Joachim Wehner’s research while affiliated with London School of Economics and Political Science and other places

Theories of retrospective accountability assume that voters punish poor governance and reward improvements, yet empirical evidence remains mixed. We extend this research to a new context, assessing the impact of audits on electoral outcomes in South African municipalities. Our novel identification strategy focuses on by-elections triggered by deaths in office of local councilors and compares those taking place before and after audit results are announced each year. We find that timely audit information affects the vote share of the responsible party, with voters rewarding improvements and punishing poor audits by about 5 percentage points. Additional individual-level survey evidence confirms the underpinning behavioral response more generally. Our study is the first to demonstrate the electoral accountability effects of audit information at full scale, involving universal spatial and temporal coverage as well as public and organic dissemination.

Commentators have suggested a link between leaders having a “science” background and the speed of lockdown after the outbreak of COVID-19. We examine possible underlying mechanisms and test this relationship empirically with a global dataset of the educational background of 188 leaders in office at the start of the pandemic. Using several statistical tests, we find no support for a systematic relationship between a leader having studied a natural science or medicine and the timing of the first lockdown. There are no systematic effects for female leaders and populists either. We caution against generalizations based on a small number of high-profile anecdotes about how certain leadership traits translate into different policy responses during the pandemic.

There is frequent public and media concern over the cost of bloated cabinets in many Sub‐Saharan African countries. Scholarship on elite clientelism links cabinet positions with corruption and practices that undermine sound policymaking. This article presents new data on the number of ministers in African governments and documents a robust negative association with several measures of governance, both across countries and in a regression framework that exploits within‐country variation over time and accounts for various potential confounders. This suggests policymakers, donors, investors, and citizens should pay close attention to the number of ministers appointed to the cabinet. Although the article cautions against simplistic policy prescriptions, a sizable increase in the number of ministers is likely bad news for governance.

Theories of retrospective accountability assume that voters punish poor governance and reward improvements, yet empirical evidence remains mixed. We extend this research to a new context, assessing the impact of audit information on electoral performance in South African municipalities. Our novel identification strategy focuses on by-elections triggered by deaths in office of local councilors and compares those taking place before and after audit results are announced each year. We find that timely audit information affects the vote share of the responsible party, with voters rewarding improvements and punishing poor performance by about 5 percentage points. Individual-level survey evidence offers similar results. Our findings broaden the scope conditions of prior work by documenting accountability effects in a strongly party-centered setting. We emphasize the importance of information disseminated at full scale – which is transmitted through regular media and organizational channels, increases salience, and ensures common knowledge – and from a credible source.

We analyze when economists become top-level “economic policy-makers,” focusing on financial crises and the partisanship of a country’s leader. We present a new dataset of the educational and occupational background of 1200 political leaders, finance ministers, and central bank governors from 40 developed democracies from 1973 to 2010. We find that left leaders appoint economic policy-makers who are more highly trained in economics and finance ministers who are less likely to have private finance backgrounds but more likely to be former central bankers. Finance ministers appointed during financial crises are less likely to have a financial services background. A leader’s exposure to economics training is also related to appointments. This suggests one crucial mechanism for affecting economic policy is through the selection of certain types of economic policy-makers.

Fiscal transparency and participation in government budgeting are widely promoted, yet claims about their benefits are rarely based on convincing evidence. We provide the first systematic review covering 38 empirical studies published between 1991 and early 2015. Increased budgetary disclosure and participation-which we call "fiscal openness"-are consistently associated with improvements in the quality of the budget, as well as governance and development outcomes. Only a handful of studies, however, convincingly identify causal effects, in the form of reduced corruption, enhanced electoral accountability, and improved allocation of resources. We highlight gaps and set out a research agenda that consists of: (a) disaggregating broad measures of budget transparency to uncover which specific disclosures are related to outcomes; (b) tracing causal mechanisms to connect fiscal openness interventions with ultimate impacts on human development; (c) investigating the relative effectiveness of alternative interventions; (d) examining the relationship between transparency and participation; and (e) clarifying the contextual conditions that support particular interventions. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/THE WORLD BANK. All rights reserved.

Fiscal transparency and participation in budgeting are increasingly promoted and jointly enshrined in international standards and norms. Yet, claims about the benefits of increased budgetary disclosure and participation are not always based on convincing evidence. We provide the first systematic review of the impacts of “fiscal openness” interventions in 38 empirical studies published between 1991 and early 2015. Fiscal openness variables are associated with the quality of the budget, including macro-fiscal outcomes, resource allocation, and service delivery, as well as governance and development outcomes. While only a handful of studies identify causal effects, these find that fiscal transparency or participation in budgeting have desirable impacts in the form of reduced corruption, enhanced electoral accountability, and improved allocation of resources. We highlight gaps and set out a research agenda that consists of: (a) disaggregating broad measures of budget transparency to uncover which specific disclosures are doing the work; (b) detailed tracing of the causal mechanisms that connect fiscal openness interventions with ultimate impacts on human development; (c) investigating the relative effectiveness of alternative interventions; (d) examining the relationship between transparency and participation in budgeting; and (e) clarifying the contextual conditions required for specific interventions to have desired effects.

This article analyzes the political origins of differences in adherence to the fiscal framework of the European Union (EU). It shows how incentives to use fiscal policy for electoral purposes and limited budget transparency at the national level, combined with the need to respond to fiscal rules at the supranational level, interact to systematically undermine the Economic and Monetary Union through the employment of fiscal gimmicks or creative accounting. It also explains in detail how national accounts were manipulated to produce electoral cycles that were under the radar of the EU budget surveillance system, and concludes with new perspectives on the changes to (and challenges for) euro area fiscal rules.