Suchergebnisse

Why do autocratic regimes contain bureaucratic corruption in some economic sectors but allow it in other areas? This paper examines variations in governance outcomes and perceptions across firms in Morocco based on a survey of 659 businesses. Three factors explain better public services and control of corruption: the magnitude of potential rents that firms can exchange with the administration, the collective action capacity of the sector vis-à-vis the executive, and the taxability of the industry. Firms in sectors with low rent potential are more likely to coordinate, claim, and obtain better governance in exchange for taxes, whereas high-rent companies find it difficult to sustain effective pro-governance collective action. The findings shed light on business–state relations in autocratic political regimes that have to balance revenue raising goals, policy commitments to selected sectors, and incentives for grand corruption.

Are autocratic leaders accountable to any constituencies? Does fiscal transparency play a role in relation to accountability? Simply put, do authoritarian executives have to "show the bill" of taxes raised and expenditure allocated to their political coalition of support in order to stay in power? What are the dimensions of transparency that matter? The main hypothesis is that the impact of transparency on autocratic accountability depends on the costs and benefits of the fiscal contract perceived by a pivotal constituency – the middle class. In one-party and personalistic regimes where this group is not incorporated into the network of privileges, being transparent about its high costs but low redeemable benefits endangers regime survival. By contrast, autocratic regimes with limited multiparty competition that include the middle class into their coalitions of support are more likely to be transparent about the fiscal costs and benefits of investment in regime longevity. This openness translates into accountability, since autocratic leaders who do not enact it have, on average, a shorter political tenure. I use cross-national measures of fiscal transparency and test the theoretical implications with several survival models of political tenure in autocracies across time and space.

In recent years, alongside democratic backsliding and security threats, censorship is increasingly used by governments and other societal actors to control the media. Who is likely to be affected by censorship and why? Does censorship as a form of punishment coexist with or act as a substitute for reward-based forms of media capture such as market concentration or bribes? First, this argues that censors employ censorship only toward certain targets that provide information to politically consequential audiences, while allowing media that caters to elite audiences to report freely. Second, the paper hypothesizes that coercion and inducements are substitutes, with censorship being employed primarily when bribes and ownership fail to control information. To test these hypotheses, a new data set was built of 9,000 salient censorship events and their characteristics across 196 countries between 2001 and 2015. The study finds strong empirical support for the theory of media market segmentation.

What explains different levels of clientelism across countries? Why do some politicians deliver clientelistic goods to their electoral constituencies, and why do some voters demand them? This article focuses on the historical origins of trust in states and shows that they have a lasting impact on contemporary patterns of patronage. The shift to programmatic politics reflects a historical transition from personalized trust in politicians to trust in impersonal bureaucracies tasked by political parties to implement policy. Past experience with public bureaucracy informs the expectations of voters and parties regarding the performance of the state and its ability to provide public goods, which in turn shape the degree of clientelistic exchange across societies. To capture state capacity, the authors focus on the critical juncture before the expansion of women's suffrage, and use the ability of public bureaucracies to reduce infant mortality in the interwar period as a proxy for historical state capacity and as an instrument to predict trust. Macrodata from eightyeight electoral democracies and microdata from the most recent wave of the World Value Survey provide supportive evidence for the theory.

How does the social and political context in which decision-makers find themselves in affect their ability to realize their reform goals? How does this context facilitate or inhibit specific reform agendas and projects? How can we operationalize and evaluate these risks and opportunities in order to decide what reforms and projects are feasible given the circumstances? This book provides the reader with the full panoply of political economy tools and concepts necessary to understand, analyze, and integrate how political and social factors may influence the success or failure of their policy goals. Starting with the empirical puzzle of why corruption, rent seeking, and a lack of good governance emerge and persist in a host of countries and sectors the book reviews how collective action problems and the role of institutions, as well as a host of ancillary political economy concepts can affect the feasibility of different projects. However, the book is not just a one stop shop of political economy concepts, but also provides practical advice on how to organize and use this information via the introduction of stakeholder mapping tools and the development of an actionable political economy toolkit.In other words researchers, graduate students, and policy practitioners interested in understanding, the what, the why and the how of policy reform will find this book an essential tool.