Administrative Science Quarterly; Volume 62, Issue 1, March 2017

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ISBN/ISSN

0001-8392

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The Elephant (or Donkey) in the Boardroom: How Board Political Ideology Affec…

We examine how directors’ political ideologies, specifically the board-level average of how conservative or liberal directors are, influence boards’ decisions about CEO compensation. Integrating research on corporate governance and political psychology, we theorize that conservative and liberal boards will differ in their prevailing beliefs about the appropriate amounts CEOs should be paid and,…

The Secret Ballot and the Market for Votes at 19th-Century British Elections

This article examines the impact of the secret ballot on the market for votes at parliamentary elections in the 19th-century United Kingdom. I use a formal model of an exchange between a candidate and a voter to predict the impact of the secret ballot on bribe prices, the marginal effect campaign spending on candidates’ electoral prospects, and election turnout. I test these predictions against…

From Open to Secret Ballot: Vote Buying and Modernization

The secret ballot is one of the cornerstones of democracy. We contend that the historical process of modernization caused the switch from open to secret ballot with the underlying mechanism being that income growth, urbanization, and rising education standards undermined vote markets. We undertake event history studies of ballot reform in Western Europe and the U.S. states during the 19th and 2…

An Introduction to Special Issue: The Causes and Consequences of Secret Ballo…

This article introduces a collection of papers that explore two understudied but critical questions of enduring concern for the study of democratization. Was the secret ballot driven by the same forces that drove the rise of democracy more generally? Did the secret ballot end electoral fraud, or was its effect merely endogenous to economic modernization more generally? This article provides his…

Good Types in Authoritarian Elections: The Selectoral Connection in Chinese L…

A new electoral design for subnational congress elections in China allows me to investigate the informational utility of authoritarian elections. Authoritarian regimes are notoriously bad at solving the moral hazard problem in the voter’s agency relationship with politicians. Borrowing from the literature on political selection, I theorize that authoritarian elections can nonetheless solve the …

Consultative Authoritarianism and Its Limits

Consultative authoritarianism challenges existing conceptions of nondemocratic governance. Citizen participation channels are designed to improve policymaking and increase feelings of regime responsiveness, but how successful are these limited reforms in stemming pressure for broader change? The article develops a new theoretical lens to explain how common citizens perceive the introduction of …

Bringing in China: Insights for Building Comparative Political Theory

What do comparativists have to gain by reading recent work on China? In this article, I focus specifically on the ways in which scholarship on China can contribute to the task of theory building in comparative politics. I identify two areas that could reap particularly high benefits from considering scholarship on China—comparative political development and the political behavior of development…

Evaluability assessment of a small NGO in water-based development

Small non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in water-based development in low- and middle-income countries face unique challenges when it comes to evaluative practice. Few prioritize evaluation because they lack expertise and/or feel strongly about funding programs and not processes, given accountability to donors. To examine facilitators and barriers to evaluation in this context, we e…

From wealth to health: Evaluating microfinance as a complex intervention

Innovative interventions that address the social determinants of health are required to help reduce persistent health inequalities. We argue that microcredit can act in this way and develop a conceptual framework from which to examine this. In seeking to evaluate microcredit this way we then examine how randomized controlled trials, currently considered as the ‘gold standard’ in impact evaluati…

Network-based approaches for evaluating ambient assisted living (AAL) technol…

Ambient assisted living technologies could support people experiencing physical or cognitive challenges, to maintain social identities and complex activities of daily living. Although there has been substantial investment in developing ambient assisted living innovation, less effort has been devoted to understanding how to evaluate the impact of ambient assisted living on physical and mental he…

An examination of evaluation users’ preferences for program- and actor-orie…

As programs and policies have grown in complexity, theory of change evaluation approaches and methods have become increasingly popular. While the academic literature often adheres to program-oriented theories of change, it is gradually being exposed to actor-oriented theories of change, which aim to enhance the flexibility of evaluations in order to adapt to growing complexity. Aside from the m…

Learning from seasoned evaluators: Implications of systems approaches for eva…

In the last 20 years, approaches (i.e. concepts, theories, methods) from the systems fields have increased in popularity among evaluators and evaluation commissioners. Their popularity stems in part from a widespread view that systems approaches transform evaluation practice, despite a lack of evidence. There have been few empirical examinations of the implications of these approaches for evalu…

Enhancing participatory evaluation in a humanitarian aid project

This article examines participatory evaluation of humanitarian aid projects in post-conflict contexts, through the presentation of a particular case: the evaluation of a project supporting herders and Bedouin communities breeding small ruminants in the Gaza Strip. The article analyses the current situation in the Gaza Strip, a unique humanitarian context, in order to gain insight into the value…

Towards rigorous practice: A framework for assessing naturalistic evaluations…

This article reflects on the design and application of a framework for assessing the rigour of naturalistic evaluations in the development sector. The framework was employed in a review of a naturalistic evaluation ‘model’. It focused on the quality of evaluation results generated by the application of this model to outcome and impact assessments of development programmes. Naturalistic evaluati…

Evaluating a complex research capacity-building intervention: Reflections on …

There is increasing policy demand for real-time evaluations of research and capacity-building programmes reflecting a recognition of the management, governance and impact gains that can result. However, the evidence base on how to successfully implement real-time evaluations of complex interventions in international development efforts is scarce. There is therefore a need for reflective work th…

External specialist support for school self-evaluation: Testing a model of su…

With an increasing emphasis on school self-evaluation as a mechanism for school improvement, many countries provide a range of supports to guide schools through the self-evaluation process. While models of support vary across jurisdictions, there are a number of common approaches that prevail, including the provision of an external specialist to support the school self-evaluation process. Howev…

Process Tracing and Bayesian Updating for impact evaluation

Commissioners of impact evaluation often place great emphasis on assessing the contribution made by a particular intervention in achieving one or more outcomes, commonly referred to as a ‘contribution claim’. Current theory-based approaches fail to provide evaluators with guidance on how to collect data and assess how strongly or weakly such data support contribution claims. This article presen…

Evaluation capacity in the European Commission

Ex-post evaluations are a potential tool to improve regulatory interventions and to hold rule-makers accountable. For these reasons the European Commission has promised to systematically evaluate its legislation, but it remains unclear if actual evaluation capacity is being built up in the Commission’s Directorates-General. This article describes and explains the variation in evaluation capacit…

Performance audit as a contributor to change and improvement in public admini…

The last 30 years of the New Public Management ‘regime’ in many western countries have resulted in increased use of audit and other control mechanisms. These mechanisms are supposed to contribute both to accountability and improvement. In this article, theories of evaluation and organizational learning are used to understand how the dynamics of control affect change processes. We analyse respon…