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The shifting emphasis on performance evaluation and accountability in the context of financial lending or foreign-aid arrangements sponsored by international organizations (IOs) has brought to the fore the question of government ownership of reforms. While the concept of ownership has featured highly in academic and policy debates over the effects of IO conditionality, it arguably remains theoretically elusive, ill-identified, and under-specified. In this article, we focus on International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs and define government ownership with respect to the counterfactual level of de jure structural reforms that would be achieved in the absence of IMF conditionality. We then use the synthetic control method to identify continuous levels of ownership as a function of a treatment effect on treated compliers and operationalize the concept of ownership over external- and financial-sector conditionality across a restricted sample of uninterrupted IMF arrangements (1980–2014). Furthermore, we probe the criterion and construct validity of our measure with respect to known determinants, proxies, and outcomes of ownership. We argue that ours is a reliable, replicable, valid, robust, and systematic measure of ownership that can help better identify and estimate the indirect relationship between program design and policy implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature argues that with ever‐increasing levels of supranational constraints governments have less 'room to manoeuvre'; therefore, voters will place less weight on policy outcomes in their voting decisions. The question that remains less explored is how voters fill this accountability gap. We argue that, in this context, voters may move away from outcome‐ to input‐oriented voting. Fulfilling their promises becomes less vital for incumbents as long as they exhibit effort to overturn an unpopular policy framework. We test this argument against a survey experiment conducted in the run‐up to the September 2015 election in Greece, where we find a positive impact of the incumbent's exerted effort to challenge the status quo of austerity on vote intention for SYRIZA – the senior coalition government partner at the time – despite the failed outcome of the government's bailout negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite years of crisis, the euro has enjoyed strong popular support across the Eurozone periphery. In light of the high costs of internal devaluation strategies, this begs the question why the public has remained in favor of the common currency. In this article, we propose a theoretical mechanism that accounts for both voters' pocketbook preferences and their sociotropic assessments over the noisy trade-offs associated with the outcomes of euro membership and euro exit. Using original survey data from three consecutive survey waves in Greece (conducted in July, September, and December 2015, respectively), we analyze the attitudes of Greek voters toward the euro in an environment of acute uncertainty, austerity, high unemployment, and economic recession. First, we juxtapose our uncertainty mechanism of popular euro attitudes against other explanations put forward in the literature and find strong support for our argument. Second, we conduct a survey experiment to tap into attitudes toward the euro-austerity trade-off and find that as uncertainty over policy outcomes diminishes, framing effects abate in significance, especially among those who voted No in the July 2015 referendum. Finally, we derive distinct sets of euro preferences for different 'vulnerability profiles'. Over time, as the trade-offs of euro membership become more pronounced, we find a marked fall in euro support between July and December 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the prospect of accession to an international union affect a non-member-state government's incentives to implement political and economic liberalization reforms? To answer this question, we propose an informational mechanism of international union accession conditionality drawing on Bénabou and Tirole's (The Review of Economic Studies, 70, 489–520, 2003) formalization of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In a Bayesian game of union accession between a supranational principal (e.g., EU Commission) and a national agent (e.g., the government of the target country), we find that the extrinsic bonus of post-accession transfers may on the one hand reinforce the agent's short-term incentives to meet the accession criteria but on the other hand can also "crowd out" its intrinsic motivation to liberalize and comply with the union's acquis in the long run. As a result, we expect that (i) net-recipient countries' post-accession pace of reform may decline or even turn negative over time (temporal effect), (ii) the crowding-out effect will be stronger for countries that enjoy higher levels of distributive net transfers and those that go through a lengthier negotiation period (spatial effect), and (iii) early liberalizers are ex ante more likely to be officially selected as union candidate members, accept the accession contract, and implement the required reforms. We illustrate the theoretical mechanism and dynamics of the model with anecdotal evidence from two paired comparisons in respect to the effects of economic conditionality attached to EMU accession (Greece vs. Spain) and political conditionality attached to EU accession (Hungary vs. Estonia). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to analyze the political economy of military conscription policy and its relationship with a country's external security environment. National security is modeled as a non-rivalrous and non-excludable public good, whose production technology consists of either centrally conscripted or competitively recruited military labor. Conscription is construed as an implicit discretionary tax on citizens' labor endowment. Based on this, I propose a simple political economy model of pure public goods provision financed by two policy instruments: a lump-sum income tax and a conscription tax. Constraint optimization of a quasi-linear utility function gives rise to three general classes of preferences: high- and low-skilled citizens will prefer an all-volunteer army, albeit of different size, whereas medium-skilled citizens will favor positive levels of conscription. These derived preferences allow me to tease out an explicit relationship between military manpower procurement policy, a country's level of external threat, and its pre-tax income inequality levels. One of my key findings is that more egalitarian countries are more likely to use conscription as a military manpower procurement mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the relationship between supranational integration and domestic party-system polarization (extremism). We first construct a theoretical argument that uncovers the key trade-off between the "output legitimacy" of a supranationally integrated party system and the inevitable loss of "input legitimacy" caused by externally imposed policy constraints. This translates into a strategic tradeoff between responsibility and responsiveness at the party level of electoral competition. We hypothesize that while moderate supranational policy constraints can initially speed-up platform convergence, ever-closer political integration may reverse the trend towards higher levels of party-system polarization and party extremism. We apply our framework to the case of EU integration and test our key non-monotonic prediction both at the party-system level of polarization and at the party level of ideological extremism. Finally, we apply to synthetic control method (SCM) for causal inference in comparative case studies to study how political integration and supranational policy constraints have affected their overall level of party-system polarization over time. Our overall empirical analysis strongly corroborates our theoretical argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does conditionality always work? If, as it appears, the answer is negative, why do certain externally incentivized countries comply while others do not? To answer these questions we rely on cognitive psychology and dynamic Bayesian principal-agent games to develop a theory of downwards-sloping long-run supply curves. More specifically, we explain how, when applied to an intrinsically motivated agent, external incentives imposed by an informed principal carry an informative signal which in the long run crowds out the agent's intrinsic motivation. To probe the plausibility of the ensuing hypotheses we compare the reformist pace of two centre-left governments of financially distressed Southern European countries during the eurozone crisis, namely Greece's Papandreou administration and Spain's Rodríguez Zapatero administration. Based on the analysis of more than 400 newspaper reports and 12 expert interviews we find positive support for our theory: while Papandreou quickly admitted the need for far-reaching and politically costly reforms, Zapatero initially delayed all kinds of measures. But as European incentives kicked in, the strongly incentivized Papandreou went into irreversible reform fatigue, while the softly incentivized Zapatero dedicated his last months in office to bring about unprecedented reforms. We conclude with some indications about future research in this direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on a Condorcetian common-values framework, this paper tackles the question of optimal committee formation within a community of finite size. Solving for the Bayesian information aggregation game yields some interesting normative results that emphasize the presence of informational externalities as root causes of suboptimally low voluntary participation levels in communal decision-making and the potentially Pareto-enhancing nature of drafting vis-à-vis decentralized mechanisms of self-selection. I firstly derive the optimal size of a committee based on the assumption of informative voting and, then, I show that it is globally optimal amongst all voting equilibrium strategies. I subsequently compare it to the various symmetric equilibria that may arise in a complete information setting or a Bayesian environment with heterogeneous private costs. I finally sketch out an optimal transfer scheme that can ex ante implement the socially efficient committee size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new theoretical framework of international unions qua coalitions of countries adopting a common policy and common supranational institutions. I make use of a three-country spatial bargaining game of coalition formation, in order to examine the endogenous strategic considerations in the creation and enlargement of international unions. Why would we observe a gradualist approach in the formation of the grand coalition even if the latter is assumed to be weakly efficient? I propose asymmetric information about the benefits of integration as a mechanism that can generate gradual union formation in equilibrium. As it turns out, it may well be in the ‘core’ countries’ interest to delay the accession of a third, ‘peripheral’ country in order to (1) stack the institutional make-up of the initial union in their favor and (2) signal their high resolve to wait out the expansion of their bilateral subunion. A related case from the European experience provides an interesting illustration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]