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The authors investigate the relationship between constitutional design and the rule of law in emerging democracies. The authors provide a formal logic to the Madisonian assertion that increasing the number of veto players strengthens the rule of law. The model shows that as the number of veto players in government increases, their ability to collude on accepting bribes decreases; therefore, their incentive to vote on legislation strengthening the rule of law increases. The authors classify governments according to the number of veto players, following the logic proposed by Tsebelis. The authors test hypotheses derived from their model on 35 emerging democracies using veto-player data that they gathered for the analyses. The authors find that systems with multiple veto players have higher levels of the rule of law. Furthermore, independent of the number of veto players, presidential systems have lower levels of the rule of law than do parliamentary systems.

Why is government corruption more pervasive in some societies than in others? In this article we examine public choice explanations that attribute corruption to a lack of competition in either political or economic arenas or both. The principal part of our analysis draws on recently-published data about levels of corruption for a broad cross-section of countries reported for the early 1980s. We supplement this with an additional analysis of a second dataset on corruption measured during the late 1980s. Our analyses confirm that political competition affects level of corruption, but this effect is nonlinear. Corruption is typically lower in dictatorships than in countries that have partially democratized. But once past a threshold, democratic practices inhibit corruption. However, we obtained mixed results with respect to the relationship of economic competition and corruption: government size does not systematically affect corruption, but membership of the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries (OPEC) does. Finally, corruption is more pervasive in low-income countries which tend to underpay public sector employees. (British Journal of Political Science / FUB)

As with other areas of comparative political inquiry, analyses of political corruption must carefully negotiate around numerous methodological issues. In this article, we focus primarily on problems of operationalization & measurement of corruption. We evaluate the major examples of cross-country measures of corruption that have recently emerged & review research that has incorporated the new measures. We end with a discussion of an alternative method for the cross-national measurement & analysis of corruption, one that might also facilitate the goal of establishing universal principles & causal claims about political corruption. 2 Tables, 1 Appendix, 63 References. Adapted from the source document.

Does foreign aid affect domestic political unrest? 'Selectorate' models of political survival predict that foreign aid should lead autocratic governments, but not democratic ones, to restrict civil liberties. This requires investment in repressive capacity, which should in turn deter unrest. We thus argue that foreign aid should reduce unrest in autocracies but not in democracies. We find strong support for this hypothesis in a sample of 84 countries from 1970 through 2007, as well as evidence for our causal mechanism. Our results add to the mounting evidence that foreign aid has more desirable effects when targeted at democratic regimes.

AbstractInternational donors emphasize greater recipient-country ownership in the delivery of foreign assistance because it ostensibly promotes the efficient use of resources and strengthens recipient-country administrative capacity. The preferences of citizens in developing countries, however, are not well understood on this matter. Do they prefer that their own governments control foreign aid resources, or are there conditions under which they instead prefer that donors maintain control over how aid is implemented? We explore these questions through parallel survey experiments in Myanmar, Nepal, and Indonesia. Our experimental vignettes include two informational treatments: one about who implements aid (i.e., the donor or the recipient government) and the other about the trustworthiness of the foreign donor. The trust-in-donor treatment, on average, increases levels of support for aid in all three countries. In contrast, we observe heterogenous average treatment effects regarding aid control: control of aid by the donor rather than the government reduces levels of support in Indonesia and Myanmar, whereas it increases support levels in Nepal. We show how the cross-country variation in ATEs originates in consistent individual-level variation in reactions to aid control that is more shaped by respondents' trust in their own government than their trust in the donor.

Previous research suggests that ideology, material interests, and moral values drive citizens' preferences over foreign aid policy. Little attention has been paid to how perceptions of the international environment affect these preferences. We examine the extent to which citizens in a traditional donor country consider donor competition when deciding whether to impose aid sanctions on governments engaged in human rights violations. Employing an information experiment conducted among Japanese adults, we find that the prospect of another donor ready to act as a substitute aid-provider reduces support for the use of aid sanctions. This effect runs most strongly through a pathway privileging security concerns, and the effect is larger among respondents who have preexisting concerns about the other donor. These results highlight the way in which public desires for foreign aid to bring about material returns can hinder a government's ability to use aid to promote good governance ends.