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Does aid conditionality—the setting of policy goals in exchange for access to aid—promote reform? Many studies on the impact of aid and reform suggest not. However, few explicitly examine whether the impact of aid on reform is mediated by recipient regime type. I argue that conditional aid is effective but its efficacy depends on recipient countries' level of democracy because the value of aid to governments depends on the degree to which it helps them maintain power, and recent work shows that the marginal impact of aid on political survival increases with level of democracy. I test this argument on data from 68 countries over the period from 1980 to 1999. I focus on the impact of IMF and World Bank aid on fiscal reform, one of the most commonly stipulated conditions in aid-for-policy arrangements. I find that aid from the Bretton Woods institutions promotes fiscal reform, but only in more democratic countries.

This article evaluates conditions that facilitate banking crises resolution using data from 67 developing countries from 1980 to 1995. In particular, the author examines explanatory variables under three categories: external macroeconomic constraints, the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and domestic political conditions. The principal results of the analyses are twofold. First, IMF credits decrease the probability of resolving banking crises. This result holds controlling for potentially confounding variables and in a test for endogeneity. Second, the decisiveness of a political regime significantly influences the probability of emerging from systemic distress. Specifically, in cases of moderate banking distress, decisiveness facilitates resolution of crisis, but during periods of severe crises, less decisive governments (i.e., governments constrained by accountability groups) are likely to recover more quickly than are those with less constrained executives.

Under what conditions will politicians strengthen state capabilities through bureaucratic reform? This article presents a principal–agent model of state capacity that shows that unless competition to influence policy is largely confined to a single dimension, politicians have no incentive or 'political will' to adopt bureaucratic reform. The validity of this model is tested using the experience of the Philippines in the period 1946–72. It is found that politically relevant groups in the Philippines were competing to influence policy over issues of social welfare, economic nationalism and control over public spending, and that groups' demands over these issues failed to align along a single dominant dimension. Consistent with expectations derived from the principal–agent model, there were numerous calls for and attempts to improve bureaucratic performance, but the calls went unheeded and the attempts failed miserably. The study highlights a lesson of potential use to countries currently undergoing democratization. It argues that state capacity is not a function of insulating the state from societal forces, but rather of clarifying lines of authority and accountability in the hierarchy of principal–agent relationships between society, politicians and bureaucrats.

What conditions underpin endemic corruption, and why does it persist more acutely in some countries than others? In this article, the author builds a theory based on the principal-agent framework to address this question. In particular, she argues that the level of corruption in a polity is determined not only by the absence or presence of competitive elections, but also by the number of dimensions that structure competition among forces attempting to influence public policy. The analysis shows that if competition is organized along more that one dimension, or "cleavage issue", then politicians will have greater incentives and opportunities to plunder the public treasury for their personal enrichment. Furthermore, she suggests that the number of dimensions of competition in a polity is determined by the interaction of socio-economic structures and political institutions. The utility of this theory is illustrated with a case study of the Philippines under the Marcos regime. The analysis concludes that the roots of cronyism and economic stagnation in the Philippines run much deeper than the plunder of a single dictator and his cronies. The study suggests that without significant constitutional reform, the Philippines will find it difficult to escape the vicious cycle in which it has been trapped since independence. (AJPS/DÜI)

Climate-related foreign aid is on the rise, with signatories to the Paris Climate agreement pledging $100 billion annually to promote mitigation and adaptation in recipient countries. While this seems like a welcome development, we have little evidence that climate aid actually encourages recipients to adopt climate legislation. In this article, we examine the relationship between climate aid and recipient climate policy. Using multiple measures of each, we find no evidence that the former is systematically related to the latter. Although this suggests that climate aid is ineffective, this conclusion must be qualified due to the poor quality of both climate aid and climate policy data. More definitive conclusions will require more accurate coding of climate aid as well as better climate policy measures that distinguish truly consequential policies from less consequential ones.