Suchergebnisse

Introduces an issue exploring the role of institutions in economic growth & the ways in which they can foster or discourage growth. While the contributors explore different substantive lines & have varying disciplinary backgrounds, they reach several convergent themes: (1) There is a high degree of social scientific ignorance about the relationships of specific institutions & processes of institutional change to economic development. (2) The match between formal institutions & local social, political, economic, & cultural settings is important. (3) There is a need to explore beyond functionalist approaches to institutions & recognize the role of complementarities within institutional systems. (4) The analytic & practical consequences of uncertainties that are part of institutional reform must be further studied, & the implications for the politics of institutional change explored. 110 References. L. A. Hoffman

This concluding article returns to the broad question that motivates this special issue of Studies in Comparative International Development: Will the Digital Revolution constitute a revolution in development? In addressing this issue, we explore a number of common themes emphasized by the different contributions: the future of the North-South divide, the role of the state in promoting digital development, the transferability & adaptability of specific information & communication technologies, the challenges & potential benefits of controlling digital information, & the developmental effects of digitally enabled communities. We argue that the Digital Revolution's ultimate impact on development will depend on several key variables, including the extent to which these technologies foster within-country linkages among different sectors & socioeconomic classes; the degree to which new technological applications may be customized or transformed to advance local development; & the outcome of political contests between organized interests that are promoting different ways of organizing & governing the global digital economy. While it is difficult to fully assess a transformation while living in the midst of it, research on the social, political, & economic implications of the Digital Revolution will constitute an important agenda for development scholars in the years to come. References. Adapted from the source document.

Dunning,T.: Fighting and voting: violent conflict and electoral politics. - S. 327-339 Machado, F. ; Scartascini, C. ; Tommasi, M.: Political institutions and street protests in Latin America. - S. 340-365 Chacón, M. ; Robinson, J. A. ; Torvik, R.: When is democracy an equilibrium? Theory and evidence from Colombia's La Violencia. - S. 366-396 Balcells, L.: Continuation of politics by two means: direct and indirect violence in civil war. - S. 397-422 Steele, A.: Electing displacement: political cleansing in Apartadó, Colombia. - S. 423-445 McBride, M. ; Milante, G. ; Skaperdas, S.: Peace and war with endogenous state capacity. - S. 446-468 Brancati, D. ; Snyder, J. L.: Rushing to the polls: the causes of premature postconflict elections. - S. 469-492

Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism addresses major questions in distributive politics. Why is it acceptable for parties to try to win elections by promising to make certain groups of people better off, but unacceptable - and illegal - to pay people for their votes? Why do parties often lavish benefits on loyal voters, whose support they can count on anyway, rather than on responsive swing voters? Why is vote buying and machine politics common in today's developing democracies but a thing of the past in most of today's advanced democracies? This book develops a theory of broker-mediated distribution to answer these questions, testing the theory with research from four developing democracies, and reviews a rich secondary literature on countries in all world regions. The authors deploy normative theory to evaluate whether clientelism, pork-barrel politics, and other non-programmatic distributive strategies can be justified on the grounds that they promote efficiency, redistribution, or voter participation

The book is about distributive politics. The received theories usually predict that parties and governmentswill spend scarce resources on responsive voters. And these responsive voters will be fence-sitters, people who might otherwise not turn out or vote for the party responsible for the distribution but who could be swayed by a favor or a program. Yet over and over again, the evidence seemed to tell us that not fence-sitters but firm party loyalists were the primary beneficiaries of the distributive game. Because we believed in the received theories, we discarded them only reluctantly. Like good Kuhnians, a few anomalies did not shift our paradigm. But eventually the weight of the anomalies was too much. Constructing an alternative theory was only one of the tasks we faced. Our new theory suggested new questions and new observational implications. Many parties can be decomposed into leaders and low-level operatives or brokers. If brokers play the distributive game by different rules than do their leaders, allocations of resources should come out differently when brokers are in control and when leaders are in control. (They do.) If brokers are imperfect agents of party leaders, antimachine reform movements, when they break out, may be driven as much by party leaders as by non-partisan reformers. (In several countries, they have been.) And if brokers are imperfect agents, it should be the case that they impose agency losses on parties and parties should devise elaborate techniques to monitor the brokers and minimize these losses. (We offer evidence that both are true.) ; Fil: Nazareno, Marcelo. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades. Escuela de Historia; Argentina. ; Fil: Nazareno, Marcelo. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales; Argentina. ; Fil: Brusco, Valeria. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales; Argentina. ; Ciencia Política

Machine generated contents note: Part I. Information, Accountability, and a New Approach to Cumulative Learning: 1. Do informational campaigns promote electoral accountability? Thad Dunning, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, Susan D. Hyde, Craig McIntosh and Gareth Nellis; 2. The Metaketa Initiative Thad Dunning, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, Susan D. Hyde and Craig McIntosh; 3. Informational interventions: theory and measurement Thad Dunning, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, Susan D. Hyde, Craig McIntosh and Gareth Nellis; Part II. Field Experiments: 4. Under what conditions does performance information influence voting behavior? Lessons from Benin Claire Adida, Jessica Gottlieb, Eric Kramon and Gwyneth Mcclendon; 5. When does information increase electoral accountability? Lessons from a field experiment in Mexico Eric Arias, Horacio Larreguy, John Marshall and Pablo Querubin; 6. Candidate videos and vote choice in Ugandan parliamentary elections Melina R. Platas and Pia Raffler; 7. Budgets, SMS texts, and votes in Uganda Mark T. Buntaine, Sarah S. Bush, Ryan Jablonski, Daniel L. Nielson and Paula M. Pickering; 8. Performance-based voting in local elections: experimental evidence from Burkina Faso Malte Lierl and Marcus Holmlund; 9. Horizontal but not vertical: accountability institutions and electoral sanctioning in Northeast Brazil Taylor C. Boas, F. Daniel Hidalgo and Marcus A. Melo; 10. Dilemmas and challenges of citizen information campaigns: lessons from a failed experiment in India Neelanjan Sircar and Simon Chauchard; Part III. Cumulative Learning: 11. Meta-analysis Thad Dunning, Clara Bicalho, Anirvan Chowdhury, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, Susan D. Hyde, Craig McIntosh and Gareth Nellis; 12. Learning about cumulative learning: an experiment with policy practitioners Gareth Nellis, Thad Dunning, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, Susan D. Hyde, Craig McIntosh and Catlan Reardon; Part IV. Conclusion: 13. Challenges and opportunities Thad Dunning, Guy Grossman, Macartan Humphreys, Susan D. Hyde, Craig McIntosh and Gareth Nellis; Part V. End Matter: 14. Appendix: meta-preanalysis plan (MPAP); 15. References; Part VI. Online Appendix.

Do informational interventions shape electoral choices and thereby promote political accountability? The chapters in Part II of this book provided answers to this question in particular contexts. The studies individually provide rich insights not only into the impact of interventions that were common to all studies, but also on the effects of alternative interventions that were specific to each one. In this chapter, we assess the larger lessons that we can glean from our coordinated studies. As outlined in Chapter 3, all studies seek to test common hypotheses about the impact of harmonized informational interventions, using consistent measurements of outcome variables. Our preregistered analysis allows us to evaluate whether, pooling data from the set of studies in the initiative, information about politician performance led voters to alter their electoral behavior. It also informs a discussion about the conditions under which they did or did not do so. We find that the overall effect of information is quite precisely estimated and not statistically distinguishable from zero. The analysis shows modest impacts of information on voters' knowledge of the information provided to them. However, the interventions did not appear to shape voters' evaluations of candidates, and, in particular, they did not discernibly influence vote choice. This slate of null results obtains in nearly all analyses for the individual country studies too. Nor is there strong evidence of impact on voter turnout, though under some specifications we find suggestive evidence that bad news may boost voter mobilization. Our results are robust to different analytic strategies and across a variety of modeling and dataset construction choices. The findings also suggest that the estimated effect in our missing study would have needed to be extremely large to alter our broader conclusions. The size of our meta-analysis reduces the chances that null estimated effects stem from low statistical power, and the fact that our results are so consistent across the individual studies limits the possibility that our mostly null effects are due to idiosyncrasies in implementation or study design. In the rest of this chapter, we first describe the prespecified approach that we use to analyze the pooled dataset. We then report our main findings, point out the consistency of results across studies, and report robustness checks. Next we consider several possible reasons for our null findings by testing the prespecified hypotheses. The most plausible reason for the null effects stems from the failure of the interventions to shape voters' perceptions of politicians; we do not find evidence, however, that this is due to partisan or ethnic attachments or other heuristic substitutes for information. It is critical to underscore the similarities of these interventions to previous treatments in the experimental research literature and to interventions for which donor organizations in the transparency space routinely advocate. Indeed, our interventions were crafted by researchers with substantial country-specific expertise, usually in collaboration with local NGOs. Our null results across wide array of contexts therefore provide an important baseline of evidence against which future studies can be weighed. This chapter could be profitably read in conjunction with Chapter 3, which discusses the common interventions and our measurement of key variables, but it can be read as a standalone chapter as well.

Do informational interventions shape electoral choices and thereby promote political accountability? The chapters in Part II of this book provided answers to this question in particular contexts. The studies individually provide rich insights not only into the impact of interventions that were common to all studies, but also on the effects of alternative interventions that were specific to each one. In this chapter, we assess the larger lessons that we can glean from our coordinated studies. As outlined in Chapter 3, all studies seek to test common hypotheses about the impact of harmonized informational interventions, using consistent measurements of outcome variables. Our preregistered analysis allows us to evaluate whether, pooling data from the set of studies in the initiative, information about politician performance led voters to alter their electoral behavior. It also informs a discussion about the conditions under which they did or did not do so. We find that the overall effect of information is quite precisely estimated and not statistically distinguishable from zero. The analysis shows modest impacts of information on voters' knowledge of the information provided to them. However, the interventions did not appear to shape voters' evaluations of candidates, and, in particular, they did not discernibly influence vote choice. This slate of null results obtains in nearly all analyses for the individual country studies too.1 Nor is there strong evidence of impact on voter turnout, though under some specifications we find suggestive evidence that bad news may boost voter mobilization. Our results are robust to different analytic strategies and across a variety of modeling and dataset construction choices. The findings also suggest that the estimated effect in our missing study would have needed to be extremely large to alter our broader conclusions. The size of our meta-analysis reduces the chances that null estimated effects stem from low statistical power, and the fact that our results are so consistent across the individual studies limits the possibility that our mostly null effects are due to idiosyncrasies in implementation or study design. In the rest of this chapter, we first describe the prespecified approach that we use to analyze the pooled dataset. We then report our main findings, point out the consistency of results across studies, and report robustness checks. Next we consider several possible reasons for our null findings by testing the prespecified hypotheses. The most plausible reason for the null effects stems from the failure of the interventions to shape voters' perceptions of politicians; we do not find evidence, however, that this is due to partisan or ethnic attachments or other heuristic substitutes for information. It is critical to underscore the similarities of these interventions to previous treatments in the experimental research literature and to interventions for which donor organizations in the transparency space routinely advocate. Indeed, our interventions were crafted by researchers with substantial country-specific expertise, usually in collaboration with local NGOs. Our null results across wide array of contexts therefore provide an important baseline of evidence against which future studies can be weighed. This chapter could be profitably read in conjunction with Chapter 3, which discusses the common interventions and our measurement of key variables, but it can be read as a standalone chapter as well.

A preregistered meta-analysis of six field experiments finds no evidence overall that information campaigns shape voter behavior.

Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives' performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.