Unlike much of the growing literature on political clientelism, this short paper contains mainly the author’s general reflections on the broad issues of governance (or mis-governance including corruption), democracy, and state capacity that...
The last several months have given us many reasons to worry about US democracy – not least the riot at the US Capitol and the president’s refusal to...
Political clientelism — which reflects strategic, discretionary, and targeted exchange of private goods and services for political support to the incumbent — has characterised distributive politics in the Global South for decades. The conditional...
Why does clientelism persist? What determines how politicians signal responsiveness or fulfil their campaign promises? Existing works assume that politicians choose the most successful means of winning votes—either through targeted patronage...
This paper critically reviews evidence on ‘thinking and working politically’ in development. Scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognised that development is fundamentally political, and efforts are underway to develop more politically...
In the developing world, clientelism is common. In Africa, public office is often used to redistribute resources to ethnically defined constituencies, and this form of clientelistic exchange is a key determinant of vote choice. Does clientelistic...
Part of Book Extractive Industries
Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The...
Part of Book The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
The questions of whether aid has impact and is effective have been the subject of considerable attention. This thematic issue brings together nine studies that speak to the diverse ways in which aid affects development outcomes including, but not...
Part of Book The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
Since the early 2000s international development agencies have actively promoted social protection as a new global public policy. This process can be understood as flowing from related shifts within the global political economy and of development...
Since 2000, Zimbabwe has been under some pressure to provide more fully for its children. It is not clear whether child poverty has worsened, although AIDS, drought, and economic mismanagement have all compromised poverty reduction. In any case...
Donor interest in the extractives sector is based upon the premise that it represents an opportunity to improve a country’s development prospects. However, in many cases the presence of extractive resources is associated with poor economic...
Developing countries face a trade-off between the twin objectives of structural transformation and inclusive growth. This is the ‘developer’s dilemma’. This study analyses the dilemma as it manifested itself in the Indian context, and identifies two...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid Impact and Effectiveness
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid Impact and Effectiveness
Why does clientelism persist? What determines how politicians signal responsiveness to voters and exert effort towards fulfilling campaign promises? This article explores how state capacity, legislative institutional strength, and established ideas...
Part of Journal Special Issue Clientelist Politics and Development
This paper investigates whether the current effectiveness agenda—agreed during the 2011 Busan High Level Forum on Development Effectiveness—continues to define best practice in development amidst a rapidly changing development landscape. To do so, we...
This paper presents evidence of political legacies of exposure to a violent class conflict over 100 years. We revisit the Finnish Civil War of 1918 and first trace out the impact of local conflict exposure on electoral outcomes over a quarter-century...
Malaysia provides for interesting paradoxes. Poverty was reduced by adopting a horizontal perspective to policy planning through affirmative action targeting one ethnic group lagging economically in society. However, outcomes of affirmative action...
Bridging the gap between humanitarian assistance and development cooperation has been a contentious issue in academia and development practice for decades. Drawing on an evaluation of Germany’s ‘Partnership for Prospects’ initiative, this paper...
Join the network
