Violence, bribery, and fraud: the political economy of?elections in Sub-Saharan Africa

Post-Soviet African democratization has introduced elections into contexts that often lack restraints upon the behavior of candidates, resulting in the emergence of voter intimidation, vote-buying, and ballot fraud. We propose a model of electoral competition where, although some voters oppose violence, it is effective in intimidating swing voters. We show that in equilibrium a weak challenger will use violence, which corresponds to a terrorism strategy. Similarly, a nationally weak incumbent will use repression. However, a stronger incumbent facing local competition will prefer to use bribery or ballot fraud. We discuss the applicability of the model to several African elections.     

Do African Manufacturing Firms Learn from Exporting?

We use firm-level panel data for the manufacturing sector in four African countries to investigate whether exporting impacts on efficiency, and whether efficient firms self-select into the export market. Based on simultaneous estimation of a production function and an export regression, our preferred results indicate significant efficiency gains from exporting, which can be interpreted as learning by exporting. We show that modelling unobserved heterogeneity by a flexible approach is important for deriving this conclusion. A policy implication of our results is that Africa would gain from orientating its manufacturing sector towards exporting.     

A Hard Time to Be a Father?: Reassessing the Relationship Between Law,Policy, and Family (Practices)

This article seeks to unpack the way in which a constellation of ideas around what it means to speak of 'good fatherhood' has come to inform a series of debates, after the election of the New Labour government in 1997, around the content and contours of paternal responsibility. Via a focus on family law and recent developments around the idea of 'work-life' balance, it discusses the concepts underpinning present debates. In questioning the still-powerful (if frequently unspoken) influence of social constructionist ideas of sex/gender, it explores and question how men's 'family practices' have been understood.     

To Prevent a Revolution: John F. Kennedy and the Promotion of Democracy in Iran

John F. Kennedy came to power in 1961 with Iran on the verge of revolution against the Shah's unpopular policies. To stabilise the situation, his Administration attempted to promote democracy through a development plan based on the precepts of modernisation theory. Backed by academic theorists who argued that promoting democracy was the best way to secure victory in the Cold War, Kennedy developed an ambitious plan to transform Iran. This policy was seen as essential to replace the inevitable uncontrollable revolution and subsequent loss of Iran, with one controlled and directed by Washington. This analysis provides the first comprehensive examination of this plan and its foundations that has heretofore been overlooked. Kennedy's policy towards Iran illuminates the role that external powers can have in manufacturing, supporting, and encouraging a country's transition to democracy. Its failure, and the absence of any replacement plan to ensure political reform, made inevitable the uncontrollable revolution which eventually came in 1978.     

Retrospective voting: An experimental study

This essay reports on some experiments designed to study two candidate electoral competition when voters are ‘retrospective’ voters. The experiments consist of a sequence of elections in which subjects play the part of both voters and candidates. In each election the incumbent adopts a policy position in a one-dimensional policy space, and voters are paid (on the basis of single peaked utility function over that space) for the position adopted by the incumbent. Neither voters nor candidates are informed of the voter utility functions, and the only information received by the voter is the payoff he has received from the present and previous incumbent administrations. Despite the severely limited information of candidates and voters, we find that, generally, candidates converge toward the median voter ideal point.     

The Institutional and Psychological Foundations of Natural Resource Policies

Abstract

The pressures of political interests which drive the resource curse are well-understood. But ordinary citizens are usually cast both as the innocent victims of this process, and as the potential solution if only governments could be made more accountable to them. This paper draws upon recent developments in social psychology to discuss the formation of mass opinions on two aspects of resource ownership. One is the spatial assignment of ownership between local and national claims, which has been a significant cause of conflict. The other is the assignment of revenues between current consumption and future investment, which has usually been excessively biased towards the former. I suggest why, in the absence of an active government communications policy to offset them, known psychological biases may interact with resource discoveries to generate mass opinions which contribute to these problems.