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Across many developing countries, the delivery of basic social services is not universal, and often skewed along politicised identity cleavages. The Middle East and North Africa region is no exception. Under what conditions are some services provided in a more ‘equitable’ fashion, with less apparent favouritism towards particular groups? Drawing on the cases of health care provision in Lebanon and Turkey, this webinar will aim at exploring this question. 

Health provision is an area where public delivery is often discretionary, running along partisan, ethnic, or religious identity lines. Featuring work by Melani Cammett, the first part of the webinar will explore new empirical evidence on how societal divisions affect the quality of service delivery in Lebanon. In the second part of the webinar, drawing on the case of Turkey under AKP rule, Asli Cansunar will discuss how a government, because of its political goals, designed an effective and universal policy which widened health coverage and electorally paid out the incumbent AK Parti.

 is Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs in the Department of Government and chair of the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies at Harvard. She also holds a secondary faculty appointment in the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. Cammett's books include Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon (Cornell University Press 2014), which won the American Political Science Association (APSA) Giovanni Sartori Book Award and the Honorable Mention for the APSA Gregory Luebbert Book Award; A Political Economy of the Middle East (co-authored with Ishac Diwan, Westview Press 2015); The Politics of Non-State Social Welfare in the Global South (co-edited with Lauren Morris MacLean, Cornell University Press, 2014), which received the Honorable Mention for the ARNOVA book award; and Globalization and Business Politics in North Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Her current research projects explore "toleration" and reconciliation after ethnoreligious violence, development and identity politics. Cammett has published numerous articles in academic and policy journals, consults for development policy organizations, and is the recipient of various fellowships and awards. She serves as a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Syria.

is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Nuffield College and the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Her work lies at the intersection of comparative political economy, comparative politics, and economic history, focusing on the political consequences of economic inequality. In particular, she works on the rich’s preferences on redistributive policies in the presence of incomplete information, subjective perceptions, and different types of welfare systems. She also investigates the distributive impact of these preferences. Cansunar combines formal modeling with laboratory experiments, survey experiments, geospatial analysis, and archival research. Most of her research is concentrated in advanced industrialized countries and the Middle East.

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