Suchergebnisse

What causes a government to invest - or not invest - in poor citizens, especially mass education? In this book, Stephen Kosack focuses on three radically different developing countries whose developmental trajectories bear little resemblance to each other and offers an elegant and pragmatic answer to this question.

This article argues against the scholarly consensus that governments make pro-poor policies when they are democratic. In democracies and autocracies, a government's strongest incentive is to serve citizens who are organized, and poor citizens face collective-action disadvantages. But a 'political entrepreneur' can help poor citizens organize and attain power with their support; to stay in power, the political entrepreneur's incentive is to maintain poor citizens' support with pro-poor policies. Politics and education are analyzed over half-a-century in countries with little in common -- Ghana, Taiwan, and Brazil. Governments that expanded education for the poor were more often autocratic than democratic, but were always clearly associated with political entrepreneurs. The results suggest an alternative understanding of government incentives to serve poor citizens. Adapted from the source document.

This article argues against the scholarly consensus that governments make pro-poor policies when they are democratic. In democracies and autocracies, a government's strongest incentive is to serve citizens who are organized, and poor citizens face collective-action disadvantages. But a 'political entrepreneur' can help poor citizens organize and attain power with their support; to stay in power, the political entrepreneur's incentive is to maintain poor citizens' support with pro-poor policies. Politics and education are analyzed over half-a-century in countries with little in common – Ghana, Taiwan, and Brazil. Governments that expanded education for the poor were more often autocratic than democratic, but were always clearly associated with political entrepreneurs. The results suggest an alternative understanding of government incentives to serve poor citizens.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the potential of transparency—the provision of information to the public—to improve governance in both developed and developing societies. In this article, we characterize and assess the evolution of transparency from an end in itself to a tool for resolving increasingly practical concerns of governance and government performance. After delineating four distinct varieties of transparency, we focus on the type that has received the most rigorous empirical scrutiny from social scientists—so-called "transparency and accountability" (T/A) interventions intended to improve the quality of public services and governance in developing countries. T/A interventions have yielded mixed results: some are highly successful; others appear to have little impact. We develop a rubric of five ideal-typical "worlds" facing transparency that helps to account for this variation in outcomes. Reform based on transparency can face obstacles of collective action, political resistance, and long implementation chains. T/A interventions are more likely to succeed in contextual "worlds" with fewer of these obstacles. We find that 16 experimental evaluations of T/A interventions are largely consistent with the theoretical predictions of our five-worlds rubric.