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There is growing affinity for audits as a tool to promote political accountability and reduce corruption. Nevertheless, knowledge about the mechanisms through which audits work remains limited. While most work on audits shows that they can work via citizen sanctions of bad performers, we emphasize that audit effects can also run through prospective incentives, that is, the desire to avoid poor audit results in the first place. We distinguish audits' impact on prospective incentives and sanctions using a field experiment in Ghana; districts were randomized into audit treatment conditions targeting district procurement and oversight of development projects. We assess the effect of audits on political officials using survey experimental data and show that officials respond powerfully to prospective incentives. In districts treated with top‐down audits, in‐party favoritism falls from 60 percent at baseline to 20 percent at midline, and rates remain at 19 percent at endline. This suggests that the audit's main effect occurred before the audit results were made public, and that prospective mechanisms play an important role in audit efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research suggests that "high-impact practices" such as project-based and experiential learning make important contributions to undergraduate student development and outcomes. However, most attempts to evaluate such programs are based on qualitative or self-reported data generated from small samples. This study examines the impact on student development of a large university program that incorporates project-based learning into applied, vertically integrated, interdisciplinary research teams. We deploy a range of evidence, including self-reported assessments with a comparison group, a matched-pairs analysis of educational outcomes, participant surveys, and an alumni survey. By including a counterfactual comparison, our study demonstrates that applied projects can foster intellectual growth and positive academic outcomes among undergraduate students by: (1) contributing to skill development in relation to research, teamwork, and critical thinking; (2) developing closer relationships among students, faculty, and others within the university; (3) increasing the likelihood that a student graduates with distinction; and (4) contributing to career discernment that shapes students' post-graduate trajectories, often predisposing students toward careers in public service. We comment on the most important factors for faculty and universities seeking to replicate this model: an emphasis on team organization and operations; the opportunity for students to develop close relationships aided by layered mentoring; and applied research. We also lay out the case for developing a general structure of evaluation for such programs to facilitate comparisons across educational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community policing, and citizen cooperation with law enforcement more broadly, can improve local security outcomes by providing decentralized mechanisms for police accountability to local citizens. We hypothesize that five factors—alignment of citizen/police interests, relative costs of cooperation, costs of crime, prevalence of others' cooperation, and perceived police efficacy—comprise a decision framework that guides citizens' choices regarding whether to share information with law enforcement. We find evidence for this framework using rich survey and survey experimental data from a large nation-wide survey of Guatemalans and municipal administrative data. Our results indicate that increasing police efficacy, witness protection, and neighborhood trust boost the odds of cooperation with police by up to 55%. At a time when conversations about the relationship between community and police are widespread, this research offers insights into conditions under which cooperation between community members and law enforcement is most likely to occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the poor in the developing world work in the informal economy, that is, in occupations that take place outside of the legal system of taxing, spending, and regulating. This article examines how informal work impacts the policy and electoral preferences of the poor. We emphasize the importance of the risks inherent in informal employment in shaping the responsiveness of citizens to clientelism and their policy and voting preferences. Since most informal workers are not covered by (formal) social insurance, they prefer material goods and candidates that produce targeted, clientelistic benefits rather than programmatically delivered insurance that is unlikely to reach them. As a result, we argue that informal workers are more likely to rely on clientelistic relations as a means of hedging risks than are formal workers; prefer policies that are delivered clientelistically via political mediators rather than programmatic solutions; and prefer clientelistic over programmatic local candidates. Our findings elucidate why the preferences of poor informal workers often diverge from those assumed by standard models of social insurance and have important implications for the political economy of social policy in a world where billions work outside work-based tax-transfer systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are a core component of a robust civil society and operate in a wide variety of sectors, ranging from service delivery to political advocacy. However, research has yet to systematically investigate whether the impact of government repression varies across NGO activities. We hypothesize that advocacy NGOs are more affected by repression than those in service delivery. Surveying 176 employees from 106 NGOs in Cambodia, we employ a conjoint experiment to examine how the level of repression affects a task crucial to NGOs' survival: obtaining funding via grant applications. We find that while increases in the severity of repression appear to have a stronger deterrent effect for advocacy NGOs, repression has a large deterrent effect on service NGOs as well. Interviews and text analysis of open-ended questions suggest that local officials target both advocacy and service delivery NGOs, but for different reasons. Our findings speak to the spread of authoritarianism and the challenges NGOs face in countries with closing civic spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 fixedeffects 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: 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.Method: Analyses used archival data of representative samples from 50 countries (N = 249,217). Four types of psychotic symptoms were assessed using the well-validated CIDI interview. We examined the effects of Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID) measures of the concentration of income in the top percentile of people and the Gini coefficient of income inequality.Results: Income inequality was significantly correlated with the national prevalence of hallucinations, delusions of thought control, and delusional mood, and effects withstood control over national indices of per capita income and regime type. Findings were also robust to nonparametric bootstrapping.Conclusions: Although the cross-sectional design limits ability to claim causality, income inequality appears important for understanding psychotic symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses correlation between globalization, public finance and poverty. Topics discussed include reduction in corporate tax rates and receipts, incidence of taxing, spending, and tax expenditures and use of standard cross-national budget data to study the link between globalization, public finances, and poverty. Other topics include several graphs related to social transfers.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. We complement the experimental evidence with data from original survey questions that assess voters’ knowledge of the distributive characteristics of different social policies in the U.S. Evidence from both settings suggest only marginal support for behavioral underpinnings of the standard insurance model, particularly as the empirical setting more closely approximates the real world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of 'waves' of regime change, in which large numbers of countries experience similar political transitions at roughly similar periods of time, though once popular, have fallen from favor. Replacing the 'third wave' arguments are several competing models relating domestic social structure-specifically, the distribution of income and factor ownership-to regime type. If any of these distributive models of regime type is correct, then global trade has an important explanatory role to play. Under factor-based models, changes in the world trading system will have systematic effects on regime dynamics. Trade openness determines labor's factor income and ultimately its political power. As world trade expands and contracts, countries with similar labor endowments should experience similar regime pressures at the same time. We propose a novel empirical specification that addresses the endogeneity and data-quality problems plaguing previous efforts to examine these arguments. We investigate the conditional impact of the global trading system on democratic transitions across 130 years and all of the states in the international system. Our findings cast doubt on the utility of factor-based models of democratization, despite their importance in fueling renewed interest in the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the extent to which party systems are nationalized in four federations. In doing so, the research addresses two questions. First, is dual accountability operational across decentralized countries, or do sub-national voters turn to national cues as a means to economize in a complex information environment? By bringing a cross-national dataset to bear on this question, we are able to provide insight into where and why dual accountability might operate. Second, what explains variation in the extent to which party systems are nationalized across countries and time? We build on previous literature to suggest a number of factors likely to impact the extent of nationalization. We examine those factors in the context of provincial-level elections in Argentina, Canada, Germany and the United States. Using national and sub-national economic data, we find little evidence of dual accountability in any of our countries. We find that economic performance matters little for regional electoral outcomes, and where it does, sub-national outcomes reflect national rather than sub-national conditions. More important are the roles of partisan relations across levels of government and election timing. Sub-national co-partisans of the nationally governing party lose votes, particularly as the time from the most recent national election grows. The strength of these effects varies across our cases in predictable ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers widely recognize that economic crises have important political consequences, yet there is little systematic research on the political factors that make nations more or less susceptible to economic crisis. Scholars have long debated the economic consequences of party systems, executive powers, and societal interest groups, but their relationships to crisis proclivity are poorly understood. We assess the political correlates of economic crisis using a cross-sectional time-series analysis of 17 Latin American countries over nearly three decades. Crises are measured along two dimensions-depth and duration-and disaggregated into three types: inflationary, GDP, and fiscal crises. Statistical results suggest that political institutions have a modest, and often unexpected, correlation with crises. More important than institutional attributes are social organization and the nature of party-society linkages, particularly the existence of a densely-organized trade union movement and/or a powerful leftist party. Strong unions and powerful parties of the left are associated with more severe economic crises, though there is some evidence that the combination of left-labor strength can alleviate inflationary crises. The results demonstrate the need to disaggregate the concept of economic crisis and incorporate the societal dimension when studying the political economy of crisis and reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work linking natural resource wealth to authoritarianism and under- development 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Robert Franzese and Jude Hays on the impact of international diffusion on capital taxation and another by Christopher Anderson and Matthew Singer on the relationship between voter participation and inequality.

The author comments on the article "Debating the Direction of Comparative Politics, " by Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder published within the issue. He remarks that the authors had outlined that qualitative research on comparative politics is less rigorous that it constricts its capacity to form valid casual claims. He notes that while the authors made such assertion, they have failed to present data to prove its true.

The article underlines federalism as a way for managing conflicts between central governments and subnational interests. It is specified that both the theoretical literature and the empirical record of federations make for opposing conclusions regarding the ability of federalism to prevent civil conflict. It is posed that the peace-preserving effect of federal traits, like fiscal decentralization and political copartisanship, depends on a society's ethnic composition and income level.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What determines the relative strength of central and regional governments? Why do centers 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides answers to theoretical shortcomings with reference to the evolution of political competition at the regional level and the representation of those regions at the national level. Federalism, economics and the challenge of hard budget constraints; Federal foundations of hard budget constraints.

Examines the effects of federalism on macroeconomic management. Influences of the fiscal and political factors in federalism; Analysis of the level of fiscal decentralization; Determinants of fiscal balance and inflation.

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 macroeco-nomic 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 policy consistent with the exigencies of market pressures. With the use of a cross-sec-tional 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tests three theoretical explanations for the high level of electoral volatility in Latin America. Economic voting; Institutional characteristics of political regimes and party systems; Structure and organization of class cleavages.