Jennifer Bussell

Will Information Technology Reshape the North-South Asymmetry of Power in the Global Political Economy?

Digital technologies are sufficiently disruptive to current ways of doing things to call into question assumptions about the “inevitability” or “natural state” of many economic processes and organizational principles. In particular, the impact of digital technologies on our conceptions of property rights has potentially dramatic implications for the North-South divide and the distribution of power in the global political economy. Drawing on recent experiences with open-source property rights regimes, we present two scenarios, the “imperialism of property rights” and the “shared global digital infrastructure,” to highlight how debates over property-rights could influence the development of the global digital infrastructure and, in turn, contribute to significantly different outcomes in global economic power.

Why Get Technical? Corruption and the Politics of Public Service Reform in the Indian States

The emergence of new information and communication technologies in the 1990s offered governments opportunities to deliver public services more effectively to their citizens. Yet national and subnational authorities have employed such technologies in highly uneven ways. Drawing on a new data set of technology policy adoption by Indian states, the author argues that political calculations drive variation in the timing and scope of technology policies. Politicians weigh the expected electoral benefits from providing new goods to citizens against the expected electoral costs of reduced access to corrupt funds because of increased transparency. The author shows that the level of bureaucratic corruption in a state is the best predictor of both when states implement policies promoting computer-enabled services and the number of services made available.This finding contrasts with arguments that posit economic or developmental conditions, or alternative electoral and institutional characteristics, as the major drivers of technology investment.

Will the Digital Revolution Revolutionize Development? Drawing Together the Debate

This concluding article returns to the broad question that motivates this special issue ofStudies in Comparative International Development: Will the Digital Revolution constitute a revolution in development? In addressing this issue, we explore a number of common themes emphasized by the different contributions: the future of the North-South divide, the role of the state in promoting digital development, the transferability and adaptability of specific information and communication technologies, the challenges and potential benefits of controlling digital information, and the developmental effects of digitally enabled communities. We argue that the Digital Revolutions ultimate impact on development will depend on several key variables, including the extent to which these technologies foster within-country linkages among different sectors and socioeconomic classes; the degree to which new technological applications may be customized or transformed to advance local development; and the outcome of political contests between organized interests that are promoting different ways of organizing and governing the global digital economy. While it is difficult to fully assess a transformation while living in the midst of it, research on the social, political, and economic implications of the Digital Revolution will constitute an important agenda for development scholars in the years to come.

Political incentives and policy outcomes: Who benefits from technology-enabled service centers?

This study investigates the causes of variation in government policies to use information and communication technologies to improve service delivery to citizens. I ask why state governments in India vary in the number and type of services they offer to citizens through technology-enabled citizen service centers. I argue that politicians estimate the expected electoral benefits from providing improved services to citizens and weigh these benefits against the costs of increased government transparency and associated reductions in corrupt income. Politicians then design service center policies to maximize their chances of retaining power. Because levels of corruption and the characteristics of electoral competition vary across the Indian states, we see related variations in technology policies. These variations in policy, and in particular the services made available to citizens, have important effects on who benefits from citizen service centers. I use evidence from sixteen Indian states to test these arguments, and show that the character of the ruling government and the level of state corruption are robust predictors of variation in state-level technology policies.

Electoral competition and digital development in India and South Africa

In the last decade many developing country governments made efforts to improve service delivery and access to information through the use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). The character of these efforts, however, varies widely both across and within countries, resulting in continued inequality to access. What incentives influenced the initiation of these projects? How might variation in these incentives have affected the projects themselves? To answer these questions I compare the efforts of sub-national governments in India and South Africa to implement ICT-enabled service centers. In particular I consider what factors led to the implementation of ICT initiatives in urban versus rural areas. I find that politicians use ICT projects to achieve specific electoral goals and thus electoral conditions, specifically the character of political competition and ruling party support bases, can help to explain decisions to implement service centers for rural or urban populations. I use the cases of Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh in India and the Western Cape and Gauteng in South Africa to illustrate this argument.

Between State and Citizen: Decentralization, Institutions, and Accountability

Are politicians accountable to the demands of their citizens? What facilitates political behavior that meets citizen needs and desires? Under what circumstances will citizens reject politicians who fail in this task? The two books considered in this review essay attempt to answer these questions largely through empirical analyses of politician and citizen behavior. These works touch on two distinct but related topics in comparative politics—the ability of governments to govern and the reaction of citizens to government performance. While Grindle assesses the capacity of governments to deal with changing patterns of authority and responsibility, the contributors to the Maravall and Sánchez-Cuenca volume focus primarily on understanding, first, how and why citizens reward and punish politicians in particular ways and, second, how politicians respond to this expected behavior. In both cases, while many potential state and societal characteristics are taken into account, the nature of formal institutions plays a predominant role in explaining the behavior of both politicians and their constituents.

A Review of: "The Information Revolution and Developing Countries".

One or more servers and/or control functions that are connected to a network. One or more service providers provide information having content to the servers. The server/control function executes a process which parses the information content sent from the service provider onto two or more channels and then broadcasts those channels over the network to a plurality of client computers. The server process examines the information packets sent from the service provider to determine zero or more of the categories that describe a content of the information packet and labels the information packets with the channel identifier associated with the respective categories prior to sending the information packets over the network. The server can also run processes and broadcast commands to the clients that associate/disassociate channel identifiers with categories.