Browsing by Author "Malesky, Edmund"

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    Do subnational performance assessments lead to improved governance? Evidence from a field experiment in Vietnam
    (Fulbright Review of Economics and Policy) Malesky, Edmund; Phan, Tuan-Ngoc; Le, Anh Quoc
    PurposeSingle-party regimes increasingly use Subnational Performance Assessments (SPAs) – rankings of provinces and districts – to improve governance outcomes. SPAs assemble and publicize information on local government performance to facilitate monitoring and generate competition among officials. However, the evidence are sparse on their effects in this context. The authors argue that built-in incentive structures in centralized single-party regimes distort the positive impact of SPAs.Design/methodology/approachThe staggered rollout of the Vietnam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) created a natural experiment. Due to 2010 budget constraints, the first iteration of the PAPI survey covered only 30 of Vietnam’s 63 provinces before covering all in 2011. The PAPI team used matching procedures to identify a statistical twin for each province before randomly selecting one from each pair. The authors use randomization inference to compare the outcomes of these control and treatment groups in 2011.FindingsExposure to PAPI helped improve almost all aspects of governance; however, significant evidence of prioritization bias exist. The positive effects only persisted for the dimension of administrative procedures, which was the one area of governance that was prioritized by the central government at the time. Other dimensions only registered short-term effects.Originality/valueOur study provides an examination of the impact of SPAs in a single-party regime context. In addition, the authors leverage the natural experiment to identify information effects causally. The authors also look past short-term effects to compare outcomes for five years after the treatment occurred.
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    E-government and Political Trust: A Cross-national Study for 59 Countries
    (2024) Liu, Zhihan

    My thesis aims to investigate both the direct effect of e-government development levels and its indirect effect on political trust that operates by reducing corruption. By analyzing a nine-year panel dataset for 59 countries, I find that there is no significant relationship between e- government development levels and political trust. Similarly, there is no significant relationship between e-government development levels and corruption. These findings remind us to be cautious about the enthusiasm for e-government advancement projects; and rethink the underlying assumption that the use of ICTs can deliver better governance.

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    Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong: The Interplay of Actors, Legal Governance, and Political Economy
    (Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics) Nillasithanukroh, Songkhun; Patel, Ekta; Malesky, Edmund; Weinthal, Erika
    Abstract This chapter examines the illegal wildlife trade (IWT) in the Mekong, with particular attention to how political economic factors and legal structures shape actors’ interests and incentives. The current literature on wildlife trafficking mainly attributes wildlife protection failures to weak enforcement. However, this literature has paid little attention to the underlying factors that contribute to the weak enforcement of wildlife laws. This chapter applies a political economy analysis to better understand the role of each actor from the point of wildlife sourcing to end consumption. It also explains why effectively enforcing wildlife laws is difficult and is often not in the interest of wildlife officials. This chapter thus examines why actors along IWT supply chains engage in illegal activities and do not abide by conservation laws. With rising demand for wildlife products, particularly because of increasing economic prosperity, the survival of many endangered species is under threat. Despite growing calls for total bans of wildlife trade or trade regulations to prevent overharvesting, these frequently fail to achieve conservation goals if they do not consider the local political economy context. This chapter focuses on the global IWT hotspots of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, analyzing how legal frameworks shape local political economies and showing why IWT is a pervasive problem in the region.
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    Inequality and Support for Government Responses to Covid-19
    (IZA Discussion Paper) Dang, Hai-Anh H; Malesky, Edmund; Nguyen, Cuong Viet
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    Trajectories of Authoritarian Consolidation
    (2024) Cheung, Tung Yan Gloria

    How do dictators amass personal control to become autocrats? In particular, how do seemingly weak leaders dismantle established power structures to create a centralised authority under their control? My book project, Trajectories of Consolidation explores tactics used by dictators to undercut elite constraints and ultimately concentrate power under their own control. According leading explanations for the emergence of personalist leaders, the success of leaders in consolidating power is a result of the failure of elites to constrain and stop them, ignoring the leader’s strategic choices. Relying on these explanations would suggest that a leader’s unexpected ascent is a product of luck and negligence by his competitors.

    But dictators play chess, not blackjack. While there is no doubt that luck has some hand in the murky world of dictatorships, leaders also must continuously wrestle with the strategic puzzle inherent in trying to wrest power from strong elites. The framework proposed in my dissertation suggests an alternative mechanism: rather than being the failure of elites, the successful consolidation of leaders is possible due to a gradual strategy of piecemeal power seizures. As when seeking a checkmate in chess, consolidation of power requires a sequence of strategic moves to achieve one’s goal. Each move serves an immediate purpose and also opens up new strategies. Whether a dictator is carefully advancing his position or merely capitalising on a lucky break, in all cases he is acting in the moment in order to make new and more potent strategic moves available in the future, always trying to enable the final checkmate.

    According leading explanations for the emergence of personalist leaders, the success of leaders in consolidating power is a result of the failure of elites to constrain and stop them. However, this fails to account for the emergence of authoritarian leaders even in the face of established power structures and strong elites, and ignores the strategic choices of leaders. I propose an alternative mechanism: rather than being the failure of elites, the successful consolidation of leaders is possible due to a gradual strategy of piecemeal power seizures, a process which I term the logic of strategic path dependence. Dictators utilise sequential strategies, each furthering immediate aims while enabling potent future moves, akin to advancing towards a checkmate in chess. To show evidence of strategic path dependence, I develop a framework of three main strategies of consolidation used by leaders to accumulate and create a novel dataset of 386 authoritarian leaders and their use of consolidation over the time period of 1946 to 2004. Using a Markov transition model, my analysis reveals obvious path dependence between strategies used by leaders, more than can be attributed solely to external contextual factors.