Gendered Accountability: When and Why Do Women's Policy Priorities Get Implemented?

The past two decades have seen dramatic increases in women occupying positions of political power. Such developments have been welcomed as a means of achieving better outcomes for women in their everyday lives. We interrogate this proposition, developing a "gendered accountability" framework to the delineate conditions under which female representation should have its desired effects. Our empirical analysis applies this framework to sub-Saharan Africa, home to the largest increase in women's political representation in recent years. We find that having more women in the legislature is robustly associated with reduced infant and child mortality as well as greater spending on health. The effect on infant mortality is magnied when women are more active in civil society, and constrained to countries that have gender quotas and a proportional electoral system. We do not, however, find consistent evidence that maternal mortality and access to clean water respond to female representation.This research project was supported by the Swedish Research Council, Grant 439-2014-38, PI: Pam Fredman, Vice-Chancellor, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. We thank for helpful comments Amy Alexander, Lena Wangnerud, Ellen Lust, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Michael Wahman, and Staffan Lindberg

Female Empowerment and Economic Growth

We discuss how inclusive institutions enhance technological change, the main driver of long-term economic growth. Specifically, institutions that promote female political empowerment advance technological change through a) increasing the number and variability of new ideas introduced in the economy and b) improving the selection of more efficient ideas. We test different implications from our argument by measuring three aspects of empowerment - descriptive representation, civil liberties protection, and civil society participation - across 182 countries and 221 years. Empowerment is positively related to subsequent growth, even when accounting for initial differences in income, past growth rates, democracy, and country- and year-fixed effects. The three sub-components of empowerment are also, individually, related to growth, although not as strongly as the aggregated concept. The relationship is retained across different regimes, time periods, and geographic contexts, but is clearer for "Non-Western" countries. Finally, empowerment enhances TFP growth, a proxy for technological change.This research project was supported by the Swedish Research Council, Grant 439-2014-38, PI: Pam Fredman, Vice-Chancellor, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

The Accountability Sequence: From De-jure to De-facto Constraints on Governments

Accountability is one of the cornerstones of good governance. Establishing accountable governments is a top priority on the international development agenda. Yet, scholars and democracy practitioners know little about how accountability mechanisms develop and thus can be supported by international and national actors. The present study tackles the questions of how, and in what sequence accountability sub-types develop. We consider not only vertical (elections and political parties) and horizontal accountability (legislature, judiciary and other oversight bodies), but also diagonal accountability (civil society and media) in both their de-jure and the de-facto dimensions. By utilizing novel sequencing methods, we study their sequential relationships in 173 countries from 1900 to the present with data from the new V-Dem dataset. Considering the long-term dimensions of institution building, this study indicates that most aspects of de-facto vertical accountability precede other forms of accountability. Effective institutions of horizontal accountability – such as vigorous parliaments and independent high courts – evolve rather late in the sequence and build on progress in many other areas.This paper has been published as Staffan I. Lindberg; Anna Lührmann; Valeriya Mechkova. 2017. Mapping dimensions and sequences of accountability. World Development Report. Washington, D.C.: World Bank Group. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/324501487592445304/Mapping-dimensions-and-sequences-of-accountabilityFor helpful comments, we thank Marco Larizza, David Janoff Bulman as well as participants in the 2016 V-Dem Research Conference, and 2017 Midwest Political Science Association, where an earlier version of this paper was presented. We received funding for this research project from the World Bank as part of the Background Paper Series for the World Development Report 2017 (WDR 2017) on Governance and the Law, where an earlier version of this paper was published. This research project, and in particular the data collection, was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Grant M13-0559:1, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to Wallenberg Academy Fellow Staffan I. Lindberg, Grant 2013.0166, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; by European Research Council, Grant 724191, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; as well as by internal grants from the Vice-Chancellor's office, the Dean of the College of Social Sciences, and the Department of Political Science at University of Gothenburg. We performed simulations and other computational tasks using resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the National Supercomputer Center in Sweden, SNIC 2016/1-382 and 2017/1-68. We specifically acknowledge the assistance of In-Saeng Suh at CRC and Johan Raber at SNIC in facilitating our use of their respective systems

Does Democracy or Good Governance Enhance Health? New Empirical Evidence 1900-2012

It has been long debated whether regime types have impacts on human development. More specifically, compared to authoritarianism, are democracies more likely to provide public goods, including infrastructure that improve food provision and health care, and thus enhance health? Some studies support an optimistic view, and argue that with the accountability mechanisms of democratic elections, democracy is helpful in improving health. Some recent studies challenge the optimistic argument, and point out good governance, rather than regime types, as a more crucial determinant of human development. Using a newly collected dataset that covers 173 countries over the years 1900-2012 and contains more nuanced measures than commonly used, we intend to disentangle the debate. The results suggest that across models with various specifications, regime types have more consistent effects than quality of government on health outcomes throughout the entire period. Furthermore, we find that the mixed results of extant studies are due to that 1) the commonly used governance indicators are measured only for the recent decades, and the sample does not reflect the entire range of variation; 2) the positive effects of democracy are especially salient once the level of democracy has achieved certain threshold; 3) the positive effects of democracy are especially stable when both vertical and horizontal accountability mechanisms are improved.This research project was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Grant M13-0559:1, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V- Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; by Swedish Research Council, 2013.0166, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and Jan Teorell, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden; by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to Wallenberg Academy Fellow Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; by University of Gothenburg, Grant E 2013/43

The Inequality of Fraud. Exploring the effect of societal inequality on electoral misconduct.

The relationship between inequlity and democracy has been a subject to many academic studies. Yet no rigorous explanation has been offered about the connection between them. The present thesis engages in this debate by analyzing the effect of societal inequality on the democratic quality of elections. The hypothesis being tested is that the more the resources in society are unequally distributed, the greater the incentives and opportunities for the incumbent are to use illicit tactics to retain a privileged position. At the same time marginalized groups will be more willing to break the democratic norms in order to defend their rights better and access more power. The new V-Dem data allows for the first time to test these arguments in a comprehensive comparative analysis covering 113 years of history for 139 countries. Using a time-series cross-sectional regression model, the study tests whether and how social, economic and/or political inequality affects the level of electoral misconduct. One contribution of this study is that a new measure for electoral fraud is proposed that encompasses all legal and illegal tactics used by competitors to distort the electoral outcome. The empirical findings corroborate that on average inequality based on social group differences is associated with electoral misconduct. The frequency of fraud is higher when the underlying social differences are translated into the political life or affect civil liberties access

Université fédérale de l’Oural : une future « Harvard » régionale ?

Introduction La création des universités fédérales (au moins une dans chaque district fédéral) peut être analysée à travers trois prismes : la réforme administrative et territoriale avec le découpage en huit districts fédéraux sous la première présidence de Vladimir Poutine ; le projet de modernisation de la Russie, lancé par le président Dmitri Medvedev ; et la réforme de l’enseignement supérieur, commencée sous Poutine au milieu des années 2000 et poursuivie par Medvedev. Même si les trois ..

Les universités russes sont-elles compétitives ?

Modernisation, innovation, économie de la connaissance : des mots d’ordre que les autorités russes ne cessent de marteler sous les présidences successives de Vladimir Poutine et de Dmitri Medvedev. Les universités sont au cœur de cette stratégie d’État, qui doit permettre au pays de ne plus dépendre exclusivement de la rente énergétique. L’enjeu est aussi de replacer l’enseignement supérieur russe au sein du marché mondial de l’éducation, en attirant des étudiants étrangers et en revalorisant l’image du pays. Mais ces ambitions nationales et internationales sont-elles encore à la portée des établissements supérieurs russes éprouvés par les années de transition post-communiste, longtemps sous-financés, se partageant des étudiants de moins en moins nombreux ? La réforme profonde, engagée au milieu des années 2000, atteindra-t-elle son objectif de placer quelques universités russes dans le Top-100 des classements internationaux ? A travers six monographies, cet ouvrage propose une analyse de la situation et des perspectives de quelques-unes des meilleures universités nationales (Institut de l’Acier et des Alliages de Moscou, Haut Collège d’Économie, Université technique Bauman, Université du pétrole et du gaz Goubkine, Université fédérale de l’Oural, Nouvelle Université russe et Institut Juridique International). Les auteures, trois chercheuses russes et françaises, se sont appuyées sur des entretiens afin d’appréhender au mieux les transformations en cours au sein des universités russes et leurs perspectives