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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]

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]

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]

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

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

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]

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]