The Forum: Global Challenges to Democracy?:Perspectives on Democratic Backsliding

There is a widespread perception that we are witnessing a period of democratic decline, manifesting itself in varieties of democratic backsliding such as the manipulation of elections, marginalization and repression of regime opponents and minorities, or more incremental executive aggrandizement. Yet others are more optimistic and have argued that democracy is in fact resilient, or that we are observing coinciding trends of democratic decline but also expansion. This forum highlights key issues in the debate on democracy's decline, which center on conceptual and measurement issues, agreement on the phenomenon but not its nature or severity, the importance of international factors, the emphasis we should put on political elites versus citizens, and the consequences of backsliding for global politics. Staffan I. Lindberg provides an empirical perspective on the scope and severity of democracy's decline, and argues that polarization and misinformation are important drivers for this current wave of autocratization. Susan D. Hyde highlights the detrimental consequences of reduced support for democracy by the international community, which has affected civil society organizations—important arbiters of democracy—especially severely. Challenging some of these conclusions, Irfan Nooruddin claims that any gains for democracy after the end of the Cold War were short-lived, failing to sustain democracy because of an overemphasis on elections and a disregard for structural factors. Finally, Larry M. Bartels argues that we need to look to political elites and not citizens if we want to protect democracy in the United States and elsewhere, which has important implications for how we study democracy and its challenges.<br/

The workings of the single member plurality electoral system in India and the need for reform

India uses single member plurality system (SMPS) to elect the members of the lower house of its national parliament and the state assemblies. Under SMPS, elections are conducted for separate geographical areas, known as constituencies or districts, and the electors cast one vote each for a candidate with the winner being the candidate who gets the plurality of votes. SMPS is traditionally defended primarily on the grounds of simplicity and its tendency to produce winning candidates, which promotes a link between constituents and their representatives. It tends to provide a clear-cut choice for voters between two main parties, and is expected to gives rise to single-party rather than coalition governments. It also has the benefit of excluding extremist parties from gaining representation, unless their support is geographically concentrated

Ethnic Integration and Development in China

This paper pursues an inquiry into the relationship between ethnicity and development in the largest authoritarian country in the contemporary world, the People’s Republic of China. It engages the theoretical literature on ethnic diversity and development in general, but also pays special attention to political economy logics unique to authoritarian systems. Focusing on the western part of China over a decade since the launch of China’s Western Development Program (xibu da kaifa) in 2000, this paper utilizes the data from two censuses (2000 and 2010) together with nighttime streetlight imagery data to analyze the overall relationship between ethnicity and development provision. It also analyzes changes in such a relationship during this period. The paper finds that ethnic minority concentration negatively correlates with economic development in both the years 2000 and 2010 across the western provinces. It also finds that counties in non-autonomous provinces, which are historically more integrated with the rest of China than autonomous provinces, have a positive and systematic correlation between changes in ethnic minority concentration and changes in development during the 10-year period. The counties in autonomous provinces, on the other hand, show the opposite trend. Using three case studies of Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, the paper concludes that although there is in general a tendency for ethnic minority concentrated areas to be less developed, ultimately which groups prosper more or less depends upon specific economic development and which political control logics the Chinese state implements

International demands for austerity: examining the impact of the IMF on the public sector

What effects do International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans have on borrow-ing countries? Even after decades of research, no consensus exists. We offer a straight-forward explanation for the seemingly mixed effects of IMF loans. We argue thatdifferent loans have different effects because of the varied conditions attached to IMFfinancing. To demonstrate this point, we investigate IMF loans with and withoutconditions that require public sector reforms in exchange for financing. We find thatthe addition of a public sector reform condition to a country’s IMF program signifi-cantly reduces government spending on the public sector wage bill. This evidencesuggest that conditions are a key mechanism linking IMF lending to policy outcomes.Although IMF loans with public sector conditions prompt cuts to the wage bill in theshort-term, these cuts do not persist in the longer-term. Borrowers backslide oninternationally mandated spending cuts in response to domestic political pressures

Revisiting the Effects of IMF Programs on Poverty and Inequality

Investigating how lending programs of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) affect poverty and inequality, we explicitly address model uncertainty. We control for endogenous selection into IMF programs using data on 86 low- and middle income countries for the 1982-2009 period and analyze program effects on various poverty and inequality measures. The results rely on averaging over 90 specifications of treatment effect models and indicate adverse short-run effects of IMF agreements on poverty and inequality for the whole sample, while for a 2000-2009 subsample the results are reversed. There is evidence that significant short-run effects might disappear in the long-run. (author's abstract)Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Serie