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‘Inclusive’ distribution as electoral strategy: The politics of Turkish central government spending under AK Party rule.
Abstract
A significant body of research has explored how developmental goods and services are allocated following strategic political reasons, beyond normative considerations of efficiency and equity. Most studies of distributive politics assume that politicians always attempt to win support by strategic spending. Even if this is the central tendency, are some expenditure lines disbursed with less apparent favouritism towards particular regions? And, if so, why? We suggest that governments intentionally spare some sectors from selective geographical targeting to convey the appearance of programmatic spending, while safeguarding others to reward supporters or punish opponents. Parties may find it politically advantageous to reserve some sectors for more ‘inclusive’ spending to showcase their governance credentials, especially in policy areas that have garnered high public dissatisfaction and where voters can directly verify if promises have been kept. We analyse central government spending on all budget categories in Turkey’s 81 provinces for 2003-2015, a period when the ruling AK Party gained and consolidated power. Using fixed-effects and instrumental-variable Tobit estimators, we demonstrate that health spending has apparently become more inclusive, while other expenditures reward core strongholds.
... incumbent party -and if they behaved prospectively, by responding to campaign promises about future government actions -in which case votes would be positively correlated to future actions. While empirical evidence seems to suggest that retrospective and prospective voting are not mutually exclusive (Cammett et al., 2018), most studies in the literature find retrospective voting models more relevant. ...
... Confirming previous research on distributive politics in Turkey, the table shows that voting for the central incumbent party has had a statistically significant and substantial influence over the territorial allocation of public investment and investment subsidies to firms (columns one to four). Furthermore, results are in line with recent models of strategic targeting with alternative distributive goods (Albertus, 2013;Cammett, 2014;Cammett, Luca, & Sergenti, 2018). Diaz-Cayeros et al. (2016), for example, posit that parties machines may target low-spillover (i.e. ...
... Cammett et al. (2018) indeed show how the strategic distribution of public expenditure follows complex patterns. ...
While there is systematic evidence of how governments affect policy outputs for strategic reasons, a limited amount of studies has assessed whether these distortions are consequential for economic growth. Using data from Turkey over the period 2004-2013, the current paper measures the effect of voting for the national incumbent party on local economic performance. New instrumental variable estimates suggest that provinces where the electoral race for the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was closer have experienced faster per-capita GVA and employment growth rates. The effect is economically substantive and increases in election years. Results also provide evidence that the government has affected growth through the selective provision of state goods.
After decades of multiparty politics, Turkey is no longer a democracy. A theory-upending case, the country has descended into a competitive authoritarian regime under the Justice and Development Party ( Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP), despite rising income and education levels and strong links with the West. What accounts for democratic breakdown in such an unlikely case? Instead of ideological and institutional factors, we offer a political economy account. We contend that the coalitional ties that the AKP forged with businesses and the urban poor through the distribution of public resources has altered the cost of toleration for the party leadership and their dependent clients, while reducing the cost of suppression for incumbents. This new political calculus led to increasing authoritarianism of the AKP government through securitization of dissent, mounting repression, and systematic violation of civil liberties.
Even though a wide range of the literature explores how governments target public goods strategically, only a handful of papers examine whether these electorally motivated distributive patterns have consequences for the real economy. With the use of Turkish electoral and firm-level data, this paper examines whether electoral factors affect the variation in power outages experienced by firms across Turkish regions. The findings demonstrate that sales of firms located in regions in which the incumbent party received more votes were disproportionately higher because these firms experienced relatively lower numbers and durations of power outages.
While many scholars have moved toward using individual-level data to test theories of distributive politics, no studies have ever explicitly examined differences between individual and aggregate analyses of a distributive program. By leveraging nationwide individual-level data on both revealed voter preferences and the actual receipt of particularistic benefits through a contemporary Venezuelan land reform initiative, this Research Note demonstrates that scholars can most effectively test and refine individual-level theories of distributive politics by combining both individual and macro-level data. There are at least two advantages to doing so. First, comparing and contrasting findings from data at different levels of analysis can enable researchers to paint a more complete picture of distributive targeting. Second, when distributive benefits can be impacted or redirected by subnational politicians, as is common with many distributive programs, individual-level data alone can generate mistaken inferences that are an artifact of competing targeting attempts at different levels of government instead of initial targeting strategies. I demonstrate both of these points and discuss practical and simple recommendations regarding data collection strategies for the purposes of effectively testing theories of distributive politics.
What do we learn from Turkey and Tunisia regarding the relationship between political Islamism and democratization? Variables identified by current research such as autonomy, " moderation " , and cooperation with secular actors can cut both ways depending on various political-institutional conditions and prerogatives. Particularly, the article argues that preoccupation with " conquering the state from within as opposed to democratizing it " has been a key priority and intervening variable undermining the democratizing potential of the main Turkish and Tunisian political Islamic actors – primarily the AKP and Ennahda. These actors have prioritized acceptance by and ownership of their respective nation states over other goals and strategies, such as revolutionary takeover or Islamization of the state and confrontations with state elites. This has led to a relative neglect of designing and building institutions, whether for Islamic or democratic transformation. Hence, while contributing to democratization at various stages, these actors have a predisposition to adopt and regenerate, reframe and at times augment the authoritarian properties of their states. Research should ask how secular and religious actors can agree on institutions of vertical and horizontal state accountability that would help to address the past and present sources of the interest of political Islamists in conquering rather than democratizing the state.
Turkey’s ‘authoritarian turn’ in recent years indicates a democratic breakdown that can best be analysed by analytically distinguishing between two simultaneous developments. The first is the reproduction of Turkey’s long-existing semi-democratic regime – which the article calls old authoritarianism – in a new historical and dominant political–ideological context and under an Islamist-leaning government. The second is the emergence of a new type of authoritarianism – dubbed new authoritarianism – that is in many respects unprecedented for Turkey, is in need of better comprehension and displays important parallels with contemporary troubles of democracy in the world. Focusing on political society and institutions is insufficient to adequately examine the emergent authoritarian regime, for example to identify it as a regime type, to explain its popular support and to foresee how durable and repressive, and to what extent party-based rather than personalistic, it may become. It is necessary to combine insights from the new political economy of welfare, transition and communication with those from political and institutional democratization. Doing so suggests that new authoritarianism generates a new kind of state–society relationship where, paradoxically, political power becomes simultaneously more particularistic, personalized and mass-based. Hence, new authoritarianism has democratizing potential, but can also become more oppressive than any other regime Turkey has previously experienced. Oscillation between these two outcomes is also possible.
While Turkey’s use of public monies has been frequently marred by waste and short-term electoral rewarding, recent research suggests that the allocation of public investment across Turkish provinces between 2004 and 2012 was more responsive to socioeconomic needs than electoral politics. The current paper aims to understand this empirical puzzle by exploring whether the ‘relatively sound’ management of public investment can be explained by the characteristics of the central economic bureaucracy. It draws on process-tracing analysis and in-depth elite interviews. In line with the developmental state literature, the analysis argues that authoritative and insulated public administrations are essential for policy effectiveness, particularly in institutional contexts prone to a high politicisation of the public purse. Yet, in order to prevent bureaucratic capture, bureaus must also be accountable. The analysis in particular shows how increasing the transparency of the state and allowing a stronger oversight of policy performance by the public and the media are extremely important. Conversely, transformations which simply reduce the powers of strong, top-down bureaucracies to increase the indiscriminate control by governments – such as the ones which have occurred in Turkey in recent years – will not lead to stronger institutions, but merely produce different ineffective and unsustainable structures.
The changing connections between business and political Islam under liberalisation can best be studied through an analysis of moral justifications, political connections in business and institutional modifications. Our evidence on energy utility privatisations through a comprehensive analysis of party connections with firm and industry specific data demonstrates that Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) reshaped industry structures to nurture a new breed of politically linked businesses. In order to build a patronage regime in energy markets, the AKP manipulated regulatory institutions, suppressed the media and advocacy groups, and immobilised the judicial process in response to allegations of misconduct. The highly personalised and opaque allocation of assets increased the power of business groups that enjoyed close ties with the prime minister and key party officials. Leading politically connected firms emerged as not only the major beneficiaries but also key supporters of authoritarian politics. Our findings have important implications for the analysis of political Islam, regulatory institutions and the vulnerabilities of energy privatisations in emerging economies.
In elections around the world, large numbers of voters are influenced by promises or threats that are contingent on how they vote. Recently, the political science literature has made considerable progress in disaggregating clientelism along two dimensions: first, in recognizing the diversity of actors working as brokers, and second, in conceptualizing and disaggregating types of clientelism based on positive and negative inducements of different forms. In this review, we discuss recent findings explaining variation in the mix of clientelistic strategies across countries, regions, and individuals and identify a few areas for future progress, particularly in explaining variation in targeting of inducements by politicians on different types of voters.
In countries where governments’ disproportionate power over the bureaucracy is coupled with a strong political polarization, can votes for the national incumbent party “buy” preferential policy treatment and faster regional economic growth? The article tests such question on Turkey’s 81 provinces over 2004–12. Results uncover a link between votes and faster regional growth, as well as a small influence of preferential allocations in explaining it. Yet, after addressing potential endogeneity, economic performance is almost entirely explained by standard drivers, primarily human capital endowment. Results suggest that the impact of electorally motivated distributive politics on regions’ economic performance is extremely limited.
“Party hegemony” is a macro-level characteristic of party systems, which is a product of persistent and overwhelming electoral victories that leads to domination of the parliamentary system by a single party. Party hegemony can only emerge through a collection of individual-level (albeit aggregated), lower-level structural, and macro-level institutional factors. This article intends to shed light on hegemonic party systems by incorporating all of these aspects. It analyses the case of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey as a hegemonic party in the making. Based on individual-level survey data as well as an original province-level dataset, the article examines the role of ideology, pork barrel politics, economic voting, demographics, and political institutions in AKP's rising hegemony. The replicable nature of the dataset enables further testing of these findings in comparable cases for generalizability.
Turkey is often perceived as a country with low bureaucratic capacity and prone to political manipulation and ‘pork-barrel’. This article tests whether this is the case, by analysing the extent to which politics, rather than equity and efficiency criteria, have determined the geographical allocation of public investment across the 81 provinces of Turkey between 2005 and 2012. The results show that although the Turkish government has indeed channelled public expenditures to reward its core constituencies, socioeconomic factors remained the most relevant predictors of investment. Moreover, in contrast to official regional development policy principles, we uncover the concentration of public investment in areas with comparatively higher levels of development. We interpret this as the state bureaucracy’s intentional strategy of focussing on efficiency by concentrating resources on ‘the better off among the most in need’.
In response to the crisis of 2008 and deep recession that followed, the UK government assigned key importance to the need to ‘spatially rebalance’ the economy, to reduce its dependence on London and the South East by ‘powering up’ northern cities. This paper argues that the UK’s problem of spatial economic imbalance is in fact a long-standing one, the very persistence of which raises key issues for our theories of regional development and policy. It argues that neither the new spatial economics, with its obsession with agglomeration, nor regional studies, with its plethora of concepts and paradigms but lack of integration and synthesis, offers a particularly convincing basis for devising policies capable of redressing the spatial imbalance in the UK’s economic landscape.
The role of institutions in the promotion (or hindrance) of regional development has attracted increasing attention from scholars and policy-makers. This paper reviews recent contributions to this debate before sketching elements of a research agenda which addresses some key conjectural, methodological and political issues.
This paper examines the degree to which political connections affect business rankings through a statistical analysis of Turkey’s industry rankings between 2003 and 2011. The analysis demonstrates that business performance is associated with connectedness through industry and firm level data. We show that political connectedness varies according to the firm’s channel of access to obtain favouritism either through direct personal ties or institutional networks. Ideological motivations emerge to be significant in mobilizing, shaping and tying firm behaviour to broader political agendas. In the conclusion we discuss the impact of deepening connectedness on long-term business fortunes and political institutions.
The Bartik instrument is formed by interacting local industry shares and national industry growth rates. We show that the typical use of a Bartik instrument assumes a pooled exposure research design, where the shares measure differential exposure to common shocks, and identification is based on exogeneity of the shares. Next, we show how the Bartik instrument weights each of the exposure designs. Finally, we discuss how to assess the plausibility of the research design. We illustrate our results through two applications: estimating the elasticity of labor supply, and estimating the elasticity of substitution between immigrants and natives. (JEL C51, F14, J15, J22, L60, R23, R32)
This article examines the political dynamics of local government reform in Turkey during 2000s and 2010s, showing how the reform was implemented in a way that reproduced central state power. Contributing to debates on the relationship between state rescaling and decentralisation, it argues that the dynamics of electoral politics are key to determining the nature of institutional changes affecting central-local relations. In the Turkish context, decentralisation did not align with the interests of the ruling Justice and Development Party, given that opposition parties could potentially win local elections and control local municipal councils. By questioning the significance of the recent trend of decentralisation and the devolution of authority to lower levels of government in Turkey, this article contributes to the literature on the limits of decentralisation, especially in non-western contexts.
The disparity between the least and most productive regions in the UK is wide by the standards of many other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies. An important factor is the concentration of public investment around London. The appraisal process for infrastructure investment projects follows the methodology set out in HM Treasury’s The Green Book. It is argued that this methodology has reinforced the regional imbalance; that recent changes are unlikely by themselves to redress the London bias in infrastructure; and that infrastructure investments also need to be based on a strategic view about economic development for the whole of the UK.
A growing amount of research explores how the allocation of regional development monies follows electoral reasons. Yet, the existing literature on distributive politics provides different and contrasting expectations on which geographical areas will be targeted. The paper focuses on proportional representation (PR) systems. While in such settings governments have incentives to target core districts and punish foes, it is suggested that when incumbents attempt to build a state–party image they may broaden the territorial allocation of benefits and even target opposition out-groups. The paper exploits data on Turkey's public transport investment for the period 2003–14 and in-depth interviews to provide results in support of the hypothesis.
Cambridge Core - Latin American Government, Politics and Policy - Votes for Survival - by Simeon Nichter
Poverty relief programs are shaped by politics. The particular design which social programs take is to a large extent determined by the existing institutional constraints and politicians’ imperative to win elections. The Political Logic of Poverty Relief places elections and institutional design at the core of poverty alleviation. The authors develop a theory with applications to Mexico about how elections shape social programs aimed at aiding the poor. Would political parties possess incentives to target the poor with transfers aimed at poverty alleviation or would they instead give these to their supporters? Would politicians rely on the distribution of particularistic benefits rather than public goods? The authors assess the welfare effects of social programs in Mexico and whether voters reward politicians for targeted poverty alleviation programs. The book provides a new interpretation of the role of cash transfers and poverty relief assistance in the development of welfare state institutions. © Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Federico Estévez and Beatriz Magaloni 2016.
Distributive politics and spatial equity: the allocation of public investment in Chile. Regional Studies. This paper analyzes the influence of electoral concerns on investment distribution from the central government to Chilean municipalities. Drawing upon panel data, it shows that investment is mediated by pork-barrel and political budget cycles, as well as favouring the relatively better-off areas. Estimations also reveal that resources are channelled to the municipalities where the vote margin in local elections is larger, whereas national results are not relevant, indicating that local governments’ lobbying capacity is prioritized over national electoral interests. Based on these results, the implications for regional governance and for reducing the margin of arbitrary allocations are discussed.
This article examines how parties use clientelism in competitive and uncompetitive electoral environments. It argues that parties enjoy wide discretion to target clientelistic payoffs to inexpensive voters in their strongholds, but that head-to-head competition compels them to bid for more expensive voters. Empirically, it uses a list experiment embedded in a postelection survey to study electoral clientelism in Lebanon, a country with a mix of competitive and uncompetitive electoral districts. It finds respondents underreport clientelistic transactions by a factor of two. Proxies for the cost of a vote explain payoff targeting decisions in party strongholds, but lose their explanatory power in the competitive districts.
Rather than occupants of a position in an ideological policy space, we conceive of legislators as reputation builders – the reputation they think will best serve them in the next election. Our theory suggests that legislators will seek to undercut the efforts of the challenger they fear most – the one in the primary or the one in the general election. We test our reasoning by examining legislative cosponsorship patterns in the U.S. House of Representatives. We find evidence that legislators respond to information about their potential future electoral challenges by building reputations as loners, partisans, or dissidents. We also show that these choices have implications for an incumbent's prospects in the next election. Building the wrong reputation increases the strength of future challenges.
Political favoritism affects the allocation of government resources, but is it consequential for growth? Using a close election regression discontinuity design and data from India, we measure the local economic impact of being represented by a politician in the ruling party. Favoritism leads to higher private sector employment, higher share prices of firms, and increased output as measured by night lights; the three effects are similar and economically substantive. Finally, we present evidence that politicians influence firms primarily through control over the implementation of regulation.
Abstract—Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is a feasible but difficult goal. It requires an outcome-oriented transformation program plus the strong commitment and leadership of high-level politicians. It also necessitates attention to context and receptivity to change, which are crucial for strategy development and delivery. Any health minister should acknowledge that it is very difficult to achieve success without public support, which also translates into support for the prime minister or president of the country. It is possible to achieve major improvements to health system performance in a relatively short period of time under the right conditions. Turkey made remarkable progress in health status, patient satisfaction and financial risk protection with its ten-year Health Transformation Program. Based on Turkey's transf-ormational experience, nine guiding principles are proposed. These principles are invaluable to transformational leadership and overcoming challenges: assuring deep commitment to bring change, using a two-pronged action approach, gaining the public's support as a shield, developing a comprehensive program, achieving a balance between the public and private sectors, obtaining and sustaining the financial protection of citizens, learning from mistakes, not being blinded by short-term success, and focusing on outcomes.
New Capitalism in Turkey explores the changing relationship between politics, religion and business through an analysis of the contemporary Turkish business environment.
Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002 Turkey has undergone double regime transitions. First, tutelary democracy ended; second, a competitive authoritarian regime has risen in its stead. We substantiate this assertion with specific and detailed evidence from 2015 election cycles, as well as from broader trends in Turkish politics. This evidence indeed confirms that elections are no longer fair; civil liberties are being systematically violated; and the playing field is highly skewed in favour of the ruling AKP. The June 2015 election results and their aftermath further confirm that Turkey has evolved into a competitive authoritarian regime.
Do international reputations matter and are they transferable from one context to another? These critically important questions continue to frame policy debates surrounding US responses to crises in Syria and Ukraine. For skeptics, past actions and reputations for resolve have no bearing on an adversary's assessment of US credibility; relative “power” and “interests” explain behaviour (Hopf, 1994; Mercer, 1996; Press, 2005; Walt, 2013; Zakaria 2013). We argue that scholars who dismiss the relevance of reputations typically sidestep important questions about how adversaries actually acquire relevant information about US interests and power. Building on an extensive collection of qualitative and quantitative studies of US deterrence encounters in asymmetric conflicts over the last two decades, we argue that lessons from past actions inform an adversary's interpretation of US interests in any given case and provide crucial information about Washington's willingness to deploy military force (capabilities). By implication, lessons learned from Bosnia 1992–1995 informed actions in Kosovo 1999, which, in turn, informed subsequent assessments of US interests and commitments in Iraq 1991, 1998 and 2003. Similarly, lessons about US reputations and credibility in Iraq from 1991 to 2003 were critically important to successful WMD diplomacy in Syria. Policy implications are addressed in the conclusion.
Interest in the study of clientelism has reawakened in recent years. While the sociological and anthropological frameworks developed in the 1960s and 1970s still provide important insights into the logic of patron–client exchanges, a reckoning with the underlying political process that makes those forms of political linkage so prevalent is in order. Clientelism was then viewed as a phenomenon typical of underdeveloped political systems, usually at early phases of institutionalization, often under authoritarian or colonial regimes. Indeed, the literature suggested that clientelism was the most characteristic form of political exchange occurring in backward agrarian societies. Presumably, as societies became more developed, social structures more differentiated, and political systems more institutionalized, clientelism was bound to disappear. Yet it has not. Throughout most of the developing world and even in many parts of the developed one, clientelism remains a political and electoral fact of life. The defining trait of clientelism is that it involves direct exchanges between patrons and clients in which political support is traded for excludable benefits and services. Under what conditions do politicians attempt to buy votes through the provision of particularistic, excludable private goods, rather than through universalistic, non-excludable public goods? To answer this question, this chapter develops a portfolio theory of electoral investment and demonstrates its usefulness in the context of the erosion of hegemonic party rule in Mexico. Our theory proposes that the relative importance of clientelism vis-à-vis public goods provision depends upon the extent of poverty, political competition, and the level of electoral risk.
In many young democracies, local politics remain a bastion of nondemocratic practices, from corruption to clientelism to abuse of power. In a context where these practices are widespread, will local politicians ever voluntarily abandon them? Focusing on the practice of clientelism in social policy in Argentina, this book argues that only the combination of a growing middle class and intense political competition leads local politicians to opt out of clientelism. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, an original public opinion survey, and cross-municipal data in Argentina, this book illustrates how clientelism works and documents the electoral gains and costs of the practice. In doing so, it points to a possible subnational path towards greater accountability within democracy.
This book provides a theory and evidence to explain the initial decision of governments to adopt a conditional cash transfer program (the most prominent type of antipoverty program currently in operation in Latin America), and whether such programs are insulated from political manipulations or not. Ana Lorena De La O shows that whether presidents limit their own discretion or not has consequences for the survival of policies, their manipulation, and how effective they are in improving the lives of the poor. This book is the first of its kind to present evidence from all Latin American CCTs.
Dylan Riley reconceptualizes the nature and origins of interwar fascism in this remarkable investigation of the connection between civil society and authoritarianism. From the late nineteenth century to World War I, voluntary associations exploded across Europe, especially among rural non-elites. But the development of this "civil society" did not produce liberal democracy in Italy, Spain, and Romania. Instead, Riley finds that it undermined the nascent liberal regimes in these countries and was a central cause of the rise of fascism. Developing an original synthesis of Gramsci and Tocqueville, Riley explains this surprising outcome by arguing that the development of political organizations in the three nations failed to keep pace with the proliferation of voluntary associations, leading to a crisis of political representation to which fascism developed as a response. His argument shows how different forms of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Romania arose in response to the divergent paths taken by civil society development in each nation. Presenting the seemingly paradoxical argument that the rapid development of civil society facilitated the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Romania, Riley credibly challenges the notion that a strong civil society necessarily leads to the development of liberal democracy. Scholars and students interested in debates about the rise of fascism and authoritarianism, democratization, civil society, and comparative and historical methods will find his arguments compelling and his conclusions challenging. © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
Naturalization and DepoliticizationPutting Politics into Economic GeographyConclusion
References
Despite Turkey’s long record of electoral democracy, its system has failed to provide the expected continuity and stability. This article examines the factors behind shortcomings in Turkish democracy. It includes a consideration of public attitudes, party organization, political participation, the rule of law, patronage, and protest. The goal is to provide a coherent and balanced picture of both weaknesses in the Turkish political system and reasons to hope for future improvements.
—This qualitative case study uses primary interview data to investigate the political processes of how Turkey established a unified and universal health coverage system. The goal of providing health coverage to all citizens through a unified system has been adopted by many low- and middle-income countries, but few have achieved it; Turkey is a notable exception. We use institutional veto point theory to identify four institutional obstacles to a unified and universal coverage system in Turkey between 2003 and 2008: (1) the Ministry of Finance and Treasury, (2) the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, (3) the Office of the President, and (4) the Constitutional Court. Our analysis shows how Minister of Health Recep Akdag and his team of advisors used political strategies to address and overcome opposition at each veto point. Where possible they avoided institutional veto points by using ministerial authority to adopt policies. When adoption required approval of others with veto power, they delayed...
Understanding the dynamics of vote-buying is essential for improving accountability in elections in developing democracies. While list experiments are useful for attenuating social desirability bias associated with measuring vote-buying, they are not conducive to multivariate analyses, and the question of what types of individuals are targeted is left inadequately explored. We overcome this limitation by combining a population-based list experiment with an estimator (LISTIT) that allows for multivariate analyses in an efficient manner. Our analysis suggests that in the 2011 parliamentary elections in Turkey over one-third of the electorate was targeted for vote-buying, which is more than double the proportion willing to admit when asked directly. Additionally, we find that strong partisans of the ruling Justice and Development Party (
Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi
), less-educated individuals, and urban residents are significantly more likely to be targeted for vote-buying. We present compelling evidence for the hypotheses that parties target their core supporters and socio-economically vulnerable individuals. The strength of our evidence derives from the use of original data on vote-buying that has been collected in an unobtrusive manner and analyzed at the level of individuals.
Explaining policy change has been one of the major concerns of the health care politics and policy development literature. This article aims to explain the specific dynamics of large-scale reforms introduced within the framework of the Health Transformation Program in Turkey. It argues that confluence of the three streams - problem, policy, and politics - with the exceptional political will of the Justice and Development Party's (JDP) leaders opened up a window of opportunity for a large-scale policy change. The article also underscores the contribution of recent ideational perspectives that help explain "why" political actors in Turkey would focus on health care reform, given that there are a number of issues waiting to be addressed in the policy agenda. Examining how political actors framed problems and policies deepens our understanding of the content of the reform initiatives as well as the construction of the need to reform. The article builds on the insights of both the ideational and institutionalist perspectives when it argues that the interests, aspirations, and fears of the JDP, alongside the peculiar characteristics of the institutional context, have shaped its priorities and determination to carry out this reform initiative.
Copyright © 2015 by Duke University Press.
Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963–2011 period. Guided by a model, it then examines whether the transition in and out of democracy under the same president constrains or exacerbates ethnic favoritism. Across the post-independence period, we find strong evidence of ethnic favoritism: districts that share the ethnicity of the president receive twice as much expenditure on roads and have five times the length of paved roads built. This favoritism disappears during periods of democracy.
Like the postcolonial world more generally, Southeast Asia exhibits tremendous variation in state capacity and authoritarian durability. Ordering Power draws on theoretical insights dating back to Thomas Hobbes to develop a unified framework for explaining both of these political outcomes. States are especially strong and dictatorships especially durable when they have their origins in “protection pacts”: broad elite coalitions unified by shared support for heightened state power and tightened authoritarian controls as bulwarks against especially threatening and challenging types of contentious politics. These coalitions provide the elite collective action underpinning strong states, robust ruling parties, cohesive militaries, and durable authoritarian regimes – all at the same time. Comparative-historical analysis of seven Southeast Asian countries (Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Vietnam, and Thailand) reveals that subtly divergent patterns of contentious politics after World War II provide the best explanation for the dramatic divergence in Southeast Asia’s contemporary states and regimes.
The year 2014 marked the fortieth anniversary of Portugal’s Revolution of the Carnations, which inaugurated what Samuel P. Huntington dubbed the “third wave” of global democratization. Any assessment of the state of global democracy today must begin by recognizing—even marveling at—the durability of this historic transformation. When the third wave began in 1974, only about 30 percent of the world’s independent states met the criteria of electoral democracy—a system in which citizens, through universal suffrage, can choose and replace their leaders in regular, free, fair, and meaningful elections. At that time, there were only about 46 democracies in the world. Most of those were the liberal democracies of the rich West, along with a number of small island states that had been British colonies. Only a few other developing democracies existed—principally, India, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, Israel, and Turkey.
In the subsequent three decades, democracy had a remarkable global run, as the number of democracies essentially held steady or expanded every year from 1975 until 2007. Nothing like this continous growth in democracy had ever been seen before in the history of the world. While a number of these new “democracies” were quite illiberal—in some cases, so much so that Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way regard them as “competitive authoritarian” regimes—the positive three-decade trend was paralleled by a similarly steady and significant expansion in levels of freedom (political rights and civil liberties, as measured annually by Freedom House). In 1974, the average level of freedom in the world stood at 4.38 (on the two seven-point scales, where 1 is most free and 7 is most repressive). It then gradually improved during the 1970s and 1980s, though it did not cross below the 4.0 midpoint until the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which it improved to 3.85 in 1990. In 25 of the 32 years between 1974 and 2005, average freedom levels improved in the world, peaking at 3.22 in 2005.
And then, around 2006, the expansion of freedom and democracy in the world came to a prolonged halt. Since 2006, there has been no net expansion in the number of electoral democracies, which has oscillated between 114 and 119 (about 60 percent of the world’s states). As we see in Figure 1, the number of both electoral and liberal democracies began to decline after 2006 and then flattened out. Since 2006, the average level of freedom in the world has also deteriorated slightly, leveling off at about 3.30.
There are two ways to view these empirical trends. One is to see them as constituting a period of equilibrium—freedom and democracy have not continued gaining, but neither have they experienced net declines. One could even celebrate this as an expression of the remarkable and unexpected durability of the democratic wave. Given that democracy expanded to a number of countries where the objective conditions for sustaining it are unfavorable, due either to poverty (for example, in Liberia, Malawi, and Sierra Leone) or to strategic pressures (for example, in Georgia and Mongolia), it is impressive that reasonably open and competitive political systems have survived (or revived) in so many places. As a variant of this more benign interpretation, Levitsky and Way argue in this issue of the Journal that democracy never actually expanded as widely as Freedom House perceived in the first place. Thus, they contend, many of the seeming failures of democracy in the last ten to fifteen years were really deteriorations or hardenings of what had been from the beginning authoritarian regimes, however competitive.
Alternatively, one can view the last decade as a period of at least incipient decline in democracy. To make this case, we need to examine not only the instability and stagnation of democracies, but also the incremental decline of democracy in what Thomas Carothers has termed the “gray zone” countries (which defy easy classification as to whether or not they are democracies), the deepening authoritarianism in the non-democracies, and the decline in the functioning and self-confidence of the world’s established, rich democracies. This will be my approach in what follows.
The debate about whether...
What are the dynamics of distributive politics in a setting of multiparty competition? Existing studies on the allocation of resources across multiple electoral districts focus primarily on a setting of two-party competition and consider only the core versus swing district hypotheses. This framework does not correspond to the actual electoral setting in many countries and ignores valuable information furnished by a context of multiparty competition. Compared with two-party elections, multiparty elections provide more information about the underlying distribution of the ideological preferences of voters in a district; this information could be utilized by the incumbent party to maximize electoral returns. In this article, I argue that a setting of multiparty competition presents incentives to the incumbent party to channel disproportionately more resources to districts with an ideologically close challenger. Systematic evidence from the Conditional Cash Transfer program spending in 878 districts of Turkey from 2005 to 2008 supports this hypothesis.
Part I. Modalities of Distributive Politics: 1. Between clients and citizens: puzzles and concepts in the study of distributive politics Part II. The Micro-Logic of Clientelism: 2. Gaps between theory and fact 3. A theory of broker-mediated distribution 4. Testing the theory of broker-mediated distribution 5. A disjunction between the strategies of leaders and brokers? 6. Clientelism and poverty Part III. The Macro-Logic of Vote-Buying: What Explains the Rise and Decline of Political Machines?: 7. Party leaders against the machine 8. What killed vote buying in Britain and the United States? Part IV. Clientelism and Democratic Theory: 9. What's wrong with buying votes?
