This article examines the evolution of budgetary institutions in Estonia between 1993 and 2008, with a main focus on rules governing the preparation, adoption, and implementation of the state budget. It discusses the initial choice of budgetary institutions in 1993 and subsequent developments in the light of theoretical propositions put forth by the fiscal governance literature. The case of Est…
This article carries a broad definition of public–private concertation as a flexible form of governance that is able to overcome the distinction between network governance and participatory governance. It creates a unified framework relying on a process-related democratic approach in order to properly assess these practices in their democratic outcomes. This allows the article to fully depict h…
This article examines the renewal of public policy via instrumental innovation since the adoption in France of an automated sequence of detection and sanctioning of speed limit violations. Involved here is an instrument of public policy that points up the changes that have taken place in recent years in respect of road safety policy and provides a clearer view of some aspects of ongoing state r…
A belief in alien abduction is an emotional belief, but so is a belief that Iran intends to build nuclear weapons, that one's country is good, that a sales tax is unjust, or that French decision makers are irresolute. Revolutionary research in the brain sciences has overturned conventional views of the relationship between emotion, rationality, and beliefs. Because rationality depends on emotio…
Studies of terrorism in general and suicide terrorism in particular tend to view terrorist groups independently. However, what if the propensity for a terrorist group to adopt suicide tactics depends in part on its external linkages and the relationship between the organizational capabilities required to adopt the innovation and the organizational capabilities of the group? This article shows t…
The role of legitimacy in international relations is a topic of much debate, yet there is little understanding of the mechanism behind it. Here I address this discrepancy by asking: are state threats perceived as (il)legitimate more or less likely to be successful? By operationalizing illegitimacy as unilateral action in the presence of a multilateral option, I consider the variation in the suc…
Contrary to the general trend of trade liberalization, specific goods—such as small arms, drugs, and antiquities—have come under increasing international control in recent decades through a set of international regulatory agreements. This article offers a theoretical framework of government preferences on the international regulation of these goods. Departing from conventional models of trade p…
This article shows that the opportunity costs resulting from economic interdependence decrease the probability of war in an incomplete information game. This result is strongly consistent with existing empirical analyses of the inverse trade-conflict relationship but is the opposite of the conclusion reached by Gartzke, Li, and Boehmer, who reject the opportunity cost argument in a game-theoret…
Political units often spatially depend in their policy choices on other units. This also holds in dyadic settings where, as in much of international relations research, analysis focuses on the interaction or relation between a pair or dyad of two political units. Yet, with few exceptions, social scientists have analyzed contagion in monadic datasets only, consisting of individual political unit…
A core proposition from decades of research on internal wars asserts that democracies, with their casualty-averse publics, accountable leaders, and free media, are uniquely prone to losing counterinsurgency (COIN) wars. Yet one should question this finding, for two reasons. First, existing studies overwhelmingly adopt no-variance research designs that only examine democracies, leaving them unab…
In an effort to enhance the impact of development aid, recipients are called on to provide democratically sustained ‘ownership’ for development policies, and donors to align their interventions with these ownership-dictated strategies of their partners. This article illustrates the weaknesses of such an approach. From a political-economy perspective, severe tensions exist between concepts of de…
The international system is still governed by a normative framework designed mainly by OECD countries, especially with regard to soft-law standards in the field of development co-operation. However, the growing relevance of ‘Eastern donors’ is weakening its efficiency and raises the question of how compliance with these standards can be assured in a changing donor landscape. Despite efforts to …
This is the first of two articles evaluating the nature and extent of, and possible responses to, two of the central challenges that globalisation poses for revenue mobilisation in sub-Saharan Africa: trade liberalisation, and corporate tax competition. Both articles use a new dataset with the features needed to address these issues meaningfully: a disentangling of tariff from commodity tax rev…
This second article evaluates and discusses the challenges to government revenue in sub-Saharan Africa posed by developments in corporate taxation. Using the dataset described in the first article, it shows that, in broad terms, corporate tax revenues in the region have held up, despite a reduction in rates and evidence of substantial base-narrowing (mainly through the provision of tax holidays…
Until recently links between state and non-state security and justice have been given scant attention, despite being an important part of safety and security provision in the South. This article examines the circumstances in which such linkages occur; the benefits enjoyed by the partners; and the problems encountered. It considers how their success is to be measured, and how and when they can b…
This article links primary research into the way subjective well-being among poor people can be defined and measured to the growing literature on poverty as a failure of capacity to aspire. Data from Bangladesh, Thailand and Peru are used to illustrate a measurement strategy based on defining well-being as a function of the gap between individuals’ diverse and multiple aspirations, and their sa…
In plural societies, social welfare can be a terrain of political contestation, particularly when public welfare functions are underdeveloped and ethnic or religious groups provide basic social services. It is well established that such organizations favor in-group members, but under what conditions do they serve out-group communities? To address this question, the authors compare the welfare…
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 governed countries aid should be given in forms that …
Recent explanations of transformations of macroeconomic policy under crisis conditions spotlight the intrinsic properties of ideas and the persuasiveness with which they are marketed. Bridging the divide between power and discourse approaches, this article reveals the causal role played by the power resources of expert ideational entrepreneurs, conditional on the political conjuncture in which …
How do crises lead to change? Rationalist approaches to the question that emphasize inexorable structural responses and the pursuit of distributive preferences by newly dominant coalitions, are inadequate because they obscure the social mediation of material events and the pervasive uncertainty that follows destabilization of the precrisis status quo, which constrains actors from fully graspin…