NGOs operate in a wide variety of activity sectors, ranging from service delivery topolitical advocacy. However, research has yet to systematically investigate whether theimpact of government repression varies across NGO activities. We hypothesize thatadvocacy NGOs are more affected by repression than those in service delivery. Sur-veying employees from 176 NGOs in Cambodia, we employ a conjoint experiment toexamine how the level of repression affects a task crucial to NGOs’ survival: obtain-ing funding via grant applications. We find that while increases in the prevalence ofharassment has a stronger deterrent effect for advocacy NGOs, harassment has a largedeterrent effect on service NGOs as well. Interviews and text analysis of open-endedquestions suggest that local officials target both advocacy and service delivery NGOs,but for different reasons. Our findings speak to the spread of authoritarianism and thechallenges faced by NGOs in countries with closing civic spaces.

Most of the poor in the developing world workin the informal economy—that is, in occupationsthat take place outside of the legal system of taxing, spending and regulating.This paper examineshow informal work impacts the policy and electoral preferences of the poor.Weemphasize theimportance of the risks inherent in informal employment in shaping the responsiveness of citizensto clientelism and their policy and voting preferences. Since most informal workers are not coveredby(formal)social insurance, they prefermaterial goods andcandidatesthat produce targeted,clientelistic benefits rather than programmatically deliveredinsurancethat is unlikely to reach them.As a result, weargue thatinformal workers are more likely to rely on clientelistic relations as a meansof hedging risks than formal workers,prefer policies thatare delivered clientelisticallyvia politicalmediators rather than programmatic solutions, and preferclientelisticoverprogrammatic localcandidates.Our findingselucidate why the preferences of poor informal workers often diverge fromthose assumed by standard models of social insurance and have important implications for thepolitical economy of socialpolicyin a world where billions work outsidework-based tax-transfersystems

For potential immigrants, the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced economic opportunities and increased risks both at home and abroad. We seek to understand how COVID-19 has impacted the calculations that govern one’s decision to emigrate. Leveraging a unique panel survey of Guatemalans recently deported from the U.S., we explore how COVID-19 has affected deportees’ economic well-being and the intent to re-migrate. We find that while COVID-19 does not measurably decrease deportees’ (already poor) current economic conditions, the pandemic increases expectations of being worse off in the next year and uncertainty about future economic conditions. Furthermore, the pandemic also increases uncertainty about whether deportees intend to re-migrate in the coming year. This increase in uncertainty reflects the increased difficulty potential migrants face in weighing relative opportunities and risks during a transnational crisis, even as one’s expectations about economic well-being in the home country become more pessimistic.

One of the linchpins of democratic accountability runs through service quality. Because citizens are sensitive to the quality of basic services, they can translate (dis)satisfaction into assessments of incumbent politicians. Yet, although previous research has shown that both access to, and the quality of, basic services decline in rural settings, this seems not to translate into increased dissatisfaction with incumbents. In this paper we seek to understand why. We theorize four potential mechanisms that might underpin the weaker accountability for poor service outcomes in more remote settings. To test these mechanisms, we use data from 34,514 geocoded survey respondents across 19 countries in Latin America. We show that the likelihood of translating dissatisfaction with services into discontent with elected officials decreases as distance to urban centers increases. We find some evidence that a low sense of political efficacy and deference to hierarchy mediate the relationship between remoteness, service quality and accountability. Nevertheless, some of the direct relationship between distance and attitudes towards elected officials persists in the face of our mediation analysis, suggesting that more work needs to be done on the relationship between remoteness, service quality and accountability.

Google search is ubiquitous, and Google Trends (GT) is a potentially useful access point for big data on many topics the world over. We propose a new ‘variance-in-time’ method for forecasting events using GT. By collecting multiple and overlapping samples of GT data over time, our algorithm leverages variation both in the mean and the variance of a search term in order to accommodate some idiosyncracies in the GT platform. To elucidate our approach, we use it to forecast protests in the United States. We use data from the Crowd Counting Consortium between 2017 and 2019 to build a sample of true protest events as well as a synthetic control group where no protests occurred. The model’s out-of-sample forecasts predict protests with higher accuracy than extant work using structural predictors, high frequency event data, or other sources of big data such as Twitter. Our results provide new insights into work specifically on political protests, while providing a general approach to GT that should be useful to researchers of many important, if rare, phenomena.

Day-to-day policing represents a fundamental interface between citizens and states. Yet even in the most capable states, local policing varies enormously from one community to the next. The authors seek to understand this variation and in doing so make three contributions: First, they conceptualize communities and individuals as networks more or less capable of demanding high-quality policing. Second, they present original survey data and semistructured interviews on local policing from over one hundred sixty slums, eight thousand households, and one hundred seventy informal neighborhood leaders in India that contribute to the nascent empirical work on comparative policing and order. Third, they find evidence that well-connected individuals and densely connected neighborhoods express greater confidence in and satisfaction with local policing. Critically, these differences do not appear to be a function of a lower propensity for local conflict but rather of an increased capacity to leverage neighborhood leaders to mediate relations with the police. The combination of analytics and empirics in this article provides insight into the conditions under which individuals and communities experience the police as expropriators of rents or neutral providers of order.

In developing countries, procedural ambiguity due to bureaucratic overlap and political discretion gives rise to divergence between law and practice. In this context of pervasive informality, it is important to consider how local negotiations produce disparate outcomes. We examine these local negotiations to explain how informal property rights are acquired and how markets operate in the slums of Bengaluru, India. Drawing on original interview and survey data, we describe how at least 18 types of property documents issued to urban slum residents can be ordered along a tenure continuum. Intermediaries are required to negotiate the opportunities that lie hidden within ambiguity. A first set of political intermediaries helps slum residents acquire property rights incrementally along this continuum. A second set of intermediaries helps facilitate informal housing transactions, keeping markets liquid across the tenure continuum. The mechanics of acquiring and transacting informal properties can differ across cities and countries, but, across contexts, intermediation helps negotiate informality.

Do sovereign bond markets react systematically to microeconomic policy reforms? Some observers suggest that investors are very attentive to supply-side policies such as those related to labor markets, corporate taxation, and product standards. They argue that, along with macroeconomic outcomes and broad financial market conditions, such reforms affect sovereign bond premiums, for developed as well as emerging economies. In contrast, we predict few systematic effects of supply-side policy reforms on sovereign bond market outcomes. Our theory draws on a standard three-equation model of the economy, widely accepted among economic and finance professionals. That model makes few clear predictions regarding the anticipated effects of microeconomic policy changes; as a result, we expect that such reforms will not generate systematic market reactions. Our analyses, based on daily data from 37 countries from 2004 to 2012, indeed reveal little evidence of a systematic bond market reaction to the 47 most significant reforms to corporate taxation and labor market regulation. These results call into question the notion that “bond market vigilantes” play a central role in compelling governments to enact specific microeconomic policy changes.

Projections suggest that most of the global growth in population in the next few decades will be in urban centres in Asia and Africa. Most of these additional urban residents will be concentrated in slums. However, government documentation of slums is incomplete and unreliable, and many slums remain undocumented. It is necessary to employ creative methods to locate and sample these understudied populations. We used satellite image analysis and fieldwork to build a sample of Indian slums. We show that living conditions vary along a wide-ranging continuum of wellbeing; different points correspond to different policy needs. We also show that most variation in conditions is due to differences across rather than within neighbourhoods. These findings have important implications for urban policy. First, satellite data can be a useful tool to locate undocumented settlements. Second, policy must be appropriately nuanced to respond to wide-ranging needs. Finally, variation patterns suggest that policies should be targeted at the neighbourhood rather than the individual level.

We argue that local, long-term exposure to a centralized political authority determines sub-national patterns of contemporary economic development. Older research on economic development has focused on cross-national income accounts, often ignoring the large sub-national variation in income differences. Likewise, research on the effects of political institutions on development has mostly neglected sub-national variation in the institutional environment. Yet a growing body of work shows that the geographic reach of states within countries and their ability to foster economic exchange have varied dramatically through history. We contribute to recent research on sub-national development by creating a new measure of local historical exposure to state institutions that codes geographic distance to historical capital cities and use highly spatially disaggregated data on economic development, based on satellite data, to test their relationship. We find clear evidence, using fixed-effects estimations for both European and global data, that local historical proximity to capital cities is associated with higher levels of economic development. This finding is further substantiated through a number of robustness checks covering alternative measures, specifications, and sensitivity analyses.

In most poor countries, basic services in rural areas are less accessible and of lower quality than those in urban settings. In this article, we investigate the subnational geography of service delivery and its relationship with citizens’ perceptions of their government by analyzing the relationship between service access, satisfaction with services and government, and the distance to urban centers for more than 21,000 survey respondents across 17 African countries. We confirm that access to services and service satisfaction suffer from a spatial gradient.
However, distant citizens are less likely than their urban peers to translate service dissatisfaction into discontent with their government; distant citizens have more trust in government and more positive evaluations of both local and national officials. Our findings suggest that increasing responsiveness and accountability to citizens as a means of improving remote rural services may face more limits than promoters of democratic
governance and citizen-centered accountability presume

A burgeoning literature documents robust links of income inequality with the prevalence of psychological disorders. The aim of this paper is to extend this literature by examining the effects of cross-national income inequality on prevalence of psychotic symptoms.

Research on decentralization in Africa and beyond has made clear that the quality of decentralized governance is highly variable across localities within countries. In light of that variation, this article has three goals: first, we critique existing academic research on the quality of governance in light of work on decentralized governance in Africa; second, we provide a conceptual map of how to theorize subnational variation in the quality of governance in settings characterized by considerable dependence on higher authorities for revenues; and third, we outline a series of data initiatives that offer the opportunity to study local and regional politics in new and exciting ways across the region. We conclude with great optimism about the prospects for innovative work on decentralized governance within countries across the region.

Apart from some notable exceptions, education is regrettably understudied in comparative politics. This paucity stems from both a dearth of reliable data on schooling and the fact that education raises analytical issues that fall outside the typical domain of political scientists. In light of education’s crucial role in everything from citizen attitudes to earnings to economic growth, we recommend that political scientists pay more attention to education. In particular, comparative researchers should shift from an almost exclusive focus on average levels of schooling to explaining the causes and consequences of educational inequality. To that end, we provide a broad comparative framework for analyzing the politics of education. In our formulation, skill-biased technological change and factor endowments condition the extent to which firms demand human capital. The supply of skills is a function of the interests and institutions that link voters and politicians. We conclude by positing theoretical and empirical puzzles for future research.

The dominant theoretical approaches in the comparative political economy of the welfare state provide alternative accounts for why some governments spend more on social policies than others. In the first, poor voters seek to increase their current income by taxing the rich, and social policy serves to redistribute income from the rich to the poor. In the second account, voters seek social insurance against future job loss, and social policy serves as an insurance mechanism rather than a redistributive one. Both of these accounts share the assumption that voters can clearly distinguish between the redistributive and insurance elements of public policy and, therefore, that individual-level characteristics (income, labor market risks) systematically shape preferences over social policy. Our goal is to examine the soundness of that behavioral assumption. We do so with a laboratory experiment that involves economic production, voting on taxation and fiscal transfers. We treat subjects with social policies that vary in their level of redistribution and insurance to examine how this impacts their preferred tax rate.

Proponents often recommend high labor standards as a means of reducing inequality between and within countries. Opponents suggest that labor standards exacerbate international and domestic inequalities. In this paper, we forward a simple argument whereby the impact of higher labor standards on domestic inequality depends on a country’s labor endowment. We hypothesize that where labor is abundant, higher standards will exacerbate inequality. Where labor is scarce, higher labor standards might lower inequality. In both cases, the impact of labor standards on inequality work through an employment and wage effect. Using newly available data on labor standards around the world from 1981 to 2000, we provide evidence largely consistent with our hypotheses. Higher labor standards do, indeed, exacerbate inequality in labor-abundant economies. On the other hand, higher labor standards lower inequality in labor-scarce economies. We discuss the implications of these findings for work on labor market insiders and outsiders as well as the political economy of development.

Noteworthy recent works by Boix (2003) and Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) suggest that democratization results from elite considerations of the redistributive costs associated with democracy and the threat of revolution (alternatively referred to as the cost of repression). In both models, the redistributive mechanism whereby higher inequality raises the cost of democratization does most of the heavy lifting. What exactly constitutes the threat of revolution or the cost of repression is under-specified, and there is no sense that the propensity for revolution or the costs of repression evolve in anything but random fashion. In this paper, we outline a simple model in which the poor’s relative “class power” or “revolutionary incentive” is conditional on the factors of production they own and the openness of the international trading system. We suggest that exogenous changes in the openness of the international economy have implications for the relative capacity of “workers” or “the poor” to threaten the established order. We examine this hypothesis using data from 1820 to the present, finding that the interaction between labor abundance and the openness of the global economy have important implications for regime stability and democratization. Our theory and evidence provide one account linking the political economy of international trade and inequality with the observed tendency of democracies to appear in “waves”.

Developing countries vary dramatically in the amount they spend on social insurance. We establish a theoretical framework linking autarkic post–World War II economic development strategies with the emergence of insurance-based social policies. We argue that a government’s choice of development strategy is conditioned by the size of the domestic market, relative abundance of labor, and land inequality in the context of a closed international trading system. The development strategy in turn shapes the fiscal priority governments place on social insurance. Contrary to the compensation hypothesis prominent in studies of the rich democracies, protectionist countries emphasize social insurance. Empirical analysis finds support for our argument. The results suggest that economic policies in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s had important implications for the emergence and current contours of social policy in the developing world. These differences in priorities swamp recent within-country changes.

Although fiscal policies of central governments sometimes provide modest insurance against regional income shocks, this paper shows that procyclical fiscal policy among provincial governments can easily overwhelm these stabilizing effects. We examine the cyclicality of budget items among provincial governments in seven federations, showing that own-source taxes are generally highly procyclical, and contrary to
common wisdom, revenue sharing and discretionary transfers are either acyclical or procyclical. Constituent governments are thus left alone to
smooth their own shocks, and we document the extent to which various restraints on borrowing and saving undermine their ability to do so. The
resulting procyclicality of provincial fiscal policy is likely to have important implications in a world where demands for countercyclical fiscal policy are increasing but considerable fiscal responsibilities are being devolved to subnational governments.

This note underscores the need for more precise causal theories linking the international division of labor, national economies, and public policies. To that end, the author recommends two literatures upon which a revised dependency theory might build, namely, those on economic geography and the political economy of redistribution.

The work linking natural resource wealth to authoritarianism and underdevelopment suffers from several shortcomings. In this article, the authors outline those shortcomings and address them in a new empirical setting. Using a new data set for the U.S. states spanning 73 years and case studies of Texas and Louisiana, the authors are able to more carefully examine both the diachronic nature and comparative legs of the resource curse hypothesis than previous research has. They provide evidence that natural resource dependence contributes to slower economic growth, poorer developmental performance, and less competitive politics. Using this empirical setting, they also begin parsing the mechanisms that might explain the negative association between resource wealth and political and economic development. They draw implications from intranational findings for resource abundant countries across the world and suggest directions for future cross-national and cross-state work.

Policymakers and scholars have turned their attention to federalism as a means for managing conflicts between central governments and subnational interests. But both the theoretical literature and the empirical track record of federations make for opposing conclusions concerning federalism’s ability to prevent civil conflict. This article argues that the existing literature falls short on two accounts: first, it lacks a systematic comparison of peaceful and conflict-ridden cases across federal states, and second, while some studies acknowledge that there is no one-sizefits-all federal solution, the conditional ingredients of peace-preserving federalism have not been theorized. The authors make the argument that the peace-preserving effect of specific federal traits—fiscal decentralization, fiscal transfers, and political copartisanship—are conditional on a society’s income level and ethnic composition. The argument is tested across twenty-two federal states from 1978 to 2000.

Research on comparative decentralization and federalism is a booming industry. Recent research integrates insights from political science, economics, and economic history in emphasizing the importance of incentives for the operation of decentralized government. Such work has focused particular attention on fiscal, representative, and party institutions. In reviewing the past decade’s research, I make two
arguments. First, the comparative research on decentralization and federalism provides a model for how comparative politics can address some of the most profound questions in social thought by focusing on a theoretically and empirically tractable aspect of governance. Second, although the research addresses many of the key questions in comparative politics, it also struggles with some of the same problems and challenges as comparative politics writ large, particularly the issue of institutional endogeneity. Attention to endogeneity is central to better understanding the workings of decentralized governments and providing less facile policy recommendations for the reform of places as diverse as the United States and Iraq.

What determines the relative strength of central and regional governments? Why do center engage in more or less geographically based economic redistribution? And why do some centers redistribute from urban to rural areas while others do the opposite? This research answers these questions with reference to decentralized politics at key constitutional moments. Much contemporary research underscores the importance of the intergovernmental balance of power – be it in taxing authority or decision making autonomy – on economic outcomes. Many features of that balance are rooted in bargains struck at the time of constitution writing. Here, I suggest that the key ingredients in such bargains are the number of conflicting geographically salient factor endowments, the distribution of inter-regional inequality, and the degree of intra-state inequality within rural and urban regions. The greater the level of factoral conflict, the more elites who engage in constitutional negotiations are likely to constrain the central government by providing for substantial regional veto authority. Higher levels of inter-regional inequality heighten demands for inter-regional redistribution. Given some level of regional demand for central redistribution, whether its net effect is in favor of urban or rural regions will depend on the coalitional implications of inequality within regions. I examine the argument in light of the U.S., Argentine, and Indian processes of constitution formation.

Recent research on federations, particularly in the developing world, emphasizes the importance of hard budget constraints and a strong central government to attenuate intergovernmental economic conflicts. Such research fails on two counts. First, it does not explain how hard budget constraints emerge or become self-enforcing. Second, it does not take into account the insight of the market-preserving federalism literature that central governments strong enough to impose restraint on regions are likely too powerful to be checked in a manner consistent with the longterm health of markets. Unfortunately, the market-preserving federalism literature itself provides little insight into how to move from a market-distorting to a market-preserving equilibrium. This article answers these theoretical shortcomings with reference to the evolution of political competition at the regional level and the representation of those regions at the national level. More specifically, whereas regional competition determines the subnational demand for soft budget constraints, the coalition of those regions at the national level determines the likelihood of their provision. Empirically, the research relies on a case study of the state debt crisis of the 1840s when the United States made a definitive movement toward market-preserving federalism

Despite multiple hypotheses as to the effects of global markets on domestic politics, relatively little research exists about the distributive consequences of market integration for government policy, particularly with respect to developing nations. It is commonly suggested that increased capital mobility results in governments that are more dependent on the exigencies of markets and therefore more responsive to the structural power of capital. This is an argument linking market integration to reductions in the quality of democracy as less mobile factors ~such as labor! are locked out of the political game+ In contrast, other scholars hold that the impact of global markets has been muted+ National diversities, they argue, are pervasive, and national governments retain significant capacities to respond diversely to the requirements of mobile capital. In such a case, the effects of markets on the relative strength of labor are felt at the margins+ Despite the prevalence of the former line of reasoning among developmental scholars, researchers have only begun to examine either theoretical orientation in the context of developing nations.

Research on the relationship between federalism and economic outcomes is currently characterized by a split personality. On the
one hand, long-standing traditions in research on fiscal federalism, public choice, and a more recent body of work on “market-preserving federalism” extol the virtues of decentralized fiscal and political decision making. Theoretically, where subnational politicians have incentives to respond to the diverse interests of multiple, decentralized constituencies, the public sector will be smaller and more efficient, markets will expand, and economies will grow more rapidly. On the other hand, it is difficult to ignore the growing evidence that federalism complicates policy-making on issues ranging from fiscal and monetary.

Prior research on the politics of market reform in developing nations has generally ignored the significant role of federal political and economic arrangements in shaping adjustment processes. In contrast, this research develops a model of macroeconomic reform that accounts for the significance of subnational economic policy in the developing world’s nine major federations. I examine five hypotheses which are expected to influence the capacity of developing federations to conduct polity consistent with the exigencies of market pressures. With the use of a cross-sectional time-series analysis of fiscal and monetary policies, I show that the policy divergence between levels of government shrinks when provincial governments have greater fiscal power and there are high degrees of party centralization across levels of government. These findings have important implications for the political economy of market reform, the widespread move toward fiscal decentralization, and the design of regional supranational institutions.

Using economic data for the period between 1979 and 1995 for forty-six large federal and unitary developing nations, I analyze the impact of political federalism in the developing world on a number of measures of national economic adjustment, volatility, and crisis. The findings suggest that federalism in the ten nations where it operates has, as theoretically predicted, a negative effect on macroeconomic performance and reform. I argue that the macroeconomic and fiscal imbalances experienced by these federal nations are, in part, structurally determined by their devolved political and fiscal institutions that create incentives for subnational governments to avoid the political costs of fiscal adjustment.

Existing research has failed to address the impact of subnational politics on economic adjustment. This article attempts to fill this gap by outlining theoretical reasons for anticipating policy divergences across levels of government and by offering three hypotheses to account for variation at the subnational level. The authors explore these ideas on the basis of the Argentine experience. The study traces the impact of subnational policy on Argentine economic adjustment and tests hypotheses about subnational policy variation on the basis of provincial fiscal data. The authors’ findings underline the importance of subnational policy choice for national performance and suggest a revised understanding of the role of political competition in the economic adjustment process. The authors find considerable evidence that interactions between party competition and the structure of the public sector shape provincial fiscal performance and thereby condition the capacity for economic adjustment at the national level.

Three different theoretical explanations are tested for the exceptionally high level of electoral volatility found in contemporary Latin America: economic voting, institutional characteristics of political regimes and party systems, and the structure and organization of class cleavages. A pooled cross-sectional time-series regression analysis is conducted on 58 congressional elections and 43 presidential elections in 16 Latin American countries during the 1980s and 1990s. Institutional variables have the most consistent effect on volatility, while the influence of economic performance is heavily contingent upon the type of election and whether the dependent variable is operationalized as incumbent vote change or aggregate electoral volatility. The results demonstrate that electoral volatility is a function of short-term economic perturbations, the institutional fragilities of both democratic regimes and party systems, and relatively fluid cleavage structures.