What impact, if any, do ethnic federalism and the geographic concentration of ethnic minorities have on the political incorporation of minorities in democracies with single-member district elections? Many studies on ethnic voting in the United States have examined the impact of majority-minority districts on the turnout of minority voters and the election of minority candidates. However, few st…
This article asks whether alleged partisan policy convergence has eradicated differences in relation to privatization of delivery of welfare state services. The study utilizes a novel methodological approachnumerous intrastate comparisons set in a consilience research frameworkto assess the extent of convergence and its underlying reasons. It explores the partisan politics of school privatiza…
In this article the authors study delegation problems within multiparty coalition governments. They argue that coalition parties can use the committee system to shadow the ministers of their partners; that is, they can appoint committee chairs from other governing parties, who will then be well placed to monitor and/or check the actions of the corresponding ministers. The authors analyze whic…
Over the past decades, (mostly) private actors have been providing the public good of cross-national political data in a decentralized, uncoordinated, and unregulated fashion. They have been successful in generating an incessant supply of data. However, the success of current practices of data production has been masking severe structural limitations: the systematic undersupply of data and the …
When something goes awry in a governmental agency, a frequent claim is that appointed political heads are incompetent. If true, what explains this in a separation of powers system where the executive nominates and the legislature approves? Our analysis provides a rationale and conditions for rational incompetence. Specifically, we present a model in which a President nominates and the Senate co…
We develop a model of electoral accountability with primaries. Prior to the general election, the supporters of each of two parties decide which candidates to nominate. We show that supporters suffer from a fundamental tension: while they want politicians who will faithfully implement the partys agenda in office, they need politicians who can win elections. Accountability to supporters fails w…
A model of political information processing drawn from the studies of political behavior and psychology is applied to the emergence of cooperation observed in classic repeated Prisoners Dilemma (PD) game experiments. The results show that the model can robustly account for the learning of cooperation observed in the experiments when players are aware of the strategic nature of the game and mak…
Since Hardin first formulated the tragedy of the commons, researchers have described various ways that commons problems are solved, all based on the model of individual rationality. Invariably, these institutional solutions involve creating some system of property rights. We formulate an alternative model, one not founded on property rights but on decision-making around so-called vector payoffs…
Many scholars show that institutions help citizens with their political decisions. However, real-world contexts contain multiple institutions that are imposed together. Thus, I develop a theory and experimental test of the conditions under which combinations of two institutions induce citizens to trust a speakers statements and make better decisions than when only one institution is present. T…
The protests associated with the 2011 Arab Spring represent a serious and sustained challenge to autocratic rule in the Middle East. Under what conditions will Arab protest movements translate into a full-fledged fourth wave of democratization? We argue that questions about the commitment of Islamic political opposition to democracy beyond a countrys first free election may hinder Middle Eas…
This article describes a systematic process that is helpful in improving impact evaluation assignments, within restricted budgets and timelines. It involves three steps: a rethink of the key questions of the evaluation to develop more relevant, specific questions; a way of designing a mix of research methods to generate evidence that supports more valid conclusions; and a step that aims to make…
Evaluation and network governance are both among the top-10 trendy concepts in public policy. But how are they related? In the present article, we ask how public sector interventions guided by a network governance doctrine are to be evaluated. If evaluation means systematic judgment of organization, content, administration, outputs and effects in public policy, then evaluators need concepts and…
Part of the justification for joint-donor evaluations is that they allow the conduct of relevant evaluations with a broader scope than single-donor evaluations and at the same time reduce transaction costs. Many joint-donor evaluations, however, run into management and coordination problems, have unforeseen high transaction costs for the donors and result in general conclusions and recommendati…
The use of evaluation results is at the core of evaluation theory and practice. Major debates in the field have emphasized the importance of both the evaluators role and the evaluation process itself in fostering evaluation use. A recent systematic review of interventions aimed at influencing policy-making or organizational behavior through knowledge exchange offers a new perspective on evalua…
This article discusses an approach to managing the evaluation of complex interventions. Complex interventions pose significant challenges to the role and conduct of evaluations. In particular, they combine with reflexive learning and change to produce significant uncertainties making it hard to describe in advance what the intervention will do or what the outcomes might be. These uncertainties …
This article uses the example of Sure Start, a national initiative introduced by the UK Government in the late 1990s, as a case study to explore the reasons why large-scale, complex, national initiatives often fail to adequately evidence the impact of their work. The authors explore a range of structural, cultural, methodological and practical factors that have acted to inhibit effective evalua…
In this article, the authors explore the relationship between (impact) evaluations and cyber society, in particular digital policies. There appears to be a gap between the pace at which internet and digital policies are penetrating society and the attention professional evaluators are paying to these policies. First, we present an analytical framework for studying these policies, while examples…
Capacity development support of Southern partners has become a cornerstone of the work of many Northern development NGOs. While there is a growing consensus in the aid sector about the importance of capacity development (CD), the support base among the general public and policy makers for these kinds of activities is weak. This is linked with the observed difficulties of demonstrating the relev…
This study evaluates the 20082009 Lose your Excuse public service advertising (PSA) campaign on energy efficiency targeting 8- to 12-year-olds, intended to increase knowledge, foster proactive attitudes, and change energy usage behaviors. Baseline and two follow-up surveys were conducted with online samples representative of the national population of households with kids with online access.…
Many inquiries regarding the causal effects of policies or programs are based on research designs where the treatment assignment process is unknown, and thus valid inferences depend on tenuous assumptions about the assignment mechanism. This article draws attention to the importance of understanding the assignment mechanism in policy and program evaluation studies, and illustrates how informati…