Rachel M. Gisselquist

Democratic Transition and Democratic Survival in Benin

Through its National Conference in 1990 and presidential and legislative elections in 1991, Benin successfully undertook a transition to democracy. Notwithstanding some electoral irregularities, this (minimal) democracy has survived since, witnessing three successful alternations of executive power. A ‘deviant’ case, Benin is not well explained by theories of democratization that highlight economic development and diffusion effects. In examining the Beninese case, this article focuses on the transition in three stages: the collapse of the incumbent government; the transition to democracy; and the survival (or ‘consolidation’) of minimal democracy thereafter. In explaining each of these stages, it argues that different factors were key: in the first, economic crisis exacerbated existing weaknesses in the incumbent government; in the second, external actors supported democratization, while diverse domestic groups contributed to a process that was not dominated by any single group; and in the third, domestic leadership and institutional incentives became particularly important. The article concludes by discussing democratic deepening in Benin.

Ethnic Heterogeneity and Public Goods Provision in Zambia: Further Evidence of a Subnational ‘Diversity Dividend’

The “diversity debit” hypothesis – that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on social, economic, and political outcomes – has been widely accepted in the literature. Indeed, with respect to public goods provision – the focus of this article – the conventional wisdom holds that a negative relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and public goods provision is so well-established empirically that future research should abandon examination of whether such a relationship exists and focus instead on why it exists, that is, on the mechanisms underlying a negative relationship. This article challenges the conventional wisdom on empirical grounds. It demonstrates at the sub-national level strong evidence for a “diversity dividend” – that is, a positive relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and some measures of public goods provision, in particular welfare outcomes related to publicly provided goods and services. Building on the literature, the article draws on new analysis at district level for Zambia, using a new dataset compiled by the authors from administrative, budget, and survey data, which cover a broader range of public goods outcomes than previous work, including information on both budgetary and welfare outcomes. The article explores why relationships may differ for sub-national budgetary and welfare outcomes, considering separate models for each. Analysis shows results to be robust across a variety of alternative specifications and models. Given the more nuanced relationship between ethnic diversity and public goods provision documented, the article argues that the key task for future work is not to address why the relationship is negative, but to study under what conditions such direction holds true, and the mechanisms that underlie a diversity dividend. It concludes by considering key explanatory hypotheses against the Zambian data to identify promising areas for such theory development. More broadly, while the diversity debit hypothesis highlights the costs of diversity and could be interpreted as providing support for polices that minimize it, the findings in this article are consistent with a view that diversity can be good for communities, not only for normative reasons, but also because, under some conditions, it can support concrete welfare gains.

Ethnic divisions and public goods provision, revisited

A considerable amount of recent work in political science and economics builds from the hypothesis that ethnic heterogeneity leads to poor provision of public goods, a key component of poor governance. Much of this work cites Alesina, Baqir and Easterly as providing empirical proof. This paper argues that the findings of this article have been significantly overstated. Through a simple re-analysis of the data, it shows that ethnic diversity does not straightforwardly undermine public goods provision. Rather, at least in these data, the relationship is mixed for different public goods: ethnic diversity is related to lower provision of some public goods and to higher provision of others. In some cases, there is no clear relationship. The differences between the findings presented here and those of the original article are arguably subtle, but are worth noting because of Alesina, et al.s important contribution to the literature.

Developing and evaluating governance indexes: 10 questions

Recent years have seen a proliferation of composite indicators or indexes of governance and their use in research and policy-making. This article proposes a framework of 10 questions to guide both the development and evaluation of such indexes. In reviewing these 10 questions – only six of which, it argues, are critical – the paper advances two broad arguments: First, more attention should be paid to the fundamentals of social science methodology, that is, concept formation, content validity, reliability, replicability, robustness, and the relevance of particular measures to underlying research questions. Second, less attention should be paid to other issues more commonly highlighted in the literature on governance measurement, that is, descriptive complexity, theoretical fit, the precision of estimates, and ‘correct’ weighting. The paper builds on review of the literature and on three years of research in practice in developing a well-known governance index.

Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile States What Do We Know? What Can Comparative Analysis Add?

Why and how some states transition successfully from fragile to more robust—and some do not—are both topical and age-old questions. This volume of The ANNALS addresses these questions with particular attention to the role of foreign aid, offering new traction on theory development on state-building through the use of comparative analysis. Contributions cover selected major cases of aid-supported state-building from the end of the Second World War to the present. Collectively, they highlight the potential for external assistance both to stimulate change and to alter incentives toward institution-building in fragile states. They also show the limits of external assistance by emphasizing the decisive influence of domestic institutional legacies and political dynamics. This article frames the issues addressed in this volume and draws out key findings relevant to current public debates, including the limits to aid, the influence of historical state strength, institutional change through colonial and postcolonial interventions, and political economy incentives to maintain state weakness.

Varieties of fragility: implications for aid

Aid to fragile states is a major topic for international development. This article explores how unpacking fragility and studying its dimensions and forms can help to develop policy-relevant understandings of how states become more resilient and the role of aid therein. It highlights the particular challenges for donors in dealing with chronically fragile states and those with weak legitimacy, as well as how unpacking fragility can provide traction on how to take ‘local context’ into account. It draws in particular on the contributions to this special issue to provide examples from new analysis of particular fragile state transitions and cross-national perspectives.

Ethnic Politics in Ranked and Unranked Systems: An Exploratory Analysis

This article explores how ethnic politics may operate differently in societies with “ranked” versus “unranked” ethnic systems, where ethnicity and class correlate closely versus very little. It focuses on two hypotheses suggested, but not tested, in Donald Horowitzs Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Their plausibility is explored in seven brief case studies of electoral politics in South America and Southern Africa. The analysis suggests that theories of ethnic politics that fail to take class into account are problematic for the study of ranked societies in particular.

Human capital, labour market outcomes, and horizontal inequality in Guatemala

Abstract With the second largest indigenous population by percentage in Latin America, Guatemala is an important case for understanding horizontal inequality and indigenous politics. This paper presents new analysis of survey data, allowing for consideration both of indigenous and ladino populations, as well as of ethno-linguistic diversity within the indigenous population. Our analysis illustrates both the depth and persistence of horizontal inequalities in educational and labour market outcomes, and a broad trend towards greater equality. Earnings gaps have been reduced by, among other factors, improved educational outcomes. Ethnic groups also show distinct patterns of wages and wage gaps, and there is evidence of ‘sticky floors’ affecting some groups more than others. Our findings suggest that the focus on the indigenous/non-indigenous divide found in much of the economic literature on Latin America obscures meaningful diversity within the indigenous population. We posit that further consideration of such within-group diversity has implications for broader theories of ethnic politics, and in particular for understanding the comparative weakness of indigenous political mobilisation in Guatemala.

The Measurement of Ethnic and Religious Divisions: Spatial, Temporal, and Categorical Dimensions with Evidence from Mindanao, the Philippines

An ever-expanding body of empirical research suggests that ethno-religious divisions adversely impact a host of normatively desirable objectives linked to the quality of life in society, implicitly representing a strong challenge to multiculturalist theory and policies. The appropriate conceptualization and measurement of ethno-religious divisions has consequently become the subject of complex methodological debate. This article unpacks some of this complexity and provides a synthetic critique of how eight key measures each capture the notion of divisions and relate to each other conceptually, theoretically, and empirically within a divided society. It explores simple proportions, fractionalization, polarization, cultural distance, segregation, cross-cuttingness, horizontal inequality, and intermarriage indicators. Furthermore, instead of presenting national-level temporal snapshots of divisions as in much work, it purposely examines how measures also perform at more localized levels of analysis and over time, drawing on individual-level census data from one deeply-divided society, Mindanao, in the Philippines. Analysis underscores four major issues to which researchers should pay more attention: the sensitivity of measures to (1) the underlying causal mechanisms linking divisions with outcomes; (2) the social forces and methodologies shaping the identification and categorization of groups; (3) the passage of time and evolution of divisions; and (4) the level of spatial analysis. The article provides practical guidance and discusses the key implications of these points both for quantitative scholars working with these measures and for qualitatively-inclined empiricists and normative theorists wishing to interpret, evaluate, or otherwise engage the quantitative research on the merits and demerits of diversity.

What can experiments tell us about how to improve governance

In recent years, randomized controlled trials have become increasingly popular in the social sciences. In development economics in particular, their use has attracted considerable debate in relation to the identification of ‘what works’ in development policy. This paper focuses on a core topic in development policy: governance. It aims to address two key questions: (1) what have the main contributions of randomized controlled trials been to the study of governance? and (2) what could be the contributions, and relatedly the limits of such methods? To address these questions, a systematic review of experimental and quasi-experimental methods to study government performance was conducted. It identified 139 relevant papers grouped into three major types of policy interventions that aim to: (1) improve supply-side capabilities of governments; (2) change individual behaviour through various devices, notably incentives, and (3) improve informational asymmetries. We find that randomized controlled trials can be useful in studying the effects of some policy interventions in the governance area, but they are limited in significant ways: they are ill-equipped to study broader governance issues associated with macro-structural shifts, national level variation in institutions and political culture, and leadership. Randomized controlled trials are best for studying targeted interventions, particularly in areas of public goods provision, voting behaviour, and specific measures to address corruption and improve accountability; however, they can provide little traction on whether the intervention is transferable and ‘could work’ (and why) in other contexts, and in the longer run.