Brief Description
Who gets electricity in the developing world? Power and the Vote offers a deeply political answer tested against new data from satellites.
Learn More about the Book
How do developing states decide who gets access to public goods like electricity, water, and education? Power and the Vote breaks new ground by showing that the provision of seemingly universal public goods is intricately shaped by electoral priorities. In doing so, this book introduces new methods using high-resolution satellite imagery to study the distribution of electricity across and within the developing world. Combining cross-national evidence with detailed sub-national analysis and village-level data from India, Power and the Vote affirms the power of electoral incentives in shaping the distribution of public goods and challenges the view that democracy is a luxury of the rich with little relevance to the world's poor.
About the Author
Brian Min is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. His dissertation received the 2011 Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics from the American Political Science Association. Min's articles have appeared in World Politics, American Sociological Review, and Annual Review of Political Science. He has received grants from the World Bank, the International Growth Center, and the National Science Foundation. Min received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, MPP from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and BA from Cornell University.
Review Quotes
1. "Hundreds of millions lack reliable access to electricity, the foundation of modern life. Brian Min uses his mastery of the nuts and bolts of the sector to show that it is politicians who flip the switch. This fine book should be widely read. It provides compelling answers to central issues of the political economy of development - not least, "do elections matter?" - with meticulous technique and illuminating detail."
Philip Keefer, Principal Economic Advisor, Inter-American Development Bank
2. "The challenge of reliably measuring public and private goods provision has long stymied scholarship on distributive politics. Brian Min provides a substantial breakthrough with his innovative use of global satellite imagery to gauge the usage of electricity throughout the developing world. These remarkable data allow assessment of the uneven spread of electrical power throughout space and time, the tendency of democracies to serve poor rural populations, and the relationship between electoral and allocative politics. Scholars seeking to identify the effects of political institutions on distributive outcomes will benefit tremendously from Min's approach."
Thad Dunning, Robson Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
3. "Access to energy is crucial for economic development and poverty alleviation. Power and the Vote provides a groundbreaking and extremely meticulous investigation of the way electoral incentives, not efficiency consideration, shape the distribution of electricity around the world, particularly in India. The book makes a major contribution to the growing literature on electoral clientelism and the political economy infrastructure provision in developing countries."
Leonard Wantchekon, Princeton University, New Jersey
