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Belief in evil and hidden supernatural forces, generally referred to as witchcraft, is widespread in many parts of the African continent. In addition to affecting individual health, perceived security, and social relations, witchcraft allegations may be used as covert political instruments, resulting in governance challenges such as lack of trust, transparency, administrative delegation, and political accountability. Since witchcraft is commonly associated with physiological and psychological violence, some citizens may be less willing to participate in political activities, including seeking elected office or criticizing political elites for fear of falling victim to witchcraft. The focus of our study is Malawi where large groups in the population believe in the power of witchcraft. We aim to unpack how local witchcraft beliefs have a bearing on governance – whether, and the extent to which, witchcraft influences how citizens understand and practice transparency and accountability in everyday life. Particularly, the belief in witchcraft among Malawian elites' warrants closer scrutiny, especially since existing literature and local discourse on the impact of witchcraft tend to largely focus on rural and less educated groups in the population. As the highly secret and complex dimensions of witchcraft resist clear-cut definitions, representations, and analysis, it is not our intention to describe witchcraft in everyday life. Rather, we explore the potential political implications of not addressing elite discourses of and belief in witchcraft. We find that belief in witchcraft can influence citizens' perceptions of power and authority and can potentially undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions and processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse the impact of International Monetary Fund (IMF) programmes on appointing women leaders in ministerial positions. We hypothesize that women leaders are selected after an incumbent government starts an IMF programme to shift accountability to them during political and economic turmoil. This political manoeuvring of appointing women to leadership positions during a crisis is known as the 'glass cliff' effect. We demonstrate substantial evidence for such a 'glass cliff' effect using data covering all IMF programmes from 1980 to 2018. Our evidence shows that women are more likely to be appointed to austerity‐bearing ministerial positions under IMF programmes but not in positions of authority during negotiations with the IMF. This effect is more pronounced when a country displays worse societal gender norms, a higher level of corruption and a government facing a deeper economic crisis. Importantly, we verify that neither women's leadership nor a higher share of women in government predicts a balance of payments crisis triggering an IMF programme. In other words, women leaders do not govern worse; they are appointed to leadership positions in precarious, crisis‐ridden conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizens' ability to hold corrupt politicians accountable is a key feature of democratic political systems. Particularly in the European Union (EU), such accountability mechanisms are often argued to malfunction due to the EU's complicated and opaque institutional structure, which could compromise voters' basic abilities to detect political malpractice in Brussels. Putting EU voters' attentiveness to the test, we provide quasi‐experimental evidence of the causal effect of a recent corruption scandal in the European Parliament. Leveraging an 'Unexpected Event during Survey Design' identification strategy in France and Germany, we document a sizeable negative effect of the so‐called Qatargate scandal on public trust in the European Parliament. This provides causal evidence on the presence of attentiveness to EU politics within these electorates. Given the EU's complex institutional structure, we derive two alternative implications from this finding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effects of social and political accountability arrangements on citizens' legitimacy perceptions. Accountability arrangements are often suggested to improve the perceived legitimacy of governmental organizations. Based upon a pre-registered vignette experiment with a representative sample of N = 1574 citizens from the Netherlands, we show that social accountability (accountability to citizens) increases legitimacy perceptions, but that political accountability (accountability to politicians) does not affect legitimacy perceptions. These patterns are highly similar for both decision winners and losers, with accountability slightly more important for losers. This has important implications for our understanding of the impact of accountability for perceived legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of civic action on enhancing accountability and combating corruption in political financing, focusing on two civil society initiatives in Uruguay. The initiatives aimed to digitize and map information on funding received by political parties and politicians in the 2009 and 2014 elections, presenting their findings through interactive online platforms. The paper engages theoretically with the literature on the dimensions of accountability and contributes to understanding the challenges faced by civil society organizations in promoting political financing accountability even in full democracies, a topic largely understudied. Findings highlight concerns beyond electoral authorities’ well-known resource constraints in detecting illicit political donations and spending in Uruguay. The paper shows that transparency is not enough to reduce corruption. We argue that for political finance accountability to be effective, it must encompass bottom-up, horizontal, and diagonal dimensions. The analysis suggests the need for complementary measures, such as digital solutions for reporting and disclosing political finance information, along with active horizontal and bottom-up oversight mechanisms. The article draws on qualitative analysis based on documentary research and 19 interviews with activists, academics, journalists, developers of the initiatives, and public officials involved in political finance regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to a special issue on popular control in pre-modern Europe reviews both the contemporary resonance of the term in an era of reviving populism, and the conceptual challenges it poses for historians of all periods. It reconsiders the problem of the "popular," the question of what constitutes effective control, and the relationship between collective and coordinated action. Briefly highlighting particular aspects of articles in the issue, it stresses above all the usefulness of thinking with concrete cases. Here those range from the late medieval Languedoc to eighteenth-century Germany via Castile, northern France, and England. Doing so helps us to see how popular control operated across a range of scales. It frequently developed from bottom-up political practice, often being articulated within a range of micro-sovereignties of different sorts. Here it remained volatile and plural within a set of shared but often contested norms. That volatility extended to those exercising popular control since they could pass into the ranks of those holding official powers just as, at other times, office-holders might equally be found amongst the ranks of those acting more informally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and across Britain's empire, the idea took hold that a public office was a fiduciary trust, with legally and rhetorically enforceable duties of accountability, selflessness, and duty of care. Coupled with a remarkably free press which enabled the exposure and pursuit of corrupt activity, and petitioning activity that put pressure on Parliament, this development fostered important ideas and practices of public accountability. Yet, as the second half of the article shows, these were often difficult to effect and sustain at the local level, especially in large urban parishes, where campaigners were sometimes able to mobilize popular support for anti-corruption investigations but also faced a degree of indifference that meant change and reform were protracted, patchy, and by no means certain. Thus, on the one hand, popular control—or perhaps better, popular accountability—advanced in conceptual, legal, and some practical ways; but on the other, in some circumstances it was difficult to implement and was blunted by a range of factors that limited popular pressure and worked against reform. This article thus problematizes a linear narrative of unfailing progress toward greater accountability, highlighting instead the variety of local experiences and the nature of anti-corruption as an ongoing process. Both the central state and the parish state faced similar challenges, albeit in different contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article connects changes in administrative and bureaucratic processes that historians associate with state formation in early modern Britain with overlooked developments in thinking about political accountability. It blends the social history of state administration with intellectual history, and involves synoptic analysis as well as striking case studies. It argues that innovative political thinking emerged from new forms of political practice, and from the experiences of humble officials in the localities. Such individuals were increasingly professionalized and specialized, and their work was increasingly described using the language of trust, public interest, and state's service. The mid-seventeenth century accentuated the process by which they came to be accountable to a centralized state, not least through the routinization and intensification of quotidian practices associated with enhanced communication between center and locality. Ultimately, the article argues that such processes, as well as more regular and direct interactions between political elites and humble officials, encouraged new kinds of political thinking. These were not quite unintended, but they may not have been fully anticipated either, and they involved innovative attempts to subject higher officials to oversight from "below," and to legitimize their accountability to an adjudicating public, in ways that may even have had a lasting effect on English political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most comparative law systems, the role of parliament is not limited to issuing various types of legislation and improving the legislative framework. It goes beyond its fundamental function of legislating to include another important role: oversight, specifically the restraining role over the actions of government members in certain cases defined by the Constitution. Parliament exercises this oversight role alongside its legislative function. It is also important in maintaining public interest and evaluating the government's work by questioning its members on the progress and execution of agreed-upon projects. Referring to the Algerian system, we find that the Algerian Parliament, which consists of two chambers--the National People's Assembly (APN) and the Council of the Nation--exercises oversight over the government's actions. The first chamber, the APN, primarily does this. Consequently, this type of oversight may sometimes lead to political accountability, which can result in either the resignation of the Prime Minister or the dissolution of the first chamber of parliament. These mechanisms include the motion of censure and the interpellation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Cancel culture" has become a prominent phrase in US political commentary, with supporters and opponents relying on different value-based arguments to express their views. At the same time, these camps often fall along predictable partisan political lines. What, then, are the real motivations for promoting and opposing behaviors sometimes labeled as "canceling" in contemporary American politics? We explore this question through survey data from Pew in 2020 and two original survey experiments, conducted on the 2021 CES and a 2023 online sample. We examine how Americans define the term "cancel culture," to what extent cancel culture is linked to both a range of core democratic values, and the role of partisanship in shaping support or opposition to specific behaviors. We observe a significant range of views about cancel culture and document connections to various political values. From our experiments, we find that partisanship is a potent driver of support for and understanding of cancel culture and that value-based framing has a weaker impact as compared to partisanship. Cancel culture provides an important case study of how Americans process conflicting norms and values, including free speech and political accountability, beyond the typical constraints of the formal political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research documents how shrinking local newsrooms undermine political accountability and local fiscal and policy performance in the United States. We extend this work to examine political impacts from the level of information content in local news, which has been jeopardized by reductions in newsroom staffing. To understand how information content affects public response to news coverage of a local issue, we focus on the case of preventive spending on infrastructure maintenance and repair. Inefficiently low levels of infrastructure investment are often attributed to low public knowledge about the risk of failure events. In a preregistered survey experiment, we test how the level and type of information in a news article affect support for infrastructure investment across two different types of infrastructure risk (repeated nuisance versus catastrophic failure). For both types of risk, we find that more information-rich reporting, whether investigative or event-driven, increases public support for preventive spending and imposes accountability penalties on local leaders who fail to invest in prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on African legislatures, once considered rarely autonomous, has found that some broad-scale mass movements, including pro-poor campaigns, hold legislators accountable. This article meanwhile examines the conditions under which narrow local constituency issues, shaping partisan differences, can hold relevant representatives and parties accountable while prioritizing over executive pressures and clientelist personal gains. I argue that this sort of political accountability in legislatures can be observed concerning sectoral policy interests, which, in Africa, are often geographically concentrated along ethnicity and party support lines. Drawing on a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches including interviews, news coverage reviews, and a statistical analysis of legislative debates on the 2019 Sugar Bill in Kenya, I show that the growing and collective efforts of sugar farmers to influence their local representatives and parties to support the legislation, tying them to the same electoral fate, prompt legislators to speak in favor of their local interests. This implies that sector-based policy concerns, when addressed by organized policy backers, are used as an effective mechanism for maintaining party unity and accountability in the legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media's capacity to quickly and inexpensively reach large audiences almost simultaneously has the potential to promote electoral accountability. Beyond increasing direct exposure to information, high saturation campaigns—which target substantial fractions of an electorate—may induce or amplify information diffusion, persuasion, or coordination between voters. Randomizing saturation across municipalities, we evaluate the electoral impact of non-partisan Facebook ads informing millions of Mexican citizens of municipal expenditure irregularities in 2018. The vote shares of incumbent parties that engaged in zero/negligible irregularities increased by 6–7 percentage points in directly-targeted electoral precincts. This direct effect, but also the indirect effect in untargeted precincts within treated municipalities, were significantly greater where ads targeted 80%—rather than 20%—of the municipal electorate. The amplifying effects of high saturation campaigns are driven by citizens within more socially-connected municipalities, rather than responses by politicians or media outlets. These findings demonstrate how mass media can ignite social interactions to promote political accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how citizens’ legitimacy perceptions are affected when decision makers deviate from the recommendations of a deliberative mini‐public (DMP), and what can be done to mitigate negative consequences. The results of a preregistered vignette experiment in Belgium (N = 2659) support our two main expectations. First, citizens’ legitimacy perceptions decrease when politicians do not follow the outcome of a DMP. Second, when politicians communicate responsively about this – meaning that they show respect for the recommendations and publicly justify why they deviated from them – legitimacy perceptions substantially increase, generally reaching the level of those cases where recommendations are followed. Diving deeper into this result also shows that for this effect to occur, citizens must find the provided reasoning valid and acceptable. Finally, the results hold among both policy winners and policy losers. These findings have implications for the literature on democratic innovations, empirical legitimacy, and political representation, but also for policymakers striving to combine arrangements of public participation that go beyond triviality, with political responsibility for the whole, and sustained mechanisms for accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/context: This article has three objectives: to differentiate the theoretical arguments on the empty chair policy in Latin America, to analyze the process of institutional change that culminated with its implementation in Colombia, and to describe how it has been carried out between 2010 and 2024. Methodology: The methodological approach has three components: a theoretical part, a documentary component, and an empirically based analysis. The first describes the contrast between two approaches to the autonomy, control, and accountability of political parties and parliamentarians. The second reviews how these approaches are reflected in the rules on seat ownership (of parties or congresspersons/deputies), accountability, and sanctions for parties and congresspersons when they violate the law. The third consists of identifying cases of loss of seats, their analysis, and the determination of their effects. The principal sources of the study are constitutional reforms, Supreme Court rulings, and decisions of the Attorney General's Office on convictions of congressmen. The information is complemented with journalistic reports and electoral data. Conclusions: The empty chair policy is established in two Latin American countries (Colombia and Peru). It is an effective legal norm to sanction political parties and legislators convicted for their links with criminal groups, corruption, electoral fraud, and other crimes. It has been applied in eighteen cases due to links to paramilitarism, drug trafficking, and corruption. The affected parties have decreased their electoral performance and their seats in Congress. Originality: This is the first empirical study on the subject in Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text analyzes the crimes of misuse of subsidies intended for political parties and falsification in the background of electoral processes and parties accountability, particularly regarding the premises under which their interpretation has been proposed or their application has been intended to date. Based on that, it presents the reasons and arguments that support the claim that both figures respond to a different sense than the one assigned to them. In particular, the crime of misuse or improper application of quarterly subsidies granted to political parties sanctions their use in political campaigns, as such usage alters the rules under which public funding for these activities is allocated under conditions of equality. Furthermore, the crime of using false backgrounds in electoral or political party accountability materializes a special and qualified form of subsidy fraud. It then presents the implications that can be draw from each of these definitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'campaign-style enforcement' is a forceful policy instrument employed by Chinese authorities to address emergencies and intractable issues. However, the accountability embedded in campaign-style enforcement is largely overlooked, leading to the unclear dynamics of political mobilization at the grassroots level. While prior studies suggest that cadres in China are primarily motivated by promotion opportunities based on their political performance, this study, through a grounded-theory approach involving 557 penalized cadres in Hubei Province, argues that grassroots cadres are more likely mobilized by the stringent accountability system rather than by career promotion. Furthermore, this research develops a theoretical framework to elucidate what conditions may trigger accountability and how it drives grassroots political mobilization in the campaign-style enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many democratic systems supplement periodic elections with checks and balances. Yet, elected executives typically have some influence on one important check, the judicial branch, through their power to nominate justices. How do electoral and judicial constraints influence which policies executives pursue and which justices they nominate? We study a game-theoretic model of electoral accountability in which an executive chooses policy and appoints a justice, who can overturn policy today and (potentially) after the election. We highlight how judicial appointments provide executives a tool for signaling and commitment and also affect their incentives to signal with policy. We characterize how executives combine policy and appointments differently depending on judicial turnover, polarization, office motivation, or ideologies of sitting justices. We find that elections can moderate appointments but can also polarize them, reforms increasing justice turnover can backfire and reduce voter welfare, and distinct forms of polarization can have critically different effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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Transparency is expected to strengthen electoral accountability. Yet, initiatives disseminating politician performance information directly prior to elections have reported mixed results. We argue that to be effective, transparency needs to be sustained: The dissemination of politician performance information needs to occur early, regularly, and predictably throughout the term. Using a formal model of electoral accountability under nonprogrammatic and uneven party competition, we study how sustained transparency affects a string of decisions by various actors in advance of elections: incumbents' running choices, parties' nomination strategies, and potential challengers' entry decisions. We show how these effects shape the candidate slate and ultimately electoral outcomes, conditional on incumbent performance and the incumbent party's relative strength. We test our theory using a field experiment involving 354 subnational constituencies in Uganda, and find robust support for the idea that sustained transparency can improve electoral accountability even in weakly institutionalized electoral settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has had tremendous impacts on political, economic and social developments across the globe. Although some studies show that voters tend to hold incumbent parties accountable for managing the pandemic, the results of others suggest that the rally-round-the-flag strategy might be at plan. We contend that voters tend to hold the incumbent party accountable, even during an exogenous shock, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesize that more stringent government responses to tackle the pandemic and more COVID-19 casualties tend to decrease the electoral support for incumbent parties. Using original data from 67 national elections in 56 electoral democracies from mid-March 2020 to May 2022, the empirical results support our hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fossil industry has greatly contributed to the increase of the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This evidence and five morally relevant facts establish its moral responsibility for climate harm. This responsibility imposes on fossil fuel companies a duty of reparation for the climate crisis which requires them to redress their wrongful actions that have led to climate harm by disgorging funds. The article justifies and develops such duty of reparation in terms of financial rectification of climate-related harm. This duty provides a framework for an informed dialogue with civil society and between political representatives on the accountability of fossil fuel companies in the climate crisis and on their role in rectifying the harm they have concurred to create. Fossil fuel companies' duty of reparation is a moral determination with direct relevance for the ethics, politics, and policy of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the leadership ethics of Director of Central Intelligence William Colby within the context of the release of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) "family jewels," the internal record that listed how the CIA had been involved in a number of illegal activities, including domestic spying. It explores the moral dimension of bureaucratic leadership and illustrates its presence in Colby's thinking and actions through three indicators: his understanding of the regime values of American democracy; his adherence to his oath of office as a high-ranking civil servant, which he viewed as a positive duty; and his recognition that, in a contest between the executive and legislative branches, counterintuitively, Congress is the party on which the future existence of the CIA rests. Beyond an assessment of Colby's personal characteristics, this article explores issues of moral leadership in the realm of intelligence and contributes to an understanding of the role of accountability in a fraught political landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The document titled "Global Responsibility to Protect" is a journal that covers various research articles, book reviews, and discussions related to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. It includes topics such as the implementation of R2P in Africa, prosecution of atrocity crimes, exclusion of climate disasters from R2P, and discussions on self-determination and accountability mechanisms. The journal also delves into the challenges of atrocity prevention and response, as well as the intersection of cyberspace and R2P. Additionally, it features book reviews on related subjects. [Extracted from the article]

This journal discusses the innovation in the public financial reporting system to enhance accountability and transparency. In the digital era, technological innovations such as Fintech, e-procurement, e-budgeting, and e-audit have influenced the public financial reporting system, making it more accessible and understandable. The journal emphasizes the importance of transparency and accountability in the public financial reporting system, and how innovation can help achieve these goals. This research uses a qualitative approach and collects data from various credible online sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do politicians attribute responsibility for good and poor policy outcomes across multiple stakeholders in a policy field where they themselves can affect service provision? Such ‘diffusion’ decisions are crucial to understand the political calculations underlying the allocation of blame and credit by office-holders. We study this issue using a between-subjects survey experiment fielded among local politicians in Norway (N = 1073). We find that local politicians attribute responsibility for outcomes in primary education predominantly to school personnel (regardless of whether performance is good or bad) and do not engage in local party-political blame games. However, we show that local politicians are keen to attribute responsibility for poor outcomes to higher levels of government, especially when these are unaligned with the party of the respondent. These findings suggest that vertical partisan blame-shifting prevails over horizontal partisan blame games in settings with a political consensus culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This short article investigates how violations of civility norms by politicians affect attitudes about the importance of norms and demand for political accountability after wrongdoing. Results: Our main findings are twofold: (1) support for norms and (2) demand for punishing norm‐breaking increases when parties hold political officials accountable for their actions—especially in the case of in‐group norm‐breaking. Conclusions: These findings contribute to a growing literature on Americans' support for norms by implying that elites play an important role in sustaining the standards of democratic exchange. When elites impose punishment on copartisan elites, they signal to the public that accountability is acceptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (“ATF”) utilized its regulatory power to ban bump stocks. Given its long history of congressional marginalization and political demonization, the ATF has historically been hesitant to engage in binding forms of regulation. However, with the support of the public and a Republican president, the ATF interpreted “machine guns,” which were already banned under the National Firearms Act, to include bump stocks. The legal challenges that ensued questioned the ATF’s regulatory authority by invoking the rule of lenity. The litigation that has percolated throughout the courts of appeals has distilled into a fundamental question about agency deference: when an agency, such as the ATF, retains both criminal law enforcement and regulatory power, what level of deference should be given to its interpretations of statutes? With the Supreme Court set to hear oral arguments in Garland v. Cargill this term, one of the cases that challenges the ATF’s regulatory authority, this Note explores the primary justifications for the rule of lenity and explains why they do not apply when agencies engage in notice and comment rulemaking. Furthermore, this Note argues that, as an agency with technical expertise in an area that experiences rapid technological advancement and is subject to continual political accountability, the ATF presents the prototypical case for agency deference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have recently sought to explain why some voters remain loyal to "their" parties or candidates "no matter what they do" – an attitude that has been labeled as obstinate partisanship (OP) and limits electoral accountability. We argue that the development of OP may have to do, at least partly, with people's (in)ability to critically evaluate political information and their tendency to isolate themselves in online bubbles of congenial information and interactions. Building on this framework, we use two-wave panel survey data (NW1 = 1,259; NW2 = 982) to explore direct and indirect associations between information evaluation – a key component of information literacy – and OP. We find that information evaluation is negatively associated with OP in cross-sectional and autoregressive regression models. Analyses also support an indirect relationship between information evaluation and OP through political homophily in social media and online. We discuss possible implications for democracy and information literacy initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies the factors that contributed to the persistence of food insecurity (FI) in sub-saharan Africa (SSA) between 1990 and 2019. The sample consists of 29 countries with data obtained from the Food and Agricultural Organisation 2021, World Development Indicators 2021, International Country Risk Guide 2021 and Polity IV 2021 databases. We use the principal component analysis (PCA) to construct the composite food insecurity index. We then employ the average bayesian model (ABM) and the general to specific (GETS) approach for robustness to identify the main determinants of food insecurity in SSA. The PCA result reveals that FI in SSA results from the dimensions of food availability, food utilization and food stability. As for the ABM, results confirmed by the robustness of the GETS approach, indicated that income level, Arable land, demography and lack of democracy are the main determinants that favour FI in SSA. In contrast, rural population and education reduce FI. There is an urgent need in strengthening agricultural strategies and an inclusive distribution of national wealth followed by political accountability in other to fight against FI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares Indian and United Kingdom (UK) parliamentary devices available to backbench Member of Parliaments (MPs) highlighting their role in scrutiny and accountability. In India, MPs can utilize procedures like Parliamentary Questions, Calling Attention, and Zero Hour to address public grievances and critique government actions. Conversely, UK backbenchers benefit from devices such as Early Day Motions, Question Time, and Ministerial Statements for similar purposes.

The political appointment of bureaucrats is typically seen as jeopardizing development by selecting worse types into the bureaucracy or by depressing bureaucratic effort. I argue that political appointments also affect outcomes through a third, less studied channel, namely, by changing how bureaucrats work. Patronage provides connections between bureaucrats and politicians, and thereby grants access to material and nonmaterial resources, enhances monitoring, facilitates the application of sanctions and rewards, aligns priorities and incentives, and increases mutual trust. Political appointments can thus enhance bureaucrats' accountability and effectiveness, not just for rent‐seeking purposes but also, in certain conditions, for public service delivery. I test this theory using data on Brazilian municipal governments, leveraging two quasi‐experiments, two original surveys of bureaucrats and politicians, and in‐depth interviews. The findings highlight the countervailing effects of connections on bureaucratic governance in the developing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantifying the value that legislators give to reelection relative to policy is crucial to understanding electoral accountability. We estimate the preferences for office and policy of members of the U.S. Senate, using a structural approach that exploits variation in polls, position‐taking, and advertising throughout the electoral cycle. We then combine these preference estimates with estimates of the electoral effectiveness of policy moderation and political advertising to quantify electoral accountability in competitive and uncompetitive elections. We find that senators differ markedly in the value they give to securing office relative to policy gains: While over a fourth of senators are highly ideological, a sizable number of senators are willing to make relatively large policy concessions to attain electoral gains. Nevertheless, electoral accountability is only moderate on average, due to the relatively low impact of changes in senators' policy stance on voter support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several efforts have been undertaken to uphold the liability for atrocity crimes in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Even though the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and domestic courts opened proceedings against alleged perpetrators of atrocity crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central Africa Republic, Uganda, Kenya, Sudan, Burundi, and Rwanda, these prosecuting efforts are viewed as pursuing political strategies. Based on documentary analysis and an online research survey, this research paper shows evidence of accountability logic and political strategies. Although the undertaken efforts are in line with the logic of accountability, they remain under the influence of political strategies. The research findings highlight that political strategies have been influencing criminal law codification and its enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zambia experienced its third electoral turnover in the 2021 election. While the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) lost votes across the territory, the electoral collapse in urban Zambia was particularly remarkable. This paper argues that economic performance voting can explain urban party switching in Zambia. The argument is supported by a unique panel survey of Zambian voters in the period 2019–2022. We show that urban voters were more likely to desert the PF, even when we control for ethnicity. We also show that they were more likely to evaluate the economy poorly and more likely to change their electoral preferences in view of such poor economic evaluation. Our results stress that African elections should not be understood as static expressions of stable political cleavages but may function as real opportunities for political accountability. However, the extent to which voters are willing to re-evaluate their vote choice varies across space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jennifer Mercieca's book, "Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump," provides a comprehensive study of Trump's rhetoric during his 2016 presidential campaign. The book argues that Trump is a dangerous demagogue who uses rhetorical strategies to undermine democracy. It analyzes six major rhetorical strategies used by Trump, including appeals to crowd wisdom and attacks on personal character. The book also explores the cultural contexts that contributed to Trump's success, such as a distrusting, polarized, and frustrated electorate. Mercieca concludes by recommending public instruction in rhetoric and critical thinking to counteract the damage caused by demagoguery. [Extracted from the article]

This article is about complaint-making as a form of political participation in the NGO sector. It focuses on public scrutiny of Oxfam's use of Barclays Bank during the anti-apartheid boycott of the bank in the 1970s and 1980s and analyses pro-boycott and anti-boycott correspondence to Oxfam during this period. The article uses the Barclays boycott case to illustrate the dynamics of public-institution relationships during a period in which the NGO sector rapidly expanded and professionalised. It argues that not all donors favoured shallow or passive relationships with the NGOs that they supported. In this example, donors mobilised as a distinct type of 'consumer-supporter-activist'. Finally, the article shows how the Barclays controversy stimulated public debate around the ideal boundaries between the 'charitable' and the 'political'. It argues that apartheid South Africa stimulated far greater public engagement on this issue than other areas of Oxfam's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a speech by Michael Scharf welcoming attendees to the 2023 Klatsky Distinguished Lecture, highlighting Bruce Klatsky's contributions to human rights. Topics include the impact of the Klatsky endowment on the law school's human rights program, achievements such as the Yemen Accountability Project and the Asylum and Refugee Clinic, and the significance of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In India, undernutrition among children has been extremely critical for the last few decades. Most analyses of undernutrition among Indian children have used the administrative boundaries of a state or a district level as a unit of analysis. This paper departs from such a practice and focuses instead on the political boundaries of a parliamentary constituency (PC) as the unit of analysis. The PC is a critical geopolitical unit where political parties and party candidates make election promises and implement programmes to improve the socio-economic condition of their electorate. A focus on child undernutrition at this level has the potential for greater policy and political traction and could lead to a paradigm shift in the strategy to tackle the problem by creating a demand for political accountability. Different dimensions and new approaches are also required to evaluate the socio-economic status and generate concrete evidence to find solutions to the problem. Given the significance of advanced analytical methods and models embedded into geographic information system (GIS), the current study, for the first time, uses GIS tools and techniques at the PC level, conducting in-depth analysis of undernutrition and its predictors. Hence, this paper examines the spatial heterogeneity in undernutrition across PCs by using geospatial techniques such as univariate and bivariate local indicator of spatial association and spatial regression models. The analysis highlights the high–low burden areas in terms of local hotspots and identifies the potential spatial risk factors of undernutrition across the constituencies. Striking variations in the prevalence of undernutrition across the constituencies were observed. Most of these constituencies that performed poorly both in terms of child nutrition and socio-economic indicators were located in the northern, western, and eastern parts of India. A statistically significant association of biological, socio-economic, and environmental factors such as women's body mass index, anaemia in children, poverty, household sanitation facilities, and institutional births was established. The results highlight the need to bring in a mechanism of political accountability that directly connects elected representatives to maternal and child health outcomes. The spatial variability and pattern of undernutrition indicators and their correlates indicate that priority setting in research may also be greatly influenced by the neighbourhood association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that paying taxes makes politicians more accountable to citizens has long drawn the attention of scholars. This article contributes to the understanding of this relationship from a novel perspective: that it is elections rather than negotiations between politicians and elites—as most of the previous literature has assumed—that serve as the primary mechanism by which citizens discipline politicians. I build a voting agency model that considers two effects of income taxes on voters' decisions: how changes in voters' disposable income affect their political demands and how increments in tax revenues affect voters' beliefs about the ability of institutions to affect incumbents' decisions. I find that increments in taxes always strengthen voters' political demands. Nevertheless, it would not necessarily prove useful for disciplining incumbents—in terms of a higher expected provision of public goods and lower captured rents. Gains in political accountability, in turn, positively affect the equilibrium income tax rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since March 2020, a huge quantity of data, rankings, charts and tables has been informing the ways we speak and act in the pandemic. This article focusses on the centrality of numbers in a major national controversy: the quantification of avoidable deaths by COVID-19. Launched by scientists who first addressed the omissions of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in the management of the pandemic, estimations of avoidable deaths rapidly transitioned into the political arena with the installation of a parliamentary enquiry committee on the coronavirus crisis. The article examines the emergence and development of these estimates, as well as the role they have played and continue to play in constructing the pandemic as passed as they vie for a place in the memory of the COVID-19 crisis in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Purpose – This paper aims to conceptualize and empirically illustrate the challenges that financial market regulation presents to politicians and the organization tasked with specifying regulations and supervising their implementation in the interest of users and consumers of financial instruments. It analyses the problem from the viewpoint of the governor's dilemma and the control/competence conflict, the linked problem of the rent-seeking of agents/intermediators and consumers of financial instruments. Political accountability problems are enhanced by the materiality of the technologies used, i.e. algo trading. Design/methodology/approach – The paper theoretically conceptualizes and empirically illustrates the argument. Findings – The paper finds that regulators of digitalized financial markets are faced with considerable problems and depend on private agents when regulating financial transactions. However, the new technological instruments also offer new possibilities for securing compliance. Research limitations/implications – Further research should focus more in-depth on the cooperation between public and private actors in the specification and implementation of regulatory details. It should further investigate the conditions which allow regulators to use RegTech in the surveillance of financial firms. Practical implications – Since financial market transactions are opaque for most users, the creation of more transparency is crucial to hold regulators accountable in their activity of surveillance of financial firms. New algorithm-based technologies may lend important support in doing so. Originality/value – By linking the different analytical perspectives, i.e. the governor's dilemma vis-à-vis the intermediator or agent and the possible rent-seeking of intermediators, under the condition of a highly developed technology of financial transactions as well as the market structure, the paper offers new insights into the limits as well as new opportunities of regulating financial markets allowing for political accountability of regulators and financial firms.