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This paper investigates the relationship between individuals' attitudes towards fairness and their views about tax compliance in developing countries. It argues that individuals' attitudes regarding fairness shape their views about paying taxes and their ethical stances regarding tax evasion. Using survey data for 18 major cities in Latin America, we find that individuals who are highly sensitive to fairness are less likely to consider paying taxes as a civic duty and more likely to justify tax evasion. These attitudes toward tax compliance are not inelastic. We also find evidence that individualst argues about reciprocity and merit mediate the effect of fairness on personal views about tax compliance. Finally, this paper shows that the heuristics people use to explain their position in the income distribution make them sensitive to inequality, and it affects their tax morale. These findings help us better understand the concept of reciprocity and provide valuable lessons on the urgent task of expanding fiscal capacity to promote economic growth and inequality in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue examines environmental governance, conceptualized as environmental protections, support for sustainable development, and the regulation of large-scale development projects. Through analysis of dynamics during the commodities super-cycle of the 2000s–2010s, contributors explore the multifaceted ways that societal actors interact with the state to support, oppose, or modify environmental governance, with a focus on communities impacted by export activities and economic elites who favor their expansion. Several papers seek to understand the governance of sectors—mining, oil, and soy. Others begin with natural areas threatened by development—urban wetlands and forests. As a collection, the papers reveal three commonalities that affect the extent to which environmental governance institutions address demands of impacted communities: (1) the question of whether a policymaking process takes place in reaction to mobilizing, or whether it proactively engages environmental questions as they pertain to local populations; (2) strategies by civil society, and above all impacted residents, to ensure the implementation of environmental policies; and (3) debates over knowledge, including community efforts to harness expertise and information to counter paradigms advanced by business actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between counterinsurgency and institution-building? When do wartime institutions persist once conflict has ended? Classic theories examine how war spurs new institutions within the central state, while extensive research on rebel governance examines how insurgent actors forge new rules to garner civilian compliance and cement control. However, the legacies of armed conflict for state institutions in the theater of war remain relatively neglected. We theorize the process of local counterinsurgent institution-building and the drivers of institutional endurance following counterinsurgency. By analyzing two local counterinsurgent institutions in Nicaragua and a shadow case drawn from Indonesia, we find that while state leaders may generate new institutional arrangements to elicit information and garner resources, institutional persistence is driven by local reappropriation as communities pursue their own postwar governance and development goals. Overall, this paper contributes a new understanding for the divergent postwar paths of local institutions generated amid counterinsurgency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research shows that domestic unrest, and especially violent conflict, raises political risk and discourages foreign direct investment (FDI). However, prior work primarily has studied private Western multinational corporations, not authoritarian China, the second largest overseas investor, which has both state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and privately-owned enterprises (POEs). This paper investigates the effects of domestic conflict on overseas Chinese FDI. We first compare Chinese SOE and POE investments in host states facing political unrest. Next, we disaggregate political unrest, examining the effect of violent and non-violent campaigns on Chinese SOEs and POEs. We then disaggregate the sector of FDI inflows. Contrary to prior conflict studies, we find host states under political unrest, and specifically violent campaigns, attract Chinese SOEs no matter the economic sector, whereas POEs are more risk averse. Our findings show that Chinese SOEs favor higher risk investments, suggesting the need for theoretical nuance in the domestic conflict and FDI literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donors have strongly advocated decentralization on the grounds that it broadens the participation of citizens in development processes, thereby increasing government responsiveness to their needs. Although there have been studies seeking to establish the veracity of this claim, they remain weak on two fronts. One, while wealth differentials affect citizen participation, these studies approach citizens as a homogenous group. Two, participation is mostly viewed narrowly—participation in elections. Drawing on empirical data from Ghana's decentralization reform, this paper addresses these gaps by questioning how pro-poor citizen participation in decentralized development planning has been. I argue that although Ghana's decentralization was propagated on championing pro-poor grassroots participation in governance and development, in reality, participation is elitist and has failed to reflect the voices of the poor. My findings demonstrate that the participation structures and processes used in local development planning are unfavourable to the poor in many respects. Elite and representative participation is promoted to the detriment of broad citizen participation. This exclusion is resulting in surging apathy of citizens towards the district assemblies—institutions hitherto trusted as their development champions. This paper concludes that the poor will remain voiceless despite decentralization unless the structural barriers to their participation are tackled in decentralization design and praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, agribusiness expansion in Argentina involved the exponential growth of pesticide use throughout the country. Pesticide exposure has become a widespread problem in rural areas and farming towns, but protests and conflicts about this issue are the exception rather than the norm. Why? Based on archival work, interviews, and ethnographic observations, in this paper, we scrutinize pesticide governance at the subnational scale to elucidate this puzzle, focusing on a) informal arrangements (face-to-face negotiations between pesticide users and people affected by them), b) juridical conflicts (lawsuits against farmers over exposure of people and crops to herbicides), and c) regulatory challenges (when rural populations and environmentalists push for local ordinances to curb pesticide exposure). We find that local cultural codes encourage informal agreements and that social inequalities prevent conflicts from arising in the public sphere. The interventions of social movements and civil society organizations (or lack thereof) and the mobilization of expertise also shape pesticide governance. Our analysis highlights that pesticide governance is context-dependent or situated, and informed by subtle but significant power asymmetries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To meet the growing global demand for minerals and new energy sources, governments in the Global South advance policy interventions to improve the unequal distribution of the cost and benefits of resource extraction. This paper explains the politics behind the implementation of the Closing Development Gaps (CDG) Plan, a new redistributive plan on behalf of Amazonian Indigenous peoples near the oil circuit in the Loreto region of Peru. It emphasizes the long-lasting impact of mobilizing strategies of indigenous organizations, which relayed critical information to policymakers about the claims both old and new of Indigenous peoples neighboring the oil circuit. It also draws attention to the permeability of state institutions, which allowed newer state agencies with distinct policy streams to advance new solutions to old problems. While the CDG Plan seeks to improve resource governance by focusing on infrastructure gaps (e.g., water and sanitation, electrification), it excludes the "political gaps" and the most contentious claims related to the environment that have moved Amazonian Indigenous peoples into struggle in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental governance in the mining sector, focusing on the case of CODELCO, a Chilean copper mining company. The study examines the factors that triggered changes in CSR strategies and the types of organizational changes that were introduced. The article argues that CSR strategies in the mining sector are influenced by a combination of national and subnational factors, including tightening environmental regulations, social conflicts, and reputational crises. The paper contributes to the literature on CSR and environmental governance by providing empirical evidence and proposing a three-level institutional framework to analyze the evolution of CSR. [Extracted from the article]

Under what conditions do incumbents support, tolerate, or try to rein in armed groups within their borders? The paper argues that incumbents strategize toward armed groups in ways that help them manage the ruling coalition and remain in power. I find that incumbents support armed groups in provinces where provincial politicians have defected from the ruling coalition to opposition parties, recruiting armed groups to deliver the province in national elections with fraud and violence and punish elite defectors. Where incumbents are not fighting to keep provinces in the ruling coalition, I show that they tolerate non-dissident groups that enjoy social contracts with local communities, and try to contain their dissident counterparts. Incumbents are likely to repress predatory armed groups, dissident and non-dissident alike. Doing so helps boost elite and mass support for incumbents and project central government power into the province. The argument was inductively built with comparative case studies from Nigeria and then evaluated in Kenya. The findings contribute to an important research agenda on government-armed group relationships and carry implications for security sector aid and reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some movement parties successfully institutionalize into a functioning party organization while others struggle? This paper argues that not all movement parties institutionalize in the same way. Movement parties that emanate out of a long-term social movement organization face a qualitatively different set of challenges than those that form out of a short-term movement. Routinization—the process of parties developing rules, regulation, and predictable behavior—is a particularly crucial component for short-term movement party institutionalization. When parties emanate out of long-standing social movement organizations, they are advantaged because they already have existing formal rules and regulations. Short-term parties however, are disadvantaged because they lack these organizational structures. Further, short-term movement parties not only need routinization, but must make it a priority; the sequencing of their institutionalization matters. I demonstrate the importance of routinization with the case of Taiwan's New Power Party, a movement party formed out of the 2014 Sunflower Movement. This case shows how struggles to routinize early for short-term movement parties leads to crucial causal mechanisms hindering party institutionalization instead of helping it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have noted that output per worker varies enormously across countries. Using firm-level survey data, the present paper contributes to the related literature by analyzing difference in labor productivity between firms in 22 upper middle-income and 11 high-income countries. Labor productivity in upper-middle-income countries is about 57.5% lower than in high-income countries. The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition analysis of the productivity gap reveals that the gap is somewhat larger due to differences in the level of contributory factors (endowment effect) than due to differences in the returns to such factors (structural effect). That is, 55.2% of the productivity gap is due to endowment effect and the remaining 44.8% is due to structural effect. The biggest contributors via the endowment effect include tertiary education attainment, law and order, and quality management. Factors that contribute most via the structural effect include secondary education attainment, market size, and law and order. Thus, our results underline the importance of human capital, institutions and market size for the upper middle-income countries aspiring to become high-income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the impact of institutional shifts on the strategic choices of Russian firms. It proposes and tests hypotheses of how a shift from a weak to a strong institutional context is likely to affect firms' knowledge accumulation, absorptive capacities and internalisation of operations. Using discriminant analysis, the econometric investigation demonstrates that firms tend to allocate greater resources towards improving their knowledge and absorptive capacity and make more efforts to vertically integrate—in line with improvements in the institutional environment. These investments ensure the survivability and competitiveness of firms in the long term. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that the long-term strategic orientation of firms goes hand in hand with rising resource allocations by the nation-state towards economic development. The findings align with the institutionalist political economy views that institutions are the ultimate overseers that allow the market to operate efficiently, especially in emerging market environments. The paper is also instructive to other developing economies about the need to strengthen their institutional environments, which supports the long-term orientation of firms and has a positive impact on economic development. The analysis does not take into account the impact of sanctions on Russian business and economy, post the annexation of Crimea and the armed conflict with Ukraine. Nor does it consider the impact of COVID-19 on the economy. As such, the study attempts to constitute an untainted comparison of two paths of transition on Russian firms—shock therapy, vis-à-vis, an institutional political economy approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development economics has long focused on growth patterns to explain countries' ability to catch up and forge ahead. We argue, however, that resilience to economic shrinking matters more. Using the examples of Brazil and Indonesia, we propose that a framework consisting of social capabilities—namely structural transformation, autonomy, and inclusion—can explain why Indonesia is more resilient to economic shrinking than Brazil and why the country is more likely to be successful in its catching-up process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike prevailing research methodologies in the interdisciplinary field of global health, feminist methodologies allow researchers to unsettle the premises and assumptions of the field. This paper describes how we mobilize transnational feminist ethnography in our research on HIV in India and postabortion care in Senegal. Transnational feminist perspectives enable us to re-embed HIV prevention and post-abortion care in the politics of gender and sexuality and in postcolonial histories of health governance. They consider the role of gender and sexuality not just in terms of gendered health inequalities, but also in terms of how global health problems are defined, managed, measured, and contested. We outline how our projects put this lens into practice by pushing the methodological boundaries of time, scale, and scope and through a historicized, multisited, and multiscalar approach that triangulates multiple sources of data. Feminist ethnography requires that we turn the critical gaze upon ourselves, reflecting on multiple and shifting personal and professional positionalities during and after fieldwork and our ethical commitments to our interlocutors. While acknowledging the significant personal, institutional, and professional challenges of using feminist methodologies, especially given the dominant modes of research in global health, we urge greater consideration, among both advanced and early scholars, of the possibilities they offer for studying global health problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differential access to life-saving COVID-19 vaccines reveals the inequitable distribution of wealth and power in the global system. While several countries have developed homegrown vaccines to avoid being priced out of markets dominated by transnational drug companies, Brazil—a country with a significant research and pharmaceutical base—lagged behind those of other middle-income countries. Why? This paper blends insights from dependency theory and the theory of global capitalism to demonstrate how political coalitions, leadership, and normative frameworks negatively affect state capacity and technological development. First, austerity in public investment in research, development, and innovation prior to and during the pandemic limited the amount of resources necessary to create homegrown vaccine candidates. Second, political leadership informed by science denialism did not prioritize the development of vaccines and even discouraged their use. The analysis of vaccine development in Brazil reveals that having a pharmaceutical base and strong leadership committed to scientific principles and backed by a political coalition seeking to expand social democratic rights play a vital role in developing treatments and responding to health crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The average number of hours we spend at work varies dramatically by country. Previous research focuses on tax policy, social security, and labor market regulation to explain the differences. This paper builds on previous work by focusing on politics. Specifically, it examines the relationship between democracy and the average number of hours worked per person employed. Using data on the supply of labor from the Penn World Tables 9.1, I find there is an important difference between democracies and dictatorships: as GDP/capita increases, individuals in democracies spend fewer hours at work than their counterparts in dictatorships. The results are robust to various specifications of the model that account for selection bias and data that are missing not at random (MNAR). These findings imply that the elections, civil rights, and the political liberties associated with democracy influence the amount of time people spend at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature suggests ethnic diversity has a negative effect on development. Yet, we also know that government policies—e.g., recognizing multiple languages in minority-sizable areas—can attenuate these effects. In this paper, we ask: What are the socioeconomic implications of minority language recognition? We leverage a legal stipulation in Romania as a quasi-experiment: Minority languages are recognized as official in areas where the minority constitutes more than 20% of the population. We argue the recognition of minority languages builds social trust and facilitates efficiency in economic exchanges—mollifying the otherwise detrimental consequences of diversity. Using data at the municipality level, we find that in areas where only Romanian is recognized, ethnic diversity has a negative effect on development—a result consistent with the literature. This effect, however, is absent in areas where a minority language is recognized. The implications suggest that lowering the threshold for language recognition could promote even further development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper seeks to evaluate the role of development financing institutions (DFIs) in fostering renewable energy transformations. Whereas the conventional approach to renewable energy finance emphasizes the bankability of individual projects, we advance an alternative approach for the role of DFIs in overcoming system-level constraints to enhance renewable energy transformations. We identify four constraints, namely, the incumbent entrenchment of fossil fuels, unmet energy demand of energy-intensive industries, weak production capacity of renewable energies, and lack of supporting infrastructure. We argue that DFIs can potentially address these constraints by setting a mission-driven vision, acting as honest brokers to overcome the incumbent entrenchment, scaling up renewable energy financing to make the cost of renewable energies more competitive, incubating nascent renewable energies, and financing supporting infrastructure. We then select representative DFIs to evaluate the role of DFIs in fostering renewable energy transformations. We find that most sampled DFIs have recently prioritized financing renewable energy, supported pilot projects to achieve demonstration effects, and made investments in complementary infrastructure. Yet few DFIs have achieved the economies of scale to bring down the renewable energy price or shape the policy environment in favor of renewable energy in a manner that can trigger significant transformational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the semi-peripheral-dependent market economies (DME) of East Central Europe (ECE), foreign investors are major contributors to economic growth and tend to establish low value-added operations. At the same time, they enjoy superior bargaining power over central governments. The domination of FDI constrains domestic agency in shaping economic outcomes, thereby locking DMEs into the semi-periphery. Moving to the sub-national level, this paper challenges these views by arguing that there is considerably more scope for local development agency in DMEs than the comparative political economy literature suggests. Moreover, FDI-led upgrading, defined as multinational companies engaging in high value-added activities, can take place at the local level even without the direct involvement of the state. The paper draws on fieldwork conducted in two formerly declining industrial cities in ECE (Cluj and Gdańsk) that have recently emerged as knowledge-intensive hubs targeted by high value-added FDI. The paper shows that FDI-led upgrading in Gdańsk occurred with the active contribution and cooperation of both local private and public economic actors, whereas in Cluj, upgrading took place with the contribution of local universities and through the forging of business links between foreign capital and local firms established by expatriates and local engineers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the lack of electoral accountability, China has built an expanding welfare system that is set to include most citizens. Why does China defy the conventional prediction of an exclusive authoritarian welfare state? This paper looks at the critical time when China first established its social security system in the 1990s and argues that the state adopts a “threat-driven strategy” where the redistribution effort varies with the expected collective action of economic losers. Analyzing an original granular county-level dataset of China’s laid-off workers and social security taxation, the paper finds that a group of newly emerged economic losers, precipitated by state policy, drives the local states’ efforts to redistribute. In particular, the number of laid-off state-owned enterprise workers explains 46% of the variations in social security collection among non-state-owned enterprises. Instrumental variable estimation, with legacy state-owned enterprises established in historical contingencies as the instrument for laid-off workers, shows consistent results. Further analysis on mechanisms demonstrates that layoffs lead to an increase in SOE protests, which in turn foster greater redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments often have contentious relationships with residents of urban informal settlements. Motivated by the desire for rents and dreams of becoming the next luxury destination, city governments worldwide have forcefully evicted and demolished informal communities in this pursuit. In such instances it would seem that the state has broken the social contract with its most vulnerable citizens. How do citizens respond? We might expect them to reciprocate in kind, by withholding taxes owed to the government. Using a survey of citizens living in informal settlements across Lagos State in Nigeria, we explore what predicts citizens' willingness to comply with government taxation. In this unlikely context for voluntary compliance, we observe that a third of respondents pay taxes and a majority are willing to pay absent enforcement. We find minimal support for standard theories of tax payment — trust in or reciprocity toward the government, or identification with the nation. Instead, we find that willingness to pay taxes is correlated with group membership, believing that community members respect taxpayers, and donating to the community. Our data suggest that local institutions and social relations are associated with citizens' willingness to comply with tax policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate-generated stress has been linked to multiple socio-political outcomes, many of which are violent. Scarcity is a key mechanism behind these violent outcomes. I argue that climate-induced scarcity creates conditions for organized criminal groups to capture the markets of legal commodities. Scarcity drives prices up, creating incentives for criminal groups to capture the production and distribution of these commodities with pernicious consequences. Using qualitative evidence for the abalone shellfish market in two South African provinces, I trace the process connecting climate-induced scarcity to price changes, to criminal market capture. In doing so, I make three contributions: I propose a new theory about the climate drivers behind the behavior of organized crime by bringing together scholarship on climate and conflict and criminal violence; I extend research on organized crime from markets of illicit goods into markets for licit ones; and I provide evidence suggestive of brokerage as a specific mechanism to illegally control a market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governance in China is often characterized as dualistic. On the one hand, the state invests in stable, rule-based institutions to support effective policy implementation. Yet the state also engages in sudden regulatory campaigns, overstepping its own laws to implement rapid changes in key sectors. Businesses in China have developed coping mechanisms to weather these uncertainties; they cultivate political ties or learn to accommodate unexpected disruptions. Yet in the sphere of environmental policy implementation, businesses across the spectrum are starting to complain that local environmental enforcement feels unpredictable, even arbitrary. What constitutes unpredictable enforcement in an environment already characterized by high levels of regulatory uncertainty? What changes in environmental enforcement are driving these complaints? Using original data on nine years of city-level enforcement measures, I show that both campaign-style and rule-based enforcement have been increasing in intensity and frequency since the mid-2010s. Through qualitative evidence, I show how these two approaches work at cross purposes, generating mixed signals on which strategies businesses should use to reduce pollution or to mitigate regulatory uncertainty. Data shows that this is a nationwide pattern, which explains why business—even experienced, well-connected businesses—are complaining about arbitrary state action. This study draws attention to emerging stress tests of China's dualistic governance, while delving into what these changes portend for state-business relations in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What determines the process and scale of socioeconomic reform—such as land redistribution—in a new political regime? While the existing literature on land reform has emphasized the role of coalitions and class dynamics, I argue that central-local dynamics play a prominent part in determining a regime's redistributive ambitions. Using the case of the National Land Reform Campaign (1950–1953) under the nascent Chinese Communist Regime as the empirical focus, I find that the subnational variation in redistributive outcomes was the result of central overseers tolerating policy ineffectiveness of some local agents, but intervening against others. This variation can be traced to the regime principal's discriminatory attitudes toward different types of local agents in the new revolutionary bureaucracy: centrally deployed versus locally embedded agents. Using a most similar case design involving two Chinese provinces (Zhejiang and Guangdong), I draw from primary and secondary historical sources to trace how the two provinces diverged in redistributive outcomes despite shared political and socioeconomic backgrounds. I suggest that historical contingencies such as wartime guerrilla mobilization and the post-1949 military occupation environment shaped the initial composition of regime agents, leading to the tolerance of centrally deployed agents in Zhejiang, and sanctions toward locally embedded agents in Guangdong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although scholars often portray Mexico as caught in the "middle-income trap," this description obscures important subnational variation in patterns of economic development. We leverage this variation by examining the case of Querétaro, a state with high levels of structural transformation and economic growth since the 1980s. We reconstruct the historical trajectory of its two leading industries, automotive and aerospace. We observe that while both have cumulatively delivered real developmental gains, each also exhibits a complex mix of strengths and weaknesses. We further find that these industries' advancements and hindrances over time appear closely related to the kinds of "partial" coalitions — groups of actors from the state, private firms, and civil society organizations such as labor unions — which participate in industry-level decision-making. Both industries saw periods of "upgrading" when the partial coalitions supporting them were expanding their cognitive diversity while avoiding gross imbalances in the distribution of power among their members. They likewise experienced periods of stagnation when either of those coalition conditions underwent major change. These findings suggest that debates on escaping the middle-income trap should consider how changes in partial political coalitions affect policy models and options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a novel conceptualization and dataset of post-neoliberal populism in contemporary Latin America and Eastern Europe. By drawing insights from structuralist theories, which understood populism as historically grounded in political economy developments, I critique dominant minimal definitions and propose a synthetic conceptual alternative for the analysis of multidimensional and dynamic challengers of the watershed neoliberal revolutions that both regions have undergone since the late twentieth century. To this end, I disaggregate populism's key dimensions of anti-establishment discourse, illiberal ideology, and strategic organization into functionally interactive attributes; justify post-neoliberal populism as a family resemblance category; and develop a roadmap for case selection and measurement. I then illustrate the empirical validity and theoretical relevance of my approach by assessing the magnitude of post-neoliberal populism in 198 national-level elections in 33 Latin American and Eastern European democracies and by identifying the decline of the traditional Left as its correlate in both regions. By focusing on conceptual unity and cross-regional parallels, the article demonstrates that, contrary to conventional misconceptions, a family resemblance categorization of contemporary populism not only facilitates empirically rigorous research, but also stimulates mid-range theorizing at the intersection of intra-regional specificity and more general historicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing conventional wisdom suggests that authoritarian legislatures prevent oil nationalizations in party-based regimes. However, country scholars and media outlets remain skeptical. We develop a theory aligning with the skeptics. We argue that oil expropriations and legislative closures are endogenous to the process of the consolidation of party-based autocracies. New authoritarian parties close legislatures when they seize power and do not reopen them until they can ensure their dominance of the new legislature, a process abetted by oil expropriations. We test the argument using recently developed cross-case comparative Bayesian qualitative techniques. Evidence shows support for our theory. Our findings suggest that authoritarian legislatures are less constraining in terms of oil nationalizations than new conventional wisdom suggests. Additionally, our evidence points to a different interpretation of the role legislatures play in the evolution of authoritarian regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semi-peripheral economies are reliant on foreign capital for innovation and upgrading into higher-value-added economic activities. This characteristic of dependent development is coupled with unreliable government support for domestic businesses, resulting in fragmented state-business ties. How then did a local electrical vehicle (EV) battery startup InoBat manage to build an upgrading alliance in Slovakia and capitalise on the accelerating automotive shift to electromobility despite these barriers being present in the semi-peripheral economy of Slovakia? By developing a network-based analytical approach and using the unlikely case study of InoBat, this paper argues that developmental entrepreneurship, the mobilisation of private sector resources by venture capital or a large domestic firm, and support by private-public institutions were key determinants for the emergence of the InoBat upgrading alliance. The findings underline that local firms can also be the drivers of upgrading efforts even in the absence of consistent government support and the heavy presence of large transnational corporations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do voters in ethnically polarized settings evaluate coethnic candidates in an environment of hybrid provision of public goods, especially where such hybrid provision includes links to criminal actors? In numerous urban settings around the world, local public goods provision involves a complex mix of private vendors, state services, and criminal actors. This paper explores how voters in Karachi, Pakistan evaluate candidates making distinct claims to water provision. We present findings from a survey experiment of over 2000 Karachi residents surveyed in 2021–2022. We find that while voters generally prefer coethnic candidates regardless of their ability to provide water, a non-coethnic candidate’s access to the state water bureaucracy can decrease the coethnic advantage and increase the credibility of a non-coethnic candidate. This is particularly the case among voters least satisfied with their water supply and most reliant on private sources of water. However, contrary to literature that finds that criminality can signal competence or the likelihood of goods and services being directed to coethnics, ties to the illegal water mafia do not offer either coethnic or non-coethnic candidates any additional advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many Latin American countries, the state is to inform communities about proposed large-scale development that affects them, often in a public hearing on the environmental impact study (estudio de impacto ambiental, EIA). This article explores the role of the EIA public hearing in environmental governance, specifically in terms of local community participation in extractives. Analysis of nine mining and hydrocarbon conflicts in Colombia and Peru reveals that sometimes the public hearing is a space for project opponents alone to participate intensively, with a focus on altering development outcomes; in other cases, activists and project supporters compete at hearings; and, finally, some communities eschew the hearing entirely. The study points to two factors to explain this variation: first, whether the public hearing is a mandatory stage in environmental licensing, and second, the cohesion of impacted communities. Running counter to existing criticisms of the structures that govern public hearings in Colombian environmental licensing, the article finds that the hurdle for Colombian communities of requesting the hearing has contributed to effective organizing by movements opposed to large-scale development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subnational implementation of forest protection legislation is an important aspect of forest governance. In this article, I explore how competing interests regarding production and conservation affect forest protection at the local level in the Argentine Chaco Forest, which represents 60 percent of the Chaco Americano, the second largest forest in South America. Employing original and administrative data, I assess whether deforestation is associated with large producers, who seek to expand soy cultivation into forestlands, and the presence of indigenous communities, who favor forest protection. Quantitative analysis of the departments in the Chaco region suggests that overall deforestation is associated with soy cultivation and past deforestation. In contrast, forest loss in protected areas, which should be zero but represents almost half of total deforestation during the studied period, is positively associated with the number of indigenous communities in the department, the share of protected forestlands, the power of large producers, and past deforestation. Qualitative analysis suggests that lands inhabited by indigenous communities were generally granted protected status, as requested by national legislation and consistent with demands of indigenous groups and their allies. Yet, this protected status has been watered down by permissive regulations and the overall lax enforcement of forest protection legislation, which were in turn driven by large producers invested in cropland expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wetlands provide ecosystem services such as flood protection, improved water quality, and wildlife habitat, but are under attack in urban land-use conflicts in the Global South. This article presents two cases of local wetlands governance conflicts in Colombia (Humedal la Conejera, Bogotá, Cundinamarca) and Argentina (Laguna de Rocha, Esteban Echeverría, Gran Buenos Aires) to illustrate divergent pathways toward improved environmental governance via citizen pressures: the collaborative method (Bogotá) and the adversarial method (Buenos Aires). While existing scholarship on citizen-led regulation stresses the importance of collaboration between community organizations and the state, this article argues that adversarial tactics are also a key component of environmental governance. In both cases, citizen-led pressures led to increased enforcement of regulatory measures to restore wetlands and gain protected-area status. Citizen-led governance involved adversarial strategies such as marches, litigation, and shaming and blaming in the media, as well as collaborative strategies such as creating broad-based educational forums, working inside city government, and partnering directly with public institutions to set new policies. Against the backdrop of extensive collusion between elected officials and land developers, citizen-led subnational environmental governance has become the regulatory regime of last resort in urban Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent research has shown a growing interest in the consequences of China's foreign aid giving, few have examined how public attitudes towards China in recipient countries have responded to the surging inflows of Chinese aid. Using a geo-referenced dataset combining individual survey data with foreign aid project sites information, this paper examines the association between Chinese aid projects and public approval of China's influence in African countries. Despite contributing to development and growth in recipient countries, Chinese aid inflows may have a bifurcating effect on the approval of the donor along a partisan line. In the African context of neopatrimonialism and patronage politics, Chinese foreign aid packages are likely manipulated by the recipient government to further its domestic political interests, which could result in a partisan bias in the distribution of aid benefits favoring supporters of the incumbent government. As a result, the local presence of Chinese aid sites would be more strongly associated with a favorable attitude towards China among supporters of the incumbent political party than supporters of the opposition. We find support for our argument from a multilevel modeling of the association between the approval of China among individuals and the presence of nearby Chinese aid projects sites between 2009 and 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research suggests that people concerned about corruption use elections to punish corrupt incumbents. I argue that when people grow concerned with corruption, they may turn to exit rather than voice, using emigration to escape corruption. Highly educated citizens in particular, who are most informed about corruption and hold valuable human capital, likely see exit as attractive in the face of persistent corruption. Using a wealth of micro-level data on potential emigration, I show that when people perceive widespread corruption, they are more likely to have taken concrete steps to emigrate. Advanced degree holders are much more likely to have prepared to emigrate in response to corruption. I also show that corruption-concerned potential emigrants choose less corrupt destination countries and are less likely to have faith, and participate, in electoral institutions. My argument and findings hold implications for the corruption literature and generate new questions about the relationship between emigration and accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What motivates private firms' willingness to invest in green technologies and environmentally friendly operations? Some emphasize enhanced government regulation and enforcement, while others point to the greater potential of societal pressure. In this study, we use a survey experiment with more than 10,000 firms in Vietnam to test which type of stakeholder pressure has the strongest impact on domestic and foreign business leaders' intention to invest in green operations. We find that the effectiveness of stakeholder pressure is conditioned by the firms' target markets. Foreign investors are more susceptible than domestic firms to intensive regulatory pressure. Accounting for export orientation, however, we find that the most amenable policy targets for regulatory pressure are foreign firms aiming to sell in the Vietnamese domestic market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some countries escape the political resource curse while others do not? Most scholars argue that avoiding the claimed anti-democratic effects of natural resources, especially oil, largely depends on the quality of pre-existing political institutions and/or the effectiveness of contemporary resource management institutions. Drawing on the most-likely case of Timor-Leste, one of the world's most oil-dependent countries that nevertheless successfully consolidated democracy, we challenge these dominant theories and highlight new important factors to consider. We show that Timor-Leste did not avoid the curse because of good pre-existing political institutions, good natural resource governance institutions, or an otherwise favorable environment for democracy. Instead, we find that the ideological beliefs of major political actors, their strong popular legitimacy, the absence of a hegemonic actor among them, as well as the approaches of external actors, have produced a consolidated democracy despite strong incentives for the development of authoritarianism. These findings highlight the importance of ideology and agency, of the composition of independence movements, and of constructive international engagement, in particular at critical historical junctures. In short, even countries facing serious political and economic challenges can avoid the political resource curse, and both scholars and policymakers should consider a broader approach to the phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governmental fiscal transfers can be important tools for redistributing resources and enhancing public services in areas with limited local resources. Meanwhile, politicians can use fiscal transfers to build patronage networks, weaken opposition candidates, or engage in rent-seeking. An understudied feature of governmental transfers is that local governments can become fiscally dependent on higher-level government. This dependence might lead local officials to favor the priorities of higher-level government while compromising responsiveness to local residents. Using panel data from Chinese villages, I demonstrate that when villages become more dependent on fiscal transfers from townships, they provide fewer public goods to villagers, pay more wages to village elites, and have stronger incentives to enforce the policies favored by higher-level governments. The results also suggest that fiscal transfers will not undermine local representation when electoral competition for village leadership positions exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aid effectiveness is widely understood to suffer when multiple donors operate in the same space, but recent studies indicate benefits of fragmentation. We posit that these mixed findings may reflect differences across aid sectors — and also show how the level of implementation can condition the interpretation of results. Cross-national time-series analysis of 152 countries implies aid fragmentation can promote child survival and improve governance. However, analysis of subnational variation in Sierra Leone and Nigeria suggests the presence of more donors is associated with worse health outcomes, but better governance outcomes. Having more donors in a locality may thus be beneficial when they are working to improve the systems through which policies are implemented, but harmful if they target policy outcomes directly. A survey of Nigerian civil servants suggests potential mechanisms: fragmentation in health aid may lead to internal "brain drain" and pressure to alter projects, whereas diversity in governance aid might promote meritocratic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past two decades have witnessed the rapid diffusion of participatory planning models, including Community-Driven Development and Participatory Budgeting. Despite enormous funding outlays, studies paint a mixed picture about whether and when these programs “work” to improve welfare, governance, or social change. To better understand these questions, our paper takes an in-depth approach to understanding the sub-national application of a single participatory planning intervention implemented across Northern Kenya, using qualitative process tracing to understand the mechanisms operating across five counties. Our findings suggest the potential for participatory planning interventions to succeed is contingent on three factors which are insufficiently understood by both practitioners and academics. (1) At the institutional level, participatory planning interventions need to address genuine governance gaps by fulfilling functions that are not met by formal or informal institutions. (2) The rule-based design of participatory institutions often requires adaptation at the sub-national level in response to contextual factors, and the success of this adaptation mediates whether rules function as intended. (3) Ground-level implementers exercise far more discretion than officially recognized during implementation, suggesting they function as a poorly understood source of variation between and within programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developmental state scholars argue that through “embedded autonomy”, state activism can steer society towards positive outcomes without capture by private interests. This paper questions this claim through a case study of such activism in Singapore. It argues that not only may rent-seeking have been encouraged by Singapore’s use of industrial policy but that such a policy goes hand in hand with attempts by state actors to create an economic culture that legitimises such behaviour. The wider implication drawn is that mission-oriented state activism may require extensive cultural engineering to foster consensus over the relevant “missions”, but this level of social penetration also increases the risk of private interests capturing the state in less visible ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on the electoral legacies of civil war violence offers a puzzle. While one strand of research argues that indiscriminate rebel violence will have no effect on the electoral success of rebel-aligned parties, another argues that such violence will harden anti-rebel political attitudes in the long term. This article reconciles these conflicting predictions by examining post-conflict political attitudes over the short and medium term. We hypothesize that the organizational weaknesses that both underpin and result from indiscriminate rebel violence during civil war will constrain the vote mobilization strategies of rebel-aligned parties in post-civil war elections, eventually leading to a reversal of fortune in the medium term. We assess our hypothesis in the empirical context of the state of West Bengal in India, whose southwestern districts, collectively known as Junglemahal, experienced a spell of Maoist insurgency from 2005–2014. Taking a mixed methods approach, combining surveys across West Bengal and within Junglemahal with ethnographic research, we show that voter assessments of pre-election violence had changed sharply between the 2016 legislative assembly and 2019 parliamentary elections with violence triggering a backlash against the rebel-aligned incumbent party in 2019, but not in 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does foreign aid change local attitudes toward gender equality? Drawing on a theory of norm diffusion through intervention, we contend that when donors integrate norms into aid projects, such norms can be diffused to individuals in recipient countries. The World Bank and China are two comparable donors to examine this relationship. We matched the geocoded aid projects of the two donors from AidData and Afrobarometer surveys in Africa to test our hypotheses. Our strategy is to compare respondents' attitudes toward gender equality who were near a site where the project had been implemented at the time of the interview to those who were close to a site where the project would be started after the interview. We find that the World Bank aid increases local support for gender equality and the results differ across sectors and gender. Aid going to gender-sensitive sectors has the most significant impact on women's attitudes toward gender equality. In contrast, Chinese aid shows no similar effects. This study sheds light on the linkage between aid and social norm change and is expected to exert implications for policymakers and development practitioners adventuring in the land of aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What motivates elite factions to seek to replace an authoritarian incumbent? In this article, I provide a political economy theory of authoritarian replacement. I argue that high wealth inequality fosters authoritarian replacement, but that the effect is conditional on overall wealth being low. At low wealth, elite factions have an incentive to control the state to appropriate income. As wealth grows, elites shift their focus toward securing their wealth and thus prioritize finding credible commitments and stability within authoritarianism. I test these hypotheses using data from 1960 to 2008 and employ multistate survival analysis. A case study of Trujillo's rise in the Dominican Republic illustrates the mechanisms of the theory. The evidence supports the main theoretical expectation that replacement is more likely when the level of wealth is low but wealth inequality is high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currency crises are the most common type of financial crisis in recent decades, but little is known about how the public views these events. This paper argues that voters’ perceptions of their economic self-interests in general, and their employment prospects in particular, influence their attitudes about currency crises and preferred policy responses. We hypothesize that individuals with high degrees of job insecurity will be more concerned about currency depreciation, more opposed to orthodox policy responses such as raising the interest rate, and more supportive of unorthodox policy responses, such as intensifying capital controls. Data from nationally representative surveys in two countries experiencing currency crises recently—Argentina and Turkey—support our argument. A follow-up survey experiment in Turkey, which randomly primed some respondents about deteriorating labor market conditions, provides further evidence. Overall, the results show that concerns about the labor market have a strong and systematic influence on how voters respond to currency crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This summary discusses the importance of incorporating sociology and political science into the study of global health. It highlights influential books and articles that challenge assumptions and provide insights into various aspects of global health, such as the impact of education on HIV/AIDS rates in Kenya and the influence of neoliberalism on healthcare in Tajikistan. The article emphasizes the need for a more inclusive and diverse approach to global health research, recognizing the perspectives of the Global South. The text summarizes a special issue on global health research, covering topics such as disability regimes, mental health care, privatization of universal health coverage, struggles with COVID-19 vaccine production, health tourism, and the relationship between democracy and gender inequalities in health. The articles highlight the need for thoughtful approaches to understanding power dynamics in global health and suggest future research directions. [Extracted from the article]

What enables actors to shape norms in global health governance? Scholarship on global health has highlighted the role of experts and expertise in operationalizing norms across a variety of issues. The degree of expert consensus or dissensus and the negotiation processes between expert communities—for example, in international organizations, NGOs or academia—are commonly identified as centrally important for explaining these processes. In this article, we posit that norm-making in global health governance occurs in the shadow of hegemony; a system of status and stratification that is centered on economic and security concerns and maintained by countries at the core of the world system. These countries—notably the USA and other major economies in the Global North—project their hegemonic position in the world system across areas of global organizing, including in global health. We explore the relationship between epistemic consensus and hegemonic interests as parameters that shape the outcome of norm-making processes. To pursue this argument, we examine this relationship in the context of the development of policy norms to counter non-communicable diseases in developing countries and to pursue the securitization of global health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roughly 80 percent of people with mental illness live in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). This inductive analysis examines the ways power and the struggle for public authority affect mental health care in the LMIC of Tanzania. It investigates two mental health approaches: the biomedical approach, backed by state actors and donors and manifest in psychotropic medications, therapy, and/or hospitalization, and the spiritual approach, supported by many religious leaders and traditional healers and manifest in prayer, healing ceremonies, and traditional medications. The work demonstrates how various forms and levels of power undergirded these two approaches and influenced their abilities to improve the well-being of Tanzanians living with mental illness. Although the biomedical approach had more economic power and institutional power relative to the spiritual approach, these powers were insufficient to ensure effective patient care. The widespread presence of spiritual leaders and institutions led many to seek spiritual help, but the spiritual approach also was limited because of its proponents' narrow view of other-worldly power and their internal competition. Based on forty-six key informant interviews, the analysis elucidates how proponents of both approaches sought public authority in processes of competition and collaboration that emphasized individual solutions while downplaying social determinants that could affect mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decades, countries across the Global South have been adopting expansionary health reforms and are increasingly doing so under the banner of promoting universal health coverage. But countries have taken notably different approaches regarding the inclusion of private actors in their expanding healthcare systems. In this article, we explore the political causes and consequences of partial privatization in the context of healthcare expansion. We conduct a case study of Turkey's 2008 health reform, which coupled substantial coverage expansion with the introduction of private options in provision and financing—and has since been branded as a global "success story" of achieving universal health coverage. Specifically, we seek to explain why Turkey introduced private options with its expansionary health reform and what kind of policy feedback effects this has triggered. We find that private options were incorporated into the reform as the result of persistent business lobbying and pro-market changes in the leadership of the health ministry and not because of any international coercion, e.g., by the World Bank. The introduction of these private options has since led to the growth of private hospital and insurance markets and the political entrenchment of partial privatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are now working with humanitarian organizations to develop infrastructure abroad. This emerging phenomenon is puzzling: when, where, and why do Chinese SOEs, best known for constructing massive overseas infrastructure projects for commercial and political gain, execute smaller, lower-profile humanitarian projects? Similarly, why would humanitarian organizations––often with minimal experience in infrastructure contracting––select partners criticized for lack of emphasis on the international standards and best practices that they seek to promote? We address these questions through qualitative case studies of Chinese SOE-humanitarian organization collaboration in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and the Republic of Congo. These cases suggest that such partnerships are more likely when a humanitarian organization has previous experience working in China or with Chinese actors, when Chinese SOEs aim to enter new markets, or when these firms operate in dangerous or politically unstable environments. This study contributes to scholarship on China's evolving role in international development by providing the first empirical analysis of Chinese SOE-humanitarian organization partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines the causal impact of institutional quality on economic development from a novel perspective. At the country level, we exploit variation in the natural malaria prevalence in 1900, just before vector-control methods were developed, to instrument for institutional quality using a two-stage least squares instrumental variables framework. Our instrument is a population-weighted average of malaria endemicity estimates for the year 1900 developed by the World Health Organization scientists in the 1960s. We argue that this measure of historical malaria offers more expansive geographic information about the disease environment, and our baseline IV estimates reveal that greater institutional quality causes greater contemporaneous economic growth. Next, we investigate the robustness of these baseline results to alternative explanations, including the role of geography and the role of early colonizers' experiences, as the causal link between the early disease environmental, institutional quality, and contemporary growth. As an additional test of the explanatory power of malaria endemicity in 1900 as an instrumental variable, we replace our instrument for settler mortality and replicate the core results from the seminal study on colonial origins of comparative development by Acemoglu et al. (2001). In summary, we propose that malaria endemicity estimated for 1900 holistically explains the legacy of early disease on institutional quality development and contemporary economic development, thus significantly contributing to the resolution of the geography versus institutions debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]