Research note: Budget support suspensions as a sanctioning device

“Budget support” is a form of aid whereby a donor provides direct financial support to a recipient government’s budget.  It could also be used as a tool for punishing governments that fail to fight corruption, respect human rights, or meet other good governance norms.  But how often is this tool used for such purposes?   Nadia Molenaers, Anna Gagiano and Lodewijk Smets describe a new database that covers all budget support suspensions between 1999 and 2014.  A preliminary analysis shows that forty percent of suspensions fall in the “democracy and human rights” category.  The data set can be downloaded by researchers.  Read the research note.

Brazil: Measuring capacity, explaining corruption

In a new article for Governance, Katherine Bersch, Sérgio Praça, and Matthew Taylor respond to calls for better measures of state capacity and bureaucratic autonomy at the subnational level.  Their new measures are “objective and independent of outcome.”  And they allow exploration of the causes of corruption within Brazil.  “Low capacity and autonomy are associated with higher corruption,” they find.  Single-party dominance also increases corruption through its negative effects on agency capacity.  Read the article.

UK agency autonomy: Not what it seems

Britain’s “Next Steps” program was supposed to redefine the bargain between ministers and senior public service executives, granting more autonomy in exchange for more direct accountability.  But it hasn’t always worked out that way, Thomas Elston explains.  We need to distinguish explicit and tacit aspects of the “public service bargain,” and recognize that these two aspects move “in and out of alignment with each other.”  In the UK justice sector, oversight of agencies is “far more hierarchical and contract based.”  But the appearance of independence allows politicians to make more intricate calculations about credit-claiming or blame-avoiding for agency activities.  Read the article.

Why sub-Saharan voters support corrupt politicians

Why do voters support corrupt politicians?  In the current issue of Governance, Eric Chang and Nicholas Kerr examine voter attitudes and behavior in eighteen sub-Saharan African countries.  They distinguish between outsiders and two kinds of insiders: those who belong to patronage networks, and those who share partisan or ethnic affilations with incumbents.  “Patronage insiders” recognize higher levels of corruption but tolerate it, while “identity insiders” are simply less aware of political corruption.  Read the article.

Preserving transparency in Trump’s America

Transparency’s rise as an administrative norm over the past few decades has seemed unstoppable.  But what will happen in the era of Trump?  Mark Fenster explores this question in a new commentary for Governance.  He distinguishes between two conceptions of transparency — technocratic and populist.  Trump seems likely to resist the first conception while embracing the second.  Transparency advocates, who have grown accustomed to thinking about openness in technocratic terms, will have to develop new ways of talking about the subject.  They should “deploy the moral and populist understanding of transparency” that is preferred by Trump himself, to defend the laws and regulations that have been put in place to assure openness. Free access to the commentary.

How can scholars defend the open society?

“The tenor of political rhetoric” is a key indicator of the health of a society’s underlying norms, Julia Buxton argues in a new commentary for Governance.  And today that indicator shows that we are in a time of “norm regress: an unraveling of the shift in public attitudes over many decades that has made human rights a lived expectation and bigotry and hatred an anathema.”  Buxton argues that it is time for academics to think more carefully about their obligations as cherished norms decay.  “How, as citizens and moral agents as well as intellectuals, shall we defend and further the ideals of an open society?”  Free access to the commentary.

New editorial team for Governance

The SOG executive is pleased to announce the selection of a new editorial team for Governance.  The new co-editors are Professors Adam Sheingate of Johns Hopkins University and Éric Montpetit of the Université de Montréal.  The new team will take over on January 1, 2018.