M.A. (Politics) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

No description available.

Elections---often to a considerable degree---influence the fiscal policies pursued by governments installed on the basis of their results. Nonetheless, government behaviour is typically modelled exogenously, usually by means of a benevolent, permanently installed "social planner." However, since fiscal policies, devised by democratically elected governments, complement the decentralised pricing system, which---as shown by Samuelson (1954)---is incapable of optimally allocating both private and public goods, the social-planner approach is viewed as being an unsatisfactory tool for the purpose of describing the political aspects of economic decisions. / In the absence of a "first-best," Pareto-optimal tax system, fiscal policies are implemented as a result of inter-household "conflicts" over tax rates and public spending. In order to be able to overcome the theoretical difficulties encountered in previous contributions to the Economic Theory of Politics, this text will propose a model that explicitly depicts---"democratically aggregated"---political decisions made on the level of every individual. / In this thesis, it will be shown that (i) a country's overall budget can be derived endogenously without relying on the theoretical shortcut of interpersonal preference aggregation, (ii) electoral fluctuations be explained on the basis of the changes to the individuals' particular income and wealth situations, (iii) political behaviour be described in terms of votes and abstentions as well as party membership and ideology, and (iv) the crucial importance of a country's wealth distribution be discussed in the context of economic stability and the role of government.

This dissertation investigates how economic expertise influences development governance by examining how state economists establish methods for decision-making in global development finance. It contributes to debates over expert power by taking a science studies approach to address two problems in existing theories and accounts of experts. First, social reformers, heterodox planning theorists, and development critics from both the left and the right treat rationality and politics asymmetrically. When experts fail, politics has triumphed. When experts succeed, the credit goes to rationality, not politics. Second, within this asymmetrical approach, investigations and explanations of expert power neglect a principal conduit of expert influence: their methods. This dissertation turns the focus to economists’ efforts to establish their methods as governing rationales and the effects these methods engender. Doing so allows us to approach particular forms of state rationality such as neoliberalism or managerialism not as processes of depoliticization, of intellectual rationality prevailing over political interests and values, but as explicit political accomplishments with both the power to bring about political effects and the susceptibility to being challenged. State economists’ efforts to establish three paradigmatic development economic methods in particular—governance indicators, growth diagnostics, and randomized controlled trials—and these methods’ effects on power relations, decision-making, and the distribution of resources were assessed using an embedded case study design of their use for decision-making in administering a new development finance fund, the United States Millennium Challenge Account. A mixed methods approach using interviews, documents, and various datasets found that economists could not realize the power of their intellectual rationality without exercising power thought to be the reserve of politicos. Economists had to employ various strategies of power both to gain autonomy from bureaucratic authorities and overcome opposition from expert groups holding alternative rationalities. This involved enrolling bystanders and opponents in their entrepreneurial efforts to establish methods. The more opposition economists faced, the more power they had to exercise and allies they had to enroll. Once enrollment was successful, economists’ status was elevated and their methods became indispensable to particular decision-making processes. These new ways of making decisions introduced different biases that elevated economists’ concerns, objectives, and ways of knowing. They also impacted the distribution of development finance in ways that exacerbated inequality in at least the short to medium term. This dissertation’s focus on economists’ political work and methods has implications for planning practice because it opens up new political possibilities. Rather than treating state expertise and public participation as antagonistic, zero-sum confrontations, planners can pursue democratic values by both “opening up the state” and “getting inside” methods. If orthodox economists had to overcome opposition from groups of opposing experts with competing rationalities then other experts can likewise use political strategies to establish their methods as governing rationales. Even in situations where this is not possible or desirable, understanding methods’ political effects can instigate reflective practice and possible change.

This dissertation is based on two years of field research in Sudan, in Khartoum; the three capitals of Darfur; and Bentiu, Unity State, at the border between North and South Sudan. Building on a now substantial literature in critical humanitarian studies, my work focuses on the emergence of new economic forms, circuits, and entitlements that accompany humanitarian aid. These include the influx of ration cards, trade routes that deliberately shadow humanitarian convoys and draw in aid recipients, and entitlements based on kinship ties to injured or displaced victims of conflict. For well over a decade anthropologists have studied the social and political work humanitarianism does in excess of its stated intention to relieve the suffering of civilians in regions of national and political disasters. As numerous scholars have shown, humanitarian discourses and practices intentionally and unintentionally transform local and regional political values and institutions by altering the social relations that subtend them. I pursue how these transformations intervene into core categories of how people understand themselves to have status in a social world. The manuscript focuses on the one ways in which people and events are evaluated as having status within humanitarian logics. It explores the nexus between this logics and the creation of novel economic subjects, values, and institutions that are neither foreign nor local, neither neoliberal nor traditional. They are, rather, a glimpse of something the manuscript refers to as humanitarian economies, with all dimensions of the economic intended. These include new forms of dependency and altered structures of political authority. But they also include new strategies of local speculation based on humanitarian rubrics of recognizing need. For instance, I track the circulation and resale of objects of material necessity, such as grain, cooking oil, or work tools distributed by aid agencies. I demonstrate the ways in which such objects begin to function as general equivalents; they become a form of currency, and a vehicle for the storage, accumulation and transmission of wealth. But on the other hand, the manuscript is just as focused on the circulation of universal values of protection, and their transformation as local actors pick them up and deploy them in their social worlds. In other words, as local actors come to understand how humanitarian actors assess crisis, they produce a second order assessment of where aid is likely to go and thus what would be a profitable investment. They also produce second order deployments of how injury and livelihood is evaluated. Such practices transform basic dynamics of social entitlement. And they also change how people think of themselves and their neighbors as economic and political subjects. Meanwhile, critical infrastructures - from irrigation channels to pharmacy supply routes to radio transmitters - become the objects of heightened ethical scrutiny. Infrastructure comes to stand in for good governance, stability, and sustainable political relationships. What we witness is the emergence of what I call a speculative investment in crisis that binds crisis, livelihood, and life-value into a troubling knot.

This dissertation consists of three research articles in political economy and public finance. The first chapter provides evidence on the effect of electoral institutions on the performance of public officials. Using panel data on state supreme courts between 1947 and 1994, we measure the effects of changes in judicial electoral processes on judge work quality -- as measured by citations by later judges. Judges selected by non-partisan elections write higher-quality opinions than judges selected by partisan elections. Judges selected by technocratic merit commissions write higher-quality opinions than either partisan-elected judges or non-partisan-elected judges. Election-year politics reduces judicial performance in both partisan and non-partisan election systems. Giving stronger tenure to non-partisan-selected judges improves performance, while giving stronger tenure to partisan-selected judges has no effect. These results are consistent with the view that technocratic merit commissions have better information about the quality of candidates than voters, and that political bias can reduce the quality of elected officials. The second chapter contributes to recent work in political economy and public finance that focuses on how details of the tax code, rather than tax rates, are used to implement redistributive fiscal policies. I use tools from natural language processing to construct a high-dimensional representation of tax code changes from the text of 1.6 million statutes enacted by state legislatures since 1963. A data-driven approach is taken to recover the effective tax code – the set of legal phrases in tax law that have the largest impact on revenues, holding major tax rates constant. Exogenous variation in tax legislation from judicial districts is used to capture revenue impacts that are solely due to changes in the tax code language, with the resulting phrases providing a robust out-of-sample predictor of tax collections. I then test whether political parties differ in patterns of effective tax code changes when they control state government. Relative to Republicans, Democrats use revenue-increasing language for income taxes but use revenue-decreasing language for sales taxes – consistent with a more redistributive fiscal policy – despite making no changes on average to statutory tax rates. These results are consistent with the view that due to their relative salience, changing tax rates is politically more difficult than changing the tax code. The third chapter reports evidence on the potential benefits to local labor markets of increasing property taxes as a source of local government revenue. The data come from three states (308 tax districts, 16 years) where tax districts reassess properties on a state-mandated staggered cycle, resulting in exogenous variation in assessments and accompanying taxes. I find that an increase in taxes due to random assessment causes economic expansion, with an increase in local population and the number of local business establishments. These effects appear to be driven by increases in government revenues and expenditures, rather than by changes in borrowing behavior. These results suggests that property taxes are too low in this sample of states.

Not available / text

The decade following the close of the Second World War has been dominated throughout by the clash of political power of the United States and the Soviet Union. Their wartime alliance has crumbled. New, antagonistic alliances have come into existence. The so-called 'EastWest' split, polar in its effect, has forced the admission that prospects of stable peace depend on how successfully bridges can be made to span the gulf. This over-riding and pervading reality has blinded us to the importance of another struggle, which is everywhere mounting in force and intensity and which history may well record as a dominant theme of the twentieth century -- the world-wide struggle for independence. In some cases it has produced revolution and violence: full-scale wars have been fought in its cause in Indonesia and Indo-China; military engagements have taken place in Kenya and Tunisia; Cypriots and British garrison forces have exchanged fire; Malayans have rioted; and 'incidents' too numerous to detail have been reported from a great variety of countries where political dependence exists. Intro., p. 1.

This dissertation consists of three essays in the field of organizational economics and political economy. The first essay examines the question of mentoring and training in public sector organizations. On the job training is one of the most effective ways of improving productivity. However, managers face a trade-off when allocating time between their own outputproduction and mentoring the juniors, as mentoring takes time that managers could spend on other output production activities. Using the data on bureaucrats from the India Civil Services, I provide evidence of this trade-off. I find that junior bureaucrats in India show better performance in the district training courses when their mentors’ output is imperfectly observed by the supervisors of the mentors. I infer this difference in the performance of junior bureaucrats as an indication of differences in the mentoring efforts of the seniors. I exploit a policy reform to further show that bureaucrats are multi-tasking agents allocating time between mentoring junior bureaucrats and public service delivery. I find evidence that the reform that was introduced to bring greater transparency in the performance evaluation process shifts effort from mentoring to own output production, thereby reducing gaps in mentoring efforts. Overall, this chapter highlights the existence of perverse incentives for mentors that can affect the effectiveness of training and mentoring initiatives. The second chapter focuses on the question of distributive politics and how politicians target resources among their constituents. Using the employment data from the largest workfare program in the world, I study how employment generated under the program varies across constituencies that are represented by politicians from the ruling party. Using a close election regression discontinuity framework, I find that employment is higher in constituencies with ruling party politicians. Further, I document targeted flow of program benefits to specific marginalized groups. In the final chapter of this dissertation, I examine the politicization of bureaucratic appointments in India. Using data from two states of the country, I study appointments to the post of the district collector. I document significant differences in the characteristics of the officers that get appointed to districts with a greater proportion of politicians from the ruling party. I find that districts with greater "alignment" to the ruling party get younger officers who have been recruited through a much more rigorous exam and are less likely to be a native of the state. I find no evidence that caste plays a role in these appointments.

In this dissertation, I investigate the socioeconomic causes of consequences of ethnic conflict, and evaluate interventions that can reduce social animosity and misperceptions about outgroups. In particular, I focus on conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India. In recent years, online misinformation has emerged as a major contributor to misperceptions and animosity towards Muslims in India. In Chapter 1, I investigate if we can inoculate people against misinformation and mitigate its impact on people’s beliefs, attitudes, and behavior? We conduct a large field experiment in India with an intervention providing weekly digests containing a compilation of fact-checks of viral misinformation. In these digests, we also incorporate narrative explainers to give details and context of issues that are politically salient and consistent target of false stories. Specifically, we address misperceptions about Muslims increasingly fuelled by online misinformation. We find that familiarity with fact-checks increases people’s ability to correctly identify misinformation by eleven percentage points. However, belief in true news also decreases by four percentage points. We estimate a structural model to disentangle the two mechanisms of impact—truth discernment, which is the ability to correctly distinguish between false and true news; and skepticism, which changes the overall credulity for both false and true news. The impact is driven by an increase in both truth discernment and skepticism. Whereas skepticism increases immediately, it takes several weeks to become better at discerning truth. Finally, our intervention reduces misperceptions about Muslims, as well as leads to changes in policy attitudes and behavior. Treated individuals are less likely to support discriminatory policies and are more likely to pay for efforts to counter the harassment of inter-faith couples. In Chapter 2, I investigate the economic impacts of conflict and social animus by estimating the causal impact of ethnic violence on economic growth in India. For causal identification, I use shift-share instruments to isolate exogenous national shocks to violence from endogenous local shocks. On average, a riot reduces state GDP growth rate by 0.14 percentage points. To investigate mechanism, I estimate the dynamics of impact using the synthetic control method and compare it to theoretical predictions from a shock to social capital versus physical capital. This shows that the negative impact of violence is likely driven by a negative shock to social capital from higher animosity and discrimination among communities exposed to violence. This impact of violence on growth creates a vicious cycle when one also considers the effect in the opposite direction – lower growth leading to more violence. The multiplier due to this vicious cycle magnifies the impact of external growth shocks by 40 percent in equilibrium. Overall, the results highlight the importance of strong institutions to manage conflict for the long-term prosperity of societies. In Chapter 3, I investigate the historical origins of ethnic violence in India by comparing violence in regions that were directly ruled by British, versus those that were indirectly ruled through native kings who had significant autonomy. I find that regions that are directly ruled have more violence in post-independence period. I then use direct British rule as an instrument for ethnic violence to estimate the impact of violence and residential segregation.