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Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research 2/2015

01.01.2015

Decentralization and the Welfare State: What Do Citizens Perceive?

verfasst von: Luis Diaz-Serrano, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research | Ausgabe 2/2015

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Abstract

Trust in public institutions and public policies are generally perceived as a precondition for economic recovery in times of recession. Recent empirical evidence tends to find a positive link between decentralization and trust. But our knowledge about whether decentralization—through increased trust—improves the perception of the delivery and effectiveness of public policies is still limited. In this paper we estimate the impact of fiscal and political decentralization on the perception of the state of the education system and of health services, by using the 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008 waves of the European social survey. The analysis of the views of 160,000 individuals in 31 European countries indicates that while the effect of fiscal decentralization on the perception of the state of the health and education system is unambiguously positive, political decentralization affects citizen’s satisfaction with education and health delivery in different ways. The influence of political decentralization, however, is highly contingent on whether we consider the capacity of the local or regional government to exercise authority over its citizens (self-rule) or to influence policy at the national level (shared-rule).

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Fußnoten
1
Some exceptions are Barankay and Lockwood (2007) and Diaz-Serrano and Meix-Llop (2012). These studies analyse the impact of fiscal decentralization on school outcomes. Results report an unambiguous positive effect. Diaz-Serrano and Meix-Llop (2012) also test the impact of political decentralization and find the opposite effect.
 
2
We use the ‘within’ estimator, which subtracts group averages from the dependent variable and explanatory variables.
 
3
This framework involves the transformation of the observed ordinal outcome S ict  = j as \(\ln (Z_{ict} ) = \left[ {\phi (\mu_{j - 1,t} ) - \phi (\mu_{j,t} )} \right]/\left[ {\varPhi (\mu_{j,t} ) - \varPhi (\mu_{j - 1,t} )} \right]\), where ϕ(•) and Φ(•) are the normal density function and the cumulative normal distribution, respectively.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Decentralization and the Welfare State: What Do Citizens Perceive?
verfasst von
Luis Diaz-Serrano
Andrés Rodríguez-Pose
Publikationsdatum
01.01.2015
Verlag
Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in
Social Indicators Research / Ausgabe 2/2015
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0599-5

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