Bridging the donor-decentralization gap: Rethinking incentives and institutional impacts in control-oriented bureaucracies

Some important studies suggest that the organizational imperatives of donor agencies explain the tendency of foreign aid to reinforce institutional centralization rather than to support the development of decentralized institutions in recipient countries. This article shows that certain design features of two decentralized USAID projects completed in Peru during the 1980s facilitated achieving donor objectives, decentralized institutional development, and national-level reforms favoring decentralization. Analysis of this experience reveals that these design features reduced the costs and increased the benefits of decentralized implementation for the donor, while allowing synergies between implementation and institution building to be exploited. Indeed, in the context of Peru’s highly centralized, control-oriented public sector, bypass mechanisms traditionally used by donors to expedite implementation and insulate projects from uncertainty also generally enhanced the development of decentralized institutions. The lessons distilled in this case study have broad relevance since the sorts of administrative obstacles encountered by USAID in Peru—excessive centralization, disbursement bottlenecks, and onerous bureaucratic controls—are all too frequently found in other developing countries. Gregory D. Schmidt is an associate professor of political science at Northern Illinois University and an associate ofSeguimiento, Análisis y Evaluación Para el Desarrollo (SASE), a Peruvian nongovernmental organization specializing in grassroots development. He is the author of a book and various journal articles on development issues, and of a forthcoming book on the 1990 Peruvian presidential election.     

Conducting Research on Counties in the 21st Century: A New Agenda and Database Considerations

Given local, regional, national, and global events of the last few years and the ever-increasing service roles and expectations of county governments, American counties warrant greater scholarly attention. To guide researchers, the research agenda published in this journal 15 years ago has been refined and expanded. This 11-point agenda includes fiscal capacity and responsibility; the role of structure, politics, and political participation; intergovernmental relations and networking; professionalism; service delivery; environmental issues; population changes; managing conflict and promoting integration; terrorism and security; information technology; and economic development. In addition, five database concerns and needs that pose significant challenges to researchers are identified and presented for consideration.     

The "Race Card" Revisited: Assessing Racial Priming in Policy Contests

In The Race Card (2001), Mendelberg finds support for her theory that implicit racial appeals, but not explicit ones, prime racial resentment in opinion formation. She argues that citizens reject explicit appeals, rendering them ineffective, because they violate widespread egalitarian norms. Mendelberg's innovative research, however, suffers from several limitations. We remedy these deficiencies using two randomized experiments with over 6,300 respondents. We confirm that individuals do tend to reject explicit appeals outright, but find that implicit appeals are no more effective than explicit ones in priming racial resentment in opinion formation. In accounting for the differences between previous research and our own, we show that education moderates both the accessibility of racial predispositions and message acceptance. This suggests that the necessary assumptions of Mendelberg's theory hold only for different and exclusive subsets of the general population.     

Russian 1998–2007 TFP decomposed: some inspiration emerging from inherited Soviet legacy

Using a recently developed stochastic Translog production function frontier model, technical inefficiency, technological progress and returns to scale are examined during Russia’s 1998–2007 cyclical expansion at the branch level including both the market and non-market economy. The service sector plus high skill-intensive goods production is shown to be relatively more efficient than traditional Soviet era goods sectors. Technical efficiency decreases markedly over the expansion while technological progress is quite high (23 %) suggesting an expanding frontier leaving many branches behind as the economy adjusts away from the early transition era. Much greater attention to human capital policies are suggested to foster intensive growth in an environment of low oil and gas prices.     

Protecting Homebuyers in Low‐Income Communities: Evaluating the Success of Texas Legislative Reforms in the Informal Homeownership Market

Among low‐income homebuyers, a contract for deed (CFD) has been a widely used but risky and informal mechanism for purchasing a home or lot. This article examines a series of major consumer protections adopted by the Texas Legislature from 1995 to 2005 and whether this legislation shaped the behavior of sellers who historically relied on CFDs in Texas colonias. Tracking changes in the use of CFDs between 1990 and 2010, we show that developers responded to the legislative reforms by shifting away from CFDs and into other forms of seller financing. At the same time, developers have adopted a series of workarounds to the legislation (presumably legal), leaving low‐income buyers vulnerable to rapid repossession by the developer. In contrast, the impact of the legislation on low‐income residents selling their homes has been minimal. These consumer‐to‐consumer transactions remain highly informal, with ongoing reliance on the now illegal, unrecorded CFD.