Politics, Inequality, and the Robustness of Shared Infrastructure Systems

Abstract: Our infrastructure systems enable our well-being by allowing us to move, store, and transform materials and information given considerable social and environmental variation. Critically, this ability is shaped by the degree to which society invests in infrastructure, a fundamentally political question in large public systems. There, infrastructure providers are distinguished from users through political processes, such as elections, and there is considerable heterogeneity among users. Previous political economic models have not taken into account (i) dynamic infrastructures, (ii) dynamic user preferences, and (iii) alternatives to rational actor theory. Meanwhile, engineering often neglects politics. We address these gaps with a general dynamic model of shared infrastructure systems that incorporates theories from political economy, social-ecological systems, and political psychology. We use the model to develop propositions on how multiple characteristics of the political process impact the robustness of shared infrastructure systems to capacity shocks and unequal opportunity for private infrastructure investment. Under user fees, inequality decreases robustness, but taxing private infrastructure use can increase robustness if non-elites have equal political influence. Election cycle periods have a nonlinear effect where increasing them increases robustness up to a point but decreases robustness beyond that point. Further, there is a negative relationship between the ideological sensitivity of candidates and robustness. Overall, the biases of voters and candidates (whether they favor tax increases or decreases) mediate these political-economic effects on robustness because biases may or may not match the reality of system needs (whether system recovery requires tax increases).