Why is Impact Measurement Abandoned in Practice? Evidence use in evaluation and contracting for five European Social Impact Bonds

Despite broad consensus on the importance of measuring “impact,” the term is not always understood as estimating counterfactual and causal estimates. We examine a type of public sector financing, “Social Impact Bonds,” a scheme where investors front money for public services, with repayment conditional on impact. We examine five cases in four European countries of Social Impact Bonds financing active labor market programs, testing the claim that Social Impact Bonds would move counterfactual causal impact evaluation to the heart of policy. We examine first how evidence was integrated in contracts, second the overall evidence generated and third, given that neither contracts nor evaluations used counterfactual definitions of impact, we explore stakeholders’ perspectives to better understand the reasons why. We find that although most stakeholders wanted the Social Impact Bonds to generate impact estimates, beliefs about public service reform, incentives, and the logic of experimentation led to the acceptance of non-causal definitions

Allocating responsibility in multilevel government systems: voter and expert attributions in the European Union

Democratic accountability requires that citizens can assign responsibility for policy outcomes, yet multilevel structures of government complicate this task as they blur lines of accountability and leave voters uncertain about which level of government is responsible. This study examines the extent to which Europeans are able to navigate the complex and ever-changing divisions of responsibility between their national governments and the European Union (EU). Specifically, we compare citizen and expert responsibility attributions to evaluate if and how voters can competently assign policy responsibility to the European Union. Using multilevel modeling to analyze survey and media data from 27 EU member states, we demonstrate that extreme attitudes decrease citizen competence by motivating biased information processing. Yet at the contextual level, highly politicized environments result in more correct allocations of responsibility by creating an information-rich context

Community-based (and driven) development : A critical review

Community-based (and driven) development (CBD/CDD) projects have become an important form of development assistance, with the World Bank's portfolio alone approximating 7 billion dollars. The authors review the conceptual foundations of CBD/CDD initiatives. Given the importance of the topic, there are, unfortunately, a dearth of well-designed evaluations of such projects. But there is enough quantitative and qualitative evidence from studies that have either been published in peer-reviewed publications or have been conducted by independent researchers to glean some instructive lessons. The authors find that projects that rely on community participation have not been particularly effective at targeting the poor. There is some evidence that CBD/CDD projects create effective community infrastructure, but not a single study establishes a causal relationship between any outcome and participatory elements of a CBD project. Most CBD projects are dominated by elites and, in general, the targeting of poor communities as well as project quality tend to be markedly worse in more unequal communities. However, a number of studies find a U-shaped relationship between inequality and project outcomes. The authors also find that a distinction between potentially"benevolent"forms of elite domination and more pernicious types of"capture"is likely to be important for understanding project dynamics and outcomes. Several qualitative studies indicate that the sustainability of CBD initiatives depends crucially on an enabling institutional environment, which requires upward commitment. Equally, the literature indicates that community leaders need to be downwardly accountable to avoid a variant of"supply-driven demand-driven development."Qualitative evidence also suggests that external agents strongly influence project success. However, facilitators are often poorly trained and inexperienced, particularly when programsare rapidly scaled up. Overall, a naive application of complex contextual concepts like"participation,""social capital,"and"empowerment"is endemic among project implementers and contributes to poor design and implementation. In sum, the evidence suggests that CBD/CDD is best done in a context-specific manner, with a long time-horizon, and with careful and well-designed monitoring and evaluation systems.Community Development and Empowerment,Decentralization,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Health Economics&Finance,Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Health Economics&Finance,Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness,Community Development and Empowerment,Poverty Assessment

Dominican Party System Continuity amid Regional Transformations: Economic Policy, Clientelism, and Migration Flows

In the 1980s and 1990s, economic crisis produced ideological convergence in many Latin American party systems. Much scholarship explores how this convergence frequently provoked system change that enabled renewed ideological differentiation, but little research examines instances where convergence persisted without destabilizing the system. Through comparative historical analysis of Dominican continuity amid regional change, this study identifies factors that sustain or challenge party systems. Then, through analysis of Americas Barometer surveys, it assesses the causal mechanisms through which these factors shape support for the traditional Dominican parties. The findings demonstrate that maintaining programmatic and clientelist linkages facilitates continuity. In addition, the article argues that the threats political outsiders pose to existing party systems are constrained when people excluded from the system are divided and demobilized. In the Dominican case, Haitian immigration divides the popular sector while Dominicans abroad sustain ties to the parties, with both migration flows facilitating party system continuity

Second-order elections:Everyone, everywhere? Regional and national considerations in regional voting

Vote choice in regional elections is commonly explained as dependent on national politics and occasionally as an autonomous decision driven by region-specific factors. However, few arguments and little evidence have been provided regarding the determinants that drive voters’ choices to one end or the other of this dependency–autonomy continuum . In this article, we claim that contextual and individual factors help to raise (or lower) the voters’ awareness of their regional government, affecting the scale of considerations (national or regional) they use to cast their votes at regional elections. Using survey data from regional elections in Spain, we find that voters’ decisions are more autonomous from national politics among the more politically sophisticated voters, among those who have stronger feelings of attachment to their region, and in those contexts in which the regional incumbent party is different from the national one

The domestic political impact of foreign aid: recalibrating the research agenda

The recent concentration of attention by some political scientists on evaluating the effectiveness of democracy assistance, drawing on the transient policy concerns of major donors, is a welcome innovation to a research agenda traditionally biased towards aid's significance for economic development. But its focus is restricted and unrepresentative. This article argues the case for a more comprehensive assessment of the domestic political consequences - both direct and indirect - of all forms of aid, in principle for aid recipients everywhere. This recommendation offers the advantage of serving the limited purposes of analysts of democratisation generally and democracy aid specifically, but more importantly reconnects their approach with the broader political analysis of aid by a wider social science community. It is important to 'think outside the box' of contemporary donor concerns, recalibrating the research agenda in ways that raise other political priorities. The article offers a framework for this purpose. Comprehending the political dynamics in aid-receiving countries should be the primary orienting principle, rather than viewing countries as objects of aid and proceeding to interpret their politics through the distorting lens of donor perspectives

A Statistical Analysis of Economic Perceptions in the 2015 United Kingdom General Election

This paper characterises the vote which took place in the United Kingdom\u27s (U.K.) 2015 General Election as an ‘accountability instrument.’ In doing so, the research interrogates which sections of the electorate hold the incumbent government more accountable for economic outcomes between the 2010 and 2015 U.K. General Elections. The Rational Choice Theory and the Michigan Model are used in this study to present two interlinked, and yet distinct, hypotheses – that less politically informed and non-partisan voters are more likely to hold the government accountable for economic performances; compared to the politically informed and partisan voters within the electorate. Implementing cross-sectional data from the British Election Survey (2015), this paper produces evidence contrary to its first hypothesis, instead illustrating that the politically informed held the government more accountable for economic performances within the 2015 Election. However, the evidence for the second hypothesis is not conclusive due to a high degree of partisan perception bias. Consequently, this paper provides evidence to expand the economic voting literature within the U.K., especially in terms of illustrating the heterogeneity of the economic vote, and evaluating which voters are more likely to hold the government accountable for economic performances following a General Election

The social impact of social funds in Jamaica - a mixed-methods analysis of participation, targeting, and collective action in community-driven development

The authors develop an evaluation method that combines qualitative evidence with quantitative survey data analyzed with propensity score methods on matched samples to study the impact of a participatory community-driven social fund on preference targeting, collective action, and community decision-making. The data come from a case study of five pairs of communities in Jamaica where one community in the pair has received funds from the Jamaica social investment fund (JSIF) while the other has not-but has been picked to match the funded community in its social and economic characteristics. The qualitative data reveal that the social fund process is elite-driven and decision-making tends to be dominated by a small group of motivated individuals. But by the end of the project there was broad-based satisfaction with the outcome. The quantitative data from 500 households mirror these findings by showing that ex-ante the social fund does not address the expressed needs of the majority of individuals in the majority of communities. By the end of the construction process, however, 80 percent of the community expressed satisfaction with the outcome. An analysis of the determinants of participation shows that better educated and better networked individuals dominate the process. Propensity score analysis reveals that the JSIF has had a causal impact on improvements in trust and the capacity for collective action, but these gains are greater for elites within the community. Both JSIF and non-JSIF communities are more likely now to make decisions that affect their lives which indicates a broad-based effort to promote participatory development in the country, but JSIF communities do not show higher levels of community-driven decisions than non-JSIF communities. The authors shed light on the complex ways in which community-driven development works inside communities-a process that is deeply imbedded within Jamaica's socio-cultural and political context.Community Development and Empowerment,Social Capital,Education and Society,Decentralization,Public Health Promotion,Governance Indicators,Education and Society,Social Capital,Community Development and Empowerment,Civil Society

Emotions, Partisanship, and Misperceptions: How Anger and Anxiety Moderate the Effect of Partisan Bias on Susceptibility to Political Misinformation

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112200/1/jcom12164.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112200/2/jcom12164-sup-0001-AppendixS1.pd