Municipal service delivery in the Global South remains unequal despite decentralization reforms and the expansion of local government mandates. This dissertation examines why political patronage systems generate and reproduce institutional weakness in municipal service delivery, using Bogura Municipality, Bangladesh, as a secondary-city case. The study is guided by three interrelated questions about whether institutional weaknesses exist within municipal governance structures, how political mediation networks affect rule reliability, and how political mediation and perceived unfairness shape citizen trust.
The dissertation adopts a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design that integrates an embedded paired-ward qualitative case study with complementary quantitative micro-analysis. Evidence was collected from 53 respondents, including 46 citizen residents, 2 ward councillors, and 5 municipal officials, across Ward 02 and Ward 08 through semi-structured interviews conducted between December 2025 and January 2026. Two original instruments were developed: the Municipal Service Delivery Reliability Index (MSDRI), which measures demand-side service reliability across ten service domains and five governance dimensions, and the Political–Administrative Governance Integrity Index (PAGII), which measures supply-side governance integrity. Individual MSDRI scores for all 46 citizens were analyzed in IBM SPSS 26 and R 4.3.1 using Welch’s t-test, Mann–Whitney U test, Cohen’s d, and bootstrap resampling with 10,000 iterations.
Findings reveal a statistically significant and substantively exceptional governance gap between the two wards despite identical formal mandates (mean difference = 1.375; 95% CI [1.14, 1.62]; t = 11.02; p < 0.001; Cohen’s d = 3.26). All five propositions are confirmed through multi-actor triangulation and quantitative validation. The study demonstrates that institutional weakness and political patronage are co-constitutive. Patronage depends on discretionary governance spaces, while weak institutions preserve those spaces. The dissertation contributes a co-constitutive mechanism, the facilitative–gatekeeping mediation distinction, the MSDRI and PAGII instruments, an application of sub-municipal Urban Regime Theory, and a citizen trust typology.
