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Studies in international political economy (IPE) that use survey-response data sets and survey (or field) experiments have grown dramatically in recent years. New developments in survey and experimental methodology have arguably influenced IPE scholars not only to think more deeply about the microfoundations of the preferences, attitudes, and political behavior of key IPE actors but also to use survey or experimental methods to test causal claims and predictions. Yet the reasons for the rapid growth in survey and experimental methods in IPE are more multifaceted. We therefore seek to answer the following three pertinent questions in the introduction. First, what are the main substantive puzzles and issue-areas that IPE scholars analyze via survey and experimental methods in their research? Second, what are the main methodological advantages and drawbacks from using survey and experimental methods in IPE? Third, what are the key substantive theoretical and empirical insights that scholars have learned from recent research in IPE that employs either survey or experimental methods (or both)? In addition to answering these questions here, we also provide a summary of each article included in the special issue. The introduction concludes with a road map for future studies on survey and experimental research in IPE.(International Interactions (London)/ FUB)

A strong statistical association between legislative opposition in authoritarian regimes and investment has been interpreted as evidence that authoritarian legislatures constrain executive decisions and reduce the threat of expropriation. Although the empirical relationship is robust, scholars have not provided systematic evidence that authoritarian parliaments are able to restrain the actions of state leaders, reverse activities they disagree with, or remove authoritarian leaders who violate the implied power-sharing arrangement. This article shows that authoritarian legislatures, by providing a forum for horse trading between private actors, are better at generating corporate governance legislation that protects investors from corporate insiders than they are at preventing expropriation by governments. The statistical analysis reveals that the strength of authoritarian legislatures is associated with corporate governance rules and not expropriation risk.

Little is known about the political repercussions of banking crises despite the extensive literature on the link between economic performance and political outcomes. We develop a theory of how clarity of responsibility affects incumbent party survival patterns in 89 democracies between 1975 and 2005. Our results are robust to modeling strategies that include hazard models with shared frailties to account for country-specific factors that affect incumbent survival. We find that globalization weakens the accountability link between politicians and voters. Incumbents in countries with open capital accounts are much more likely to survive a banking crisis than incumbents in closed economies. We do not find conclusive evidence that divided governments or those with multiple veto players enjoy higher survival rates after banking crises; in fact, the opposite seems to be true. We conclude with a discussion of the paradoxical relationship that openness brings to incumbents: greater exposure to foreign shocks and reduced electoral punishment for banking crises. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

Little is known about the political repercussions of banking crises despite the extensive literature on the link between economic performance and political outcomes. We develop a theory of how clarity of responsibility affects incumbent party survival patterns in 89 democracies between 1975 and 2005. Our results are robust to modeling strategies that include hazard models with shared frailties to account for country-specific factors that affect incumbent survival. We find that globalization weakens the accountability link between politicians and voters. Incumbents in countries with open capital accounts are much more likely to survive a banking crisis than incumbents in closed economies. We do not find conclusive evidence that divided governments or those with multiple veto players enjoy higher survival rates after banking crises; in fact, the opposite seems to be true. We conclude with a discussion of the paradoxical relationship that openness brings to incumbents: greater exposure to foreign shocks and reduced electoral punishment for banking crises.

AbstractThrough a field experiment and audit study, we test how the electoral calendar affects the use of local economic development policies. We explore how electoral timing along with local political institutions and party composition affect local governments' offers of investment incentives to outside firms. We legally incorporated a consultancy and, on behalf of a real investor in manufacturing, approached roughly 3,000 U.S. municipalities with inquiries. The main experimental results show no greater tendency to offer incentives for investment anticipated prior to than after elections—a null result that is estimated with high precision. Limiting the sample to municipalities that specialize in manufacturing, the relevant subgroup, suggests that election timing matters in this most likely set of locales. Some observational findings include additional evidence on how direct elections of executives and partisanship correlate with incentive offers.

Prevailing work argues that foreign investment reduces corruption, either by competing down monopoly rents or diffusing best practices of corporate governance. We argue that the mechanisms generating this relationship are not clear because the extant empirical work is too heavily drawn from aggregations of total foreign investment entering an economy. Alternatively, we suggest that openness to foreign investment has differential effects on corruption even within the same country and under the same domestic institutions over time. We argue that foreign firms use bribes to enter protected industries in search of rents, and therefore we expect variation in bribe propensity across sectors according to expected profitability. We test this effect using a list experiment embedded in three waves of a nationally representative survey of 20,000 foreign and domestic businesses in Vietnam, finding that the effect of economic openness on the probability to engage in bribes is conditional on policies that restrict investment. Adapted from the source document.

Both countries and subnational governments commonly engage in competition for mobile capital, offering generous incentives to attract investment. Existing economics research has suggested that these tax incentives have a limited ability to affect investment patterns and are often excessively costly when measured against the amount of investment and jobs created. In this paper, we argue instead that the 'competition' for capital can be politically beneficial to incumbent politicians. Building off work on electoral pandering, we argue that incentives allow politicians to take credit for firms' investment decisions. We test the empirical implications of this theory using a nationwide Internet survey, which employs a randomized experiment to test how voters evaluate the performance of incumbent US governors. Our findings illustrate a critical political benefit of offering such incentives. Politicians can use these incentives to take credit for investment flowing into their districts and to minimize the political fallout when investors choose to locate elsewhere. Adapted from the source document.