In the context of international agendas to transform African States from a state of corruption to good governance, Oyo State’s transformation in 2011 provides an apparent fairy tale case study. For eight years, the state was synonymous with violence and ‘godfatherism’, but Governor Abiola Ajimobi’s election in 2011 brought the promise of transformation, in line with the Lagos Model, based on the highly celebrated example of nearby Lagos State. This thesis draws on six months of in-depth qualitative fieldwork in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State, to show how the Lagos Model in Oyo State leveraged international conceptions of good governance to pursue a political strategy of autonomy from central government, whilst building on long-held progressive political ideas in Yorubaland. However, the Lagos Model faced competition from populist opposition, who drew on the failings of the Lagos Model to meet popular conceptions of good governance. Key themes in popular conceptions of good governance are: progress, legitimate leadership and economic benefits. This thesis analyses the tensions within the Lagos Model’s response to these themes and uses empirical material to reveal how these tensions play out in practice. The ways in which Ajimobi was required to respond to numerous competing conceptions of good governance complicates the initial theoretical framing of a binary between corruption and good governance.

On 27 April 1994 the most hated flag in Africa was lowered, signifying the end of the Apartheid regime. As the world watched the transformation of South Africa taking place – without the bloodshed that the state‟s direst cynics had predicted – words like "miracle" and "inspirational" abounded. Since then, the world has continued to watch South Africa‟s transition to democracy and even those who were its greatest supporters have begun to ask questions about the quality and quantity of democratic reforms. The increasing centralisation and monopolisation of power by the African National Congress, declining rates of formal participation by citizens and considerable failures in service delivery are major factors contributing to the concerns about the long-term prospects for democracy in South Africa, especially given the record of democratic failure across the rest of the continent. While significant contributions have been made to the study of South African democracy – both theoretical and empirical – there are few, if any, that have sought to combine both these methodologies and hence the scholarship is not, in my view, paying the dividends it should. This research thus explores contemporary politics in South Africa, examining its assets and liabilities in order to provide a clearer picture of the state of democracy in the country. It does so by measuring practices in South Africa in terms of the role accorded to participation in three conceptions of democracy: liberal representative accounts, deliberative accounts and what I term the "categorical" account. In so doing the research will show that although concerns about democracy in South Africa are justified, if we shift our focus from the instrumental value of participation to its categorical one we may find a way to ensure that the miracle continues.

This thesis is a collection of three independent essays on policy-making incentives of government. The first essay examines whether citizens can indirectly control bureaucrats. If voters and bureaucrats prefer different types of politicians, i.e., they have a conflict of interest, incumbents need to increase the budget to prevent bureaucrats from information manipulation, which leads to an oversized government. If, instead, voters and bureaucrats prefer the same type of politicians, i.e., they have an alignment of interests, bureaucrats can send to voters a credible signal about the type of incumbents, which enhances the selection effect of election. Although political appointees enable politicians to implement the first-best policy in the case of the conflict of interests, they lead to the persistence of inefficient government in the case of the alignment of interests. The second and third essays study how autocrats commit not to confiscate private property. The second essay argues that the potential of economic growth would help the ruler to make a credible commitment. Since a predatory policy reduces the citizens’ income, it would reduce capital accumulation because of the income effect. Then, the ruler faces a trade-off between the current consumption with the predatory policy and the larger future consumption with the moderate policy, which would lead to economic growth. The third essay models endogenous judicial independence (JI) as a commitment device in the political commitment game. If information on JI is transmitted to citizens with positive probability, the ruler creates JI and does not renege on an announcement. Even if not, the ruler still can guarantee property rights by granting human rights as a signal on JI if the cost of the signal is low.

Following 15 years of high policy attention to curbing corruption in developing countries, this thesis concerns the effects of polices induced by the international donor community on curbing corruption in sub-Saharan Africa. I approach this question by assessing, in three stand-alone empirical chapters, the effects increased political competition, economic liberalisation, and the use of judicial punishment for corruption-related crimes have had on curbing corruption in sub-Saharan Africa. In the first empirical chapter, I assess the effect on corruption from increased political competition following the third wave of democratisation. While popular theories propose that political competition helps curb corruption by inducing political accountability, I find instead, in the sub-Saharan African context that in times of tense political competition the incumbent ensures his victory by buying the loyalty of the elite through distributing state resources for private means. This prebendal politics is, in turn, associated with higher levels of corruption. In the second empirical chapter, which concerns economic liberalisation and its effect on corruption, I ask what happens to corruption as the formal institutions governing the market change. Using insights from a case study on Rwanda, I find that corruption transforms rather than disappears in the advent of economic liberalisation. The third empirical chapter concerns the use of punishment for corruption-related crimes. By using politically contextualised information on prosecutions, I find that such anti-corruption interventions risk being used for political ends instead of curbing high level impunity. The overarching conclusion from this research endeavour is that corruption in the subSaharan African context has a political function which makes the reforms prescribed by the donor community difficult, or illogical, to fully comply with. The political functionality of corruption must therefore constitute the analytical cornerstone when developing anti-corruption policies in order to set realistic expectations and avoid unintended consequences.

This thesis is the history of an intense period of Israeli attempts to address the issue of how the state should communicate its national image, particularly on the international stage. Between 1966 and 1975, the Eshkol, Meir and Rabin governments invested far more time and energy in the management of Israel’s international image than the governments before or after. Those responsible for this policy were informed by a developing Israeli national political culture that bore the strong influence of pre-independence Jewish history and which reinforced the simple and pervasive concept of hasbara (literally ‘explaining’) as Israel’s communications strategy. At the same time external factors, particularly the wars of 1967 and 1973, made government information efforts and Israel’s international image far more politically important. Yet, by the end of the period, nothing much had changed. This thesis examines why that should be the case. Using newly-released archive material, personal interviews and existing research, this thesis presents a new assessment of the domestic determinants that shaped the formulation, institutionalization, and execution of Israeli policy in the period under review. Three themes emerge from examining the domestic sources of Israeli government communications strategy in the period under question. Together, they explain why such an intense period of activity should produce such limited results. Firstly, the political culture of hasbara, an instinctively defensive, tactical, persuasive and Jewishly-rooted approach to generation and maintenance of international support for Israeli foreign policy aims, itself a residue of the pre-state period, proved an imperfect lens through which to view the world, and was an obstacle to cogent policy-making. Secondly, structural features of Israeli politics contributed to the lack of substantive progress in addressing the perceived failures of hasbara. The ruling Mapai party was split between the dominant ‘activist’ camp, which broadly dismissed the pursuit of international legitimacy in favour of the ‘practical Zionism’ of David Ben-Gurion, and the ‘diplomats’ who attached a much greater value to it. However, whilst the Mapai ‘diplomats’ were sometimes strong enough to limit ‘activist’ policy, they lacked the power to articulate or pursue a real alternative. Given Mapai’s unchallenged leadership at a national level, the sporadic bursts of opposition – in parliamentary or public debate - on this issue in the period under review produced very little real change. In addition, the environment in which these issues were discussed accentuated the role of personality in foreign policy decision-making. Finally, in the absence of clear political leadership, policy was often decided by bureaucratic ‘muddling through’, a model that describes incremental change from a limited set of options, an already-familiar feature of Israeli political culture.

This thesis addresses two central questions in the field of corruption: the relationship between corruption and some of its main determinants and the effect that these relationships have on economic development. The research presented in this thesis extends the literature on corruption in several directions. The third chapter studies the empirical relationship between press freedom and bureaucratic corruption. As one of the main democratic checks and balances, press freedom is thought to impose a curb on corruption. We investigate two related aspects. The first considers whether there exists a robust empirical relationship between press freedom and corruption. The second investigates the detail, by exploring which types of restrictions to press freedom are robustly related to corruption. Using robust regression techniques on a panel of countries we conclude that restrictions to media freedom are robustly associated to higher corruption. Also we find that both political and economic restrictions to press freedom are strongly related to corruption while legal and administrative restrictions are not. The fourth chapter studies the relationship between decentralisation, corruption and development in a dynamic macroeconomic model. We assess whether corruption is always harmful to development, whether decentralisation is always beneficial for development and the effect that corruption produces on the relationship between decentralisation and development. Our main finding from this model is that if corruption is absent, decentralisation is the best alternative for development but may not be preferable to centralisation if corruption is widespread in the economy. The fifth chapter examines the empirical relationship between decentralisation and corruption. This chapter has two main goals. First, to reconsider the available evidence in light of some newly assembled data. The second goal is to incorporate into the analysis several dimensions of decentralisation simultaneously. We find that the inconsistencies in the empirical literature arise due to the frequent omission of multiple measures of decentralisation. Secondly, that both fiscal decentralisation and constitutional centralisation are simultaneously associated with lower corruption. Finally, we find that certain forms of political decentralisation -local elections- weaken the positive effect of constitutional centralisation -unitarism- on corruption.

Organizations are the literal bricks-and-mortar of government, the means by which political choices are turned into delivered goods and services, yet they are largely absent from prominent theories of state capacity, institutions, and political economy in developing countries. In three papers, I show that this omission is theoretically and empirically unjustified: not only is there a great deal of heterogeneity among organizations within the same government, but the complexities of organizations can interact with institutional and political economy factors in a manner that alters these literatures’ conclusions about public service delivery, bureaucracy, and reform. The first paper, “From Institutions to Organizations in the Study of State Capacity”, draws on interviews with senior managers from 40 organizations in Ghana’s central government to document the vast range of variation in management quality among them, explore its roots in theories of relational contracts, and connect theories of organizational performance to the institution-centric literature on state capacity in developing countries. The second paper, “Policy Implementation, Distributive Politics, and Fiscal Institutions”, analyzes an original database of 14,000 small infrastructure projects in Ghana’s local governments, and shows that the fiscal institutions used to fund projects are associated with large differences in completion rates, even after controlling for project characteristics and district, community, and contractor fixed effects. I develop a theory of policy implementation as intertemporal bargaining among political actors who face commitment problems with respect to project distribution, and show that fiscal institutions can mitigate the negative effects of these distributive pressures. The final paper, “One Size Does Not Fit All”, shows that the quality of budget execution and compliance with budget processes varies dramatically across ministries in Ghana’s government, and that the drivers of budget performance are heterogeneous and often idiosyncratic.

No description available.

Climate change is the most important issue of our time due to its potential to very seriously disrupt the life sustaining systems of planet Earth as well as its intersec-tions with other important challenges facing humanity. The United Nations Frame-work Convention on Climate Change is the key platform upon which the political process of international climate change politics takes place. The aim of this work is to produce an analysis of the role of transnational climate change advocacy networks in this political process and their internal power dynamics and thus contributing to the understanding of a crucial aspect of this political process. To advance this aim, this thesis engages with two objectives. First, a detailed ethnography is developed which serves to illustrate the political work of the environmental advocacy NGOs involved within this process, especially those that are members of Climate Action Network International (CAN-I). This approach is suitable to uncover the internal dynamics and structures of that NGO network as well as its complex and multi-layered relationships within the larger political configuration of the UNFCCC treaty process. Secondly, the investigation is advanced by analysing this ethnography through the lens of a critical theory of the public sphere. In particular, this analysis features more contemporary conceptualisations of the public sphere which stress the multiplicity of the public sphere concept including notions such as internal and external public spheres, counterpublics, and nested public spheres. Owing to this research design, the thesis has a degree of hybridity: it is expressly both an empirical thesis, with strong empirical flavour imparted by the focus on the detailed ethnographic account, as well a theoretical thesis offering an original contribution that is advanced throughout the thesis. The main theoretical thesis and contribution is that the theory of the public sphere is appropriate to analyse the political practice of civil society engagement on a transnational level if it is further developed to allow for greater degree of multiplicity and a broader conceptualisation of the notions of the “centre of authority” and the translation of the public opinion.

This thesis explored whether, why and how leadership or other factors in Punjab’s District Governments were related to participatory development programme introduced in Pakistan’s local governments in 2001. Networking/Partnering and transformational styles were found to be significantly correlated with participatory programme utilization levels in sixteen districts. Qualitative analysis in two districts concluded that leadership; local socioeconomic and power patterns; public awareness, trust and confidence; institutional-legal design of participatory development; policy-orientation of higher-level government(s); and local group politics were important factors affecting participatory development programme. Charismatic leadership is highly conductive to change when it builds integrity and trust in a novel public programme, but strong charisma could also lead to discouragement or even suppression of a poorly designed change when leaders intellectualize it in an unfavourable way. Participative leadership led to building follower ownership in participatory policy. Individualized consideration sub-style led to building follower capability for participatory development while intellectual stimulation was the most important leadership sub-style for checking elite-capture. The extent of participatory programme utilization was determined by Networking/Partnering leadership style. ‘Deliverance’ leadership behaviour was idealized by followers under conditions of poor citizen-rights. An ongoing uninterrupted participatory programme was found to be generally empowering for the communities in the long-term.