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44 Comp. Pol. Stud. 3 (2011)

handle is hein.journals/compls44 and id is 1 raw text is: Articles Comparative Political Studies 44(1) 3-27 Do Migrants Im prove ©TheAuthor(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: http://www. Their Hometowns? sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10. 1177/00104140 10381073 Rem ittances and http://cps.sagepub.com Access to Public OSAGE Services in Mexico, 1995-2000 Claire L. Adida and Desha M. Girod 2 Abstract How do citizens in developing countries access public services? Scholars study this question by emphasizing the role of government, measuring government performance as household access to public services, such as clean water and sanitation. However, the authors argue that the state does not hold a monopoly on provision of such utilities: Citizens in developing countries often turn to nonstate providers for basic utilities. In Mexico, the authors find that direct money transfers from migrants, known as re- mittances, are used to provide household access to public services. The statistical analysis across Mexico's 2,438 municipalities demonstrates that citizens improve their own access.The results also contribute new evidence to the literature on remittances and development by offering a micro-level explanation for how remittances affect both the availability and the source of basic utilities. The findings suggest that the measures scholars typically associate with government performance may in fact capture nonstate provi- sion of basic utilities. University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA 2Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA Corresponding Author: Desha M. Girod, Georgetown University, Department of Government, Intercultural Center 659, Washington, DC 20057-1034 Email: dmg78@georgetown.edu