Matthew S. Winters

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of Political Science

We examine a phenomenon we call “credit claiming by labeling” in which a sitting politician places her name on a project, program, or policy with the goal of claiming credit for it. While the prevalence of this practice suggests that many politicians believe that credit claiming by labeling will aid their careers, there is little existing evidence...

We examine a phenomenon we call "credit claiming by labeling" in which a sitting politician places her name on a project, program, or policy with the goal of claiming credit for it. While the prevalence of this practice suggests that many politicians believe that credit claiming by labeling will aid their careers, there is little existing evidence...

Conventional measures of political knowledge assess citizens’ familiarity with institutions, political parties, and political actors at the national level. We argue that other types of political knowledge are also important to democratic citizenship. We focus on knowledge about social rights (i.e., government guarantees that predominantly concern m...

Do citizens punish elected politicians for corruption carried out by unelected bureaucrats? Most studies of corruption punishment focus on accusations against politicians. We argue that the direct, and therefore undeniable, experience of corruption at the hands of street-level bureaucrats will lead citizens to punish national incumbents. We explore...

This chapter reviews empirical literature on foreign aid and QoG. The chapter begins with a description of how scholarship on foreign aid and QoG developed in conjunction with prominent debates in the development community. The chapter discusses three major debates: whether or not QoG moderates foreign aid effectiveness, whether or not donors give...

Access to justice is an important issue for people around the world. In many African countries, citizens most typically access justice through customary, community-level institutions. States and international actors, however, are attempting to extend the reach of the formal justice sector in many countries, under the logic that such institutions ma...

Foreign aid flows result from agreements reached between states that need resources and other states or international organizations that can provide those resources. Recent literature has argued that different international development organizations bargain with aid-receiving states in particular ways. Specifically, some authors argue that non-egal...

As new information technologies facilitate the production and dissemination of broadcast media, entertainment-education interventions are increasingly used in attempts to influence audiences on issues such as political participation, support for democracy, violence against women, and tolerance of ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. What facto...

How widespread is strategic voting in two-round electoral systems, and which types of voters are most likely to engage in such behavior? While runoff elections are common in presidential systems around the world, research on strategic voting in these settings remains limited. This paper explores four different types of strategic behavior that are p...

A prominent body of scholarship views revenue extraction by the state as a catalyst for the creation of representative institutions. States in the developing world, however, extract less revenue from their citizens than states in wealthy countries. One reason for this discrepancy is the presence of foreign aid. This special issue explores both theo...

Local public goods and social services are delivered through a variety of funding and implementing channels in aid-dependent countries. Existing research proposes that international aid to governments undermines government legitimacy and the fiscal contract between citizens and their rulers. We outline how the implications of fiscal contract theory...

Previous research suggests that ideology, material interests, and moral values drive citizens’ preferences over foreign aid policy. Little attention has been paid to how perceptions of the international environment affect these preferences. We examine the extent to which citizens in a traditional donor country consider donor competition when decidi...

Targeted Development: Industrialized Country Strategy in a Globalizing World. By Sarah Blodgett Bermeo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 200p. $105.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. - Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top-Down Management of Foreign Aid Doesn’t Work. By Dan Honig. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 288p. $41.95 cloth, $29.95...

As new information technologies facilitate the production and dissemination of broadcast media, entertainment-education interventions are increasingly used in attempts to influence audiences on issues such as political participation, support for democracy, violence against women, and tolerance of ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. What facto...

The total funding envelope for World Bank projects is often divided among various state and non-state actors, each of which can have competing ideas about or interests in the project. How does the division of financing relate to overall project effectiveness? I argue that too many funding streams in a project can reduce project effectiveness by cre...

Many foreign aid donors brand development interventions. How do citizens in the donor country react to seeing this branding in action? We test the proposition that citizens will express higher levels of support for foreign aid when they see a branded foreign aid project relative to seeing the same project without branding. We present results from a...

In areas of limited statehood, foreign development assistance often finances public goods and services. Do citizens attribute the presence of this development assistance to their government and thereby generalize about the legitimacy of their own government because of it? In an informational experiment embedded in a nationwide survey in Bangladesh,...

The literature on the autonomy of international organizations describes how bureaucratic agents often operate with slack that allows them to pursue their preferences in the shadow of institutional mandates. We study the division of costs in World Bank projects between the Bank and its borrowers. If this is a realm in which World Bank bureaucrats ex...

Existing research shows that survey respondents are sensitive to the source of information about political corruption and respond more strongly to information from more credible sources. This behavior occurs more frequently among the politically sophisticated. In a nation-wide survey in Argentina, we successfully replicate results originally found...

International legal scholars have identified and argued for and against new forms of non-consent-based international law. We study variation in Brazilian public opinion about adherence to international law created in three different ways: through a consent-based multilateral treaty, by the U.N. Security Council with the participation of Brazil, and...

Foreign aid donors make themselves visible as the funders of development projects to improve citizen attitudes abroad. Do target populations receive these political communications in the intended fashion, and does the information succeed in changing attitudes? Despite the widespread use of various mechanisms to communicate information about foreign...

How does information about the presence of foreign financing in a development project change people’s perceptions of that project? Using an informational experiment in Bangladesh, we find that information about US financing of a specific development intervention sends a positive signal about project quality; this effect is concentrated among indivi...

When are citizens most likely to hold politicians to account for wrongdoing? In a crowded information environment, political accountability requires that credible information about politician behavior is available and that citizens are able to identify credible information as such. Focusing on this second requirement, we argue that the ability to d...

There is a growing consensus that voters withdraw support from a politician when they receive clear information that the politician has engaged in corruption. But will voters punish an elected official for corrupt acts carried out under his or her watch even if the politician is not personally implicated in corruption? To answer this question, we p...

A number of recent studies have found that temporary members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) experience increased foreign aid inflows. We use a constrained permutations approach to replicate analyses found in Vreeland and Dreher (2014). Permuting the timing of country membership on the Security Council, we create placebo UNSC membersh...

In long-standing democracies, the partisan attachments of most citizens are stable and not responsive to short-term political events. Recent studies from younger democracies, however, suggest that partisanship may be more malleable in these contexts. In this paper we develop hypotheses about how political corruption might affect voter attachment to...

Despite having 40 per cent of the world’s potential for geothermal power production, Indonesia exploits less than five per cent of its own geothermal resources. We explore the reasons behind this lagging development of geothermal power and highlight four obstacles: (1) delays caused by the suboptimal decentralisation of permitting procedures to loc...

Branding of foreign aid may undermine government legitimacy in developing countries when citizens see social services being provided by external actors. We run a survey experiment on a sample of Indian respondents. All subjects learn about an HIV/AIDS program; treated subjects learn that it was foreign-funded. We find null results that, along with...

We hypothesize that selective donors will use types of aid over which they have more control when providing assistance to poorly governed countries. We use an original classification of project purpose codes in the AidData dataset to categorize aid flows from the period 2004 to 2010. Results from fixed effect and compositional data models provide e...

Citizens in a democracy can only hold elected officials accountable if they are able to correctly assess politician performance. Although there is ample evidence that individuals learn and take political cues from favored sources, these sources may have incentives to dissemble. When will citizens discern between more and less credible sources of po...

There is a growing consensus that voters withdraw support from a politician when they receive clear information that the politician has engaged in corruption. But do voters punish an elected executive for corrupt acts carried out under his or her watch, even if the executive is not personally implicated in corruption? To answer this question, we pr...

Indonesia drastically lags behind other countries in Southeast Asia and at similar levels of development in supplying urban wastewater sanitation. We use case studies from three cities in Indonesia to better understand why wastewater services are underprovided. We find strong demand-side constraints that interact with supply-side decision making. A...

In young democracies with weak parties, there is some evidence that partisan identification may shift in response to short-term government performance. The massive protests that erupted in Brazil in June 2013 sharply increased the salience of, and public attention to, poor government performance and took most observers by surprise. They were also w...

Identifying the causes of happiness presents a challenge for researchers interested in this fundamental outcome variable. After reviewing previous literature looking at the causal effect of political participation on life satisfaction, we discuss the merits of using panel data, where there are repeated measurements over time for each individual, an...

If development projects are to be effective, a minimum requirement is that the funding reaches its intended destination. Yet the history of international development is replete with examples of this not happening. I argue that there will be fewer problems with corruption or other diversions of funding --- which I jointly label capture --- in more p...

What explains persistent political corruption in many young democracies? Focusing on the effects of corruption on individual-level attitudes, we present two hypotheses for why citizens might be willing to cast ballots for corrupt politicians. On the one hand, voters may simply lack information about corruption. On the other hand, voters may knowing...

Why are citizens willing to cast ballots for corrupt politicians? On the one hand, voters may simply lack information about corruption. On the other hand, voters may knowingly overlook corruption when politicians otherwise perform well in office, delivering public goods to their constituents. Citizen responses to a nationwide survey in Brazil indic...

Relying on a new institutional economics analysis of transaction costs, the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness emphasizes donor harmonization as an intermediate objective for increasing the effectiveness of foreign assistance in bringing about development outcomes. Surveys on adherence to the Paris Declaration commitments so far suggest th...

In observational data, access to information is associated with lower levels of corruption. This article reviews a small but growing body of work that uses field experiments to explore the mechanisms behind this relationship. We present a typology for understanding this research based on the type of corruption being addressed (political vs. bureauc...

Previous research has demonstrated that the link between social capital and government performance is about the policy responsiveness of government. I argue that social capital helps communities overcome collective action problems related to lobbying such that they can better express their desires for certain public goods and services to the govern...

ABSTRACT: Can international donors ensure that poor countries spend their natural resource revenues on development? We review the World Bank’s 14-year effort to guide such expenditure in Chad. The World Bank used its leverage as a gate keeper of private oil sector to write oil revenue restrictions into Chadian law. Chad also agreed to submit its ex...

In this article, I review the World Bank’s response to the global financial crisis that began in the fall of 2008. I show that the World Bank significantly increased lending after the crisis began. The majority of this new lending went to middle-income countries rather than to the poorest countries of the world. At first glance, this might seem lik...

Abstract will be provided by author.

What is the relationship between voting and individual life satisfaction in Latin America? While studies of Western Europe suggest that voters are happier than non-voters, this relationship has not been explored in the younger democracies of the developing world, including those of Latin America. Using multilevel regression models to examine indivi...

Well-governed countries are more likely to make use of foreign aid for the purposes of economic development and poverty alleviation. Therefore, if aid agencies are providing funds for the sake of development, these countries should receive more aid and categorically different types of aid as compared with poorly governed countries. In poorly govern...

Foreign aid involves a chain of accountability relationships stretching from international donors through national governments and implementing agencies to a set of ultimate end users of the goods and services financed by the aid. In this paper, I review five different accountability relationships that exist in foreign aid projects among donors, go...

There is little consensus on whether foreign aid can reliably increase economic growth in recipient countries. We review the literature on aid allocation and provide new evidence suggesting that since 1990 aid donors reward political contestation but not political inclusiveness. Then we examine some challenges in analyzing cross-national data on th...

The Bono de Desarrollo Humano (BDH) program in Ecaudor is a conditional cash transfer program in existence since 2003 and targeted at poor households throughout the country. The original recipient list for the program was based on a 2002 survey of 2 million households. After the initial creation of the beneficiary list, households joined the progra...

Philips, who trained as an economist and worked in the private sector before entering the world of development, spent 14 years working for the World Bank with a focus on Tanzania, Mozambique, Belarus, and Armenia (viii). His main task in this volume is to recount and assess the reforms that Wolfensohn undertook as Bank president and then to offer a...

Resource-based explanations of protest participation examine the way in which individual characteristics predict whether or not a particular person will engage in protest activity. This paper examines variation in these predictors over space and time, using data from the first four waves of the World Values Survey. After identifying the magnitude a...

Using an original dataset of all World Bank projects from 1996 to 2002, I distinguish between projects that are targeted sub-nationally from those that are nationwide. I also distinguish investment projects from programmatic aid. Then I look to see which national characteristics predict the use of programmatic aid and national project aid by the Wo...

Theoretical literatures on procedural utility and the psychological benefits of political participation suggest that people who participate in political activities will be more satisfied with their lives because of the resulting feelings of autonomy, competence and relatedness. Individual-level data from Latin America show—in one dataset under stud...

La obra publicada sobre la utilidad procedimental y los beneficios sicológicos derivados de la participación política, hace pensar que la gente que toma parte en actividades políticas tiende a sentirse más satisfecha con su vida, gracias a la sensación de autonomía, competencia y comunidad que produce esa participación. Datos a nivel del individuo...

La obra publicada sobre la utilidad procedimental y los beneficios sicológicos derivados de la participación política, hace pensar que la gente que toma parte en actividades políticas tiende a sentirse más satisfecha con su vida, gracias a la sensación de autonomía, competencia y comunidad que produce esa participación. Datos a nivel del individuo...

After the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis, South Korean outward direct investment (ODI) remained at approximately the same level as before the crisis. What explains this remarkable persistence of outward investment concurrent with a seven-point drop in GDP? After considering contemporary theories of foreign direct investment, this article posits tha...

This paper applies the insights of obsolescing bargaining theory to a situation in which a host country interacted with both multinational corporations and an international organization, the World Bank. Drawing on resource curse literature and the Rubinstein bargaining model, we demonstrate the continued usefulness of obsolescing bargaining theory...

For more than four decades, there were no inter-Korean economic relations of any kind. Then on November 21, 1988, 40 kilograms of North Korean clams arrived in Pusan, the first realization of economic exchange between the two Koreas. The terms had been announced by South Korean President Roh Tae Woo in his “Special Declaration in the Interest of Na...

A well-known phrase used to describe politicians in Brazil is "rouba, mas faz" – "he robs, but he gets things done." It has been linked to particular political figures and used to explain President Lula's persistent popularity in spite of the numerous corruption scandals suffered by his administration. But is it really the case that voters knowingl...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

In July 2003, Chad—a poor and landlocked state—joined the league of oil-exporting nations. Reaching this point required several consortiums of international oil com-panies; extended analysis and consultation with environmentalists, anthropologists, and activists; the passage of a law detailing how the government could spend oil revenues; the creati...

This paper starts from the assumption that there is an ideal model of foreign policy making in which decision-makers are guided by the principle that ends/commitments must be kept in line with available means/resources. When means and ends become unbalanced, foreign policy is likely to fail. The paper then lays out two novel ways in which policy ma...

Benson and Rochon (2004) find a correlation between interpersonal trust and the level of protest participation in the 1990 World Values Survey data. I build on their statis-tical model, accounting for the multilevel structure of the data by looking at country-by-country regressions and running a series of multilevel models. I am able to confirm Ben...

Previous studies of multilateral aid suggest that there is often a political motive behind lending—that influential donor countries are able to influence the amount of aid provided to recipient countries by international financial institutions. Given the special circumstances of the transition from communism, how true was this for World Bank lendin...