Legislative Transparency and Credit Risk

Open governance requirements are designed to improve accountability, which implies that transparent governments are more trustworthy stewards of their publicly invested power. However, transparency may also reduce institutional effectiveness and inhibit political compromise, diminishing the capacity to manage resources responsibly. We assess empirical support for these competing perspectives in the context of American state legislatures, many of which have become exempt from state sunshine laws in recent decades. We leverage variation in the timing of these legislative exemptions to identify the effect of removing transparency in a crucial governing institution on investors’ risk perceptions of states’ general obligation bonds. Our analysis of these data during the period 1995–2010 suggests that removing legislative transparency reduces state credit risk. We conclude that while openness in government may be normatively desirable, shielding legislative proceedings from public view may actually be better for states’ debt repayment capacity, improving their overall fiscal health.     

Accountability mechanisms in community-driven reconstruction in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

A lack of accountability is often considered a root cause of conflict. Many post-conflict reconstruction efforts therefore aim to enhance accountability between authorities and the population through community-driven reconstruction programmes. This article examines the accountability mechanisms in the Tushiriki community-driven reconstruction programme in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The ethnographic research found little impact of formal programme accountability. Rather, accountability was shaped differently and had its own context-specific meaning. To make accountability more sustainable, stronger embeddedness in local institutions and more appropriate translations of abstract concepts into the local context are needed.     

The CPGB,the Connolly Association and Irish communism, 1945–1962

This article examines the relationship between the Communist Party of Great Britain and Irish communists in both Ireland and Britain in the post-war era. It argues that the British party’s strategic interest in Ireland gradually waned as it became apparent that Irish communism would remain divided by the border. The article also argues how, in Britain, competition between the nationalist Anti-Partition League and the communist dominated Connolly Association led the latter to abandon cold war sectarianism and to adopt a ‘broad strategy’ championing civil rights in Northern Ireland. The article draws out the key role played by Charles Desmond Greaves in this process, whilst noting the importance of factionalism and external factors, notably the Irish Republican Army’s Border Campaign.     

Conflicts of customary land tenure in rural Africa: is large-scale land acquisition a driver of ‘institutional innovation’?

This study combines legal and anthropological approaches to investigate how the establishment of a large-scale biofuel agro-industry is reinterpreting and potentially transforming customary institutional arrangements in rural Sierra Leone. The contractual relationships established between land acquirers and local authorities can be seen as an ‘institutional innovation’ that aims at interpreting and overcoming the limits of the national land regime. However, by formalizing customary land tenure structures through land registration, such innovations are exacerbating pre-existing social inequalities. We identified four categories of resulting conflicts: interlineage, intervillage, interfamily and intergenerational conflicts. Taken together, these conflicts question the current land-based sociopolitical structures of rural Sierra Leone and could be drivers of societal change.