Security in Buenos Aires

Comparative Politics, 2016

Democratization originally inspired hopes that new regimes would privilege human rights, yet prog... more Democratization originally inspired hopes that new regimes would privilege human rights, yet progressive reforms to the criminal code have been modest and insufficient to stem dramatic increases in incarceration rates. At the same time, developing democracies have made little headway reforming their ineffective police forces. How can we explain the stability and enforcement of punitive criminal justice policies and the erosion of police reforms? We offer a novel theoretical explanation of these contrasting patterns through a comparative study of these two policy areas in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Incentives to avoid blame for salient crimes discourage politicians from repealing punitive criminal justice policies and incentivize judges to enforce them. Responsibility for failed police reforms, however, is harder to assign, giving the police and their allies opportunities to undermine them.

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Foreign and Domestic Investment in Argentina

Political economy scholarship suggests that private sector investment, and thus economic growth, ... more Political economy scholarship suggests that private sector investment, and thus economic growth, is more likely to occur when formal institutions allow states to provide investors with credible commitments to protect property rights. This book argues that this maxim does not hold for infrastructure privatization programs. Rather, differences in firm organizational structure better explain the viability of privatization contracts in weak institutional environments. Domestic investors - or, if contracts are granted subnationally, domestic investors with diverse holdings in their contract jurisdiction - work most effectively in the volatile economic and political environments of the developing world. They are able to negotiate mutually beneficial adaptations to their contracts with host governments because cross-sector diversification provides them with informal contractual supports. The book finds strong empirical support for this argument through an analysis of fourteen water and san...

format_quoteDomestic investors with diversified local holdings renegotiate contracts 83% of the time, compared to 43% for those without and 0% for international investors.format_quote

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Policy Traps: Consumer Subsidies in Post-Crisis Argentina

Studies in Comparative International Development, 2014

Developing countries devote significant resources to lowering consumer prices for basic goods and... more Developing countries devote significant resources to lowering consumer prices for basic goods and services such as food and electricity. Theories of the welfare state only partially elucidate why consumer subsidy regimes grow so large and become entrenched. While the welfare state literature stresses how concentrated, organized beneficiary groups push for the expansion and protection of well-known programs such as pensions, the developing world's consumers are atomized, and subsidies themselves are of low visibility. The size and durability of consumer subsidy regimes stem primarily from political uncertainty and price shocks that provide politicians with strong incentives to avoid blame for repeal. Over time, environmental pressures and fears of political backlash against repeal reinforce one another, increasing the fiscal burden subsidies impose and dramatically raising the political cost of program exit. In this sense, consumer subsidy programs come to form "policy traps"-initially modest policies that quickly grow and become entrenched, thereby greatly reducing politicians' maneuvering room. We utilize this framework to analyze the meteoric growth and entrenchment of utility subsidies in post-crisis Argentina. In Argentina, subsidies grew

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Home Court Advantage

Politics & Society, 2014

A large body of scholarship in political economy suggests economic growth, and foreign direct inv... more A large body of scholarship in political economy suggests economic growth, and foreign direct investment in regulated industries in particular, is more likely to occur when formal institutions allow states to provide credible commitments regarding the security of property rights. In contrast, this article argues that we must instead examine differences in firm organizational structure and embeddedness to explain variation in the resilience of privatization contracts in weak institutional environments. Domestic investors—or, if contracts are granted at the subnational level, domestic investors with diverse local holdings—work most effectively in the developing world. Domestic investors are better able to negotiate mutually beneficial adaptations to their formal contracts with host governments because they can draw on informal contractual supports that derive from cross-sector diversification and embeddedness in the market. This article finds strong support for this argument through a...

Never Waste a Crisis: How COVID-19 Lockdowns and Message Sources Affect Household Emergency Preparedness

Natural Hazards Review

Replication Data for: Never Waste a Crisis - How COVID-19 Lockdowns and Message Sources Affect Household Emergency Preparedness

This directory includes the replication files for "Never Waste a Crisis: How COVID-19 Lockdo... more This directory includes the replication files for "Never Waste a Crisis: How COVID-19 Lockdowns and Message Sources Affect Household Emergency Preparedness". The directory holds the anonymized survey data, auxiliary input data files, and R script necessary to replicate the main and supplementary tables and figures in the paper.

The Household Welfare and Political Impacts of Increasing Service Predictability: An Experimental Intervention in Bangalore's Water Sector

From public service access to service quality: The distributive politics of piped water in Bangalore

World Development, 2022

Public service access in low-and middle-income countries is shaped by how much governments spend ... more Public service access in low-and middle-income countries is shaped by how much governments spend on services and where they choose to prioritize delivery. Accordingly, the local public goods and distributive politics literatures are largely focused on government spending and patterns of access. We argue that, even after access is granted, service quality can vary dramatically, and may vary with socioeconomic and political characteristics. We provide one of the first analyses of a key dimension of service quality: intermittency, which affects vital services such as water and electricity for hundreds of millions of people. We illustrate how to study it by highlighting the specific facets of intermittency that must be managed within the network; we show that these dimensions may be manipulated separately, and that infrastructure network structure shapes the allocation of intermittency. The literature from urban India shows that access to water connections (like access to many other local public goods) is 2 typically associated with higher socioeconomic status. In contrast, we find that in our study sites in Bangalore, water flows through pipes more frequently and predictably in low-income areas-thereby underscoring the importance of studying intermittency, and service quality more generally, as phenomena distinct from access.

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Hybrid Modes of Urban Water Delivery in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science, 2020

Most urban residents in high-income countries obtain piped and treated water for drinking and dom... more Most urban residents in high-income countries obtain piped and treated water for drinking and domestic use from centralized utility-run water systems. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), however, utilities work alongside myriad other service providers that deliver water to hundreds of millions of city-dwellers. Hybrid modes of water delivery in urban areas in low- and middle-income countries are systems in which a variety of state and nonstate actors contribute to the delivery of water to households, schools, healthcare facilities, businesses, and government offices. Historically, the field has evolved to include within-utility networks and outside-the-utility provision mechanisms. Utilities service the urban core through network connections, while nonstate, smaller-scale providers supplement utility services both inside and outside the piped network. The main reform waves since the 1990s—privatization and corporatization—have done little to alter the hybrid nature of provi...

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