Replication Studies of Development Impact Evaluations

Six years ago, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) launched a programme to promote and fund replication studies of impact evaluations in international development. We designed the programme with the objective of improving the quality of evidence for development policy-making, using replication research to both validate the results of published impact evaluations and build the incentives for more transparent and high quality research going forward. The programme’s focus is internal replication, which uses the original data from a study to address the same question as that study. This Journal of Development Studies special issue compiles the majority of completed 3ie-funded replication studies initiated in the first years of the programme. In all cases the pure replication components of these studies are generally able to reproduce the results published in the original article. Most of the measurement and estimation analyses confirm the robustness of the original articles or call into question just a subset of the original findings. These replication studies mostly focus on providing additional information about the impacts of the interventions – especially additional information that can be important for interpreting the articles for the purpose of policy-making.     

Economic Power Foundations of Cities in Global Governance

This study provides evidence that city government participation in global governance networks is explicable by the larger power hierarchy of cities in the global economy. Extant research on city government participation in global governance networks, or “transnational municipal networks (TMNs)” such as United Cities Local Governments, has largely ignored the relevance of research showing city-level connectivity to corporate and other economic networks among world cities. In this latter tradition of research, the level of a city’s connectivity to such economic networks is understood as commensurate with the hierarchical power it holds in the global economy. Using a sample of UK and Chinese cities, this study shows that patterns of participation in a range of TMNs are explained by varied measures of city-level connectivity to economic networks. Interpreted through structuration theory, findings suggest that city participation in global governance is shaped and stratified by city-level hierarchical power within the global economy.     

FROM THE DAGGER TO THE BOMB: KARL HEINZEN AND THE EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL TERROR

Historians and political scientists have been quick to draw a continuum between the tyrannicide theories of years gone by and the modern terrorism of today. Yet the underlying motivations and intended results are very different in tyrannicide and terrorism. The question this raises is what changes occurred in the theory of political violence to make the transition between tyrannicide and terrorism possible? In this article, the author looks at the writings of a little-known nineteenth-century journalist, Karl Heinzen, to gain insight into the connection made in the mind of a terrorist between tyrannicide theory and terrorism.     

Editor's note

This article examines the argument that the ability of a government to generate “audience costs”—to create a situation, that is, in which it would pay a domestic political price for backing down—plays a key role in determining how international crises run their course. It does this by looking at a dozen great power crises to see how well various aspects of the audience costs argument hold up in the light of the historical evidence. The audience costs mechanism, it turns out, does not play a major role in any of those crises—a conclusion which, the author claims, has certain important methodological implications.     

Balance of Power or the State-to-Nation Balance: Explaining Middle East War-Propensity

The Middle East is one of the most war-prone regions in the international system. What is the most powerful explanation of the war-propensity of this region? I argue that neither realism nor liberalism are able to account for variations in regional war-proneness. Instead, I advance an alternative explanation based on the concept of the state-to-nation balance in the region. This balance refers to the degree of congruence between the division of the region into territorial states and the national aspirations and political identifications of the region's peoples. The balance also refers to the prevalence of strong versus weak states in the region. Thus, I explain the Middle East's high war-proneness by focusing on its relatively low level of state-to-nation balance. This imbalance has led to a powerful combination of revisionist ideologies and state incoherence. While other regions suffer from state incoherence, powerful revisionist nationalist forces, notably pan-nationalist and irredentists (the “Greater State”), aggravate this problem in the Middle East. These revisionist forces are often transborder and are especially powerful in the Middle East because of the high degree of external/transborder incongruence in comparison with all other regions. The combination of nationalist revisionism and state incoherence has made the Middle East more prone to violence than most other regions.