Volume 47, Number 2, January 2015

Despite widespread reference in international development discourses to the importance of “effective states,” the meaning of effectiveness is often unclear. This article presents a theoretical framework for analyzing state effectiveness and evaluates it through a comparative empirical study. Focusing on efforts to regulate and tax the lucrative informal urban transport sector, it maps out the landscape of institutions and political interests that underpinned remarkably effective outcomes in Rwanda and serial failure in Uganda in the decade 2000–2010. The article argues that the divergent outcomes are not so much a function of differing bureaucratic capacity as the interaction between factors such as the credibility of government policies, sources of legitimacy, and the role of “infrastructural power,” and how these are mediated through differences in political space.

This paper tests two institutional explanations for why some democratic countries have experienced more anti-government protests than others. The first explanation deals with certain political institutions as structural determinants that shape protest activities, and the second explanation considers opposition parties as agents of protest mobilization. Using a zero-inflated negative binomial regression applied to a global sample of 107 democratic countries from 1990 to 2004, the empirical analyses show that the second explanation works better. The results demonstrate that a larger opposition camp fosters more anti-government protests only if this opposition camp is more united. Moreover, the finding suggests that the mobilization capacity of opposition parties matters for anti-government protests in developing countries but not for those in developed countries.

The creation of constitutional courts is a political affair because the judicial review of laws and competences potentially curbs the power of the elected branches. This paper seeks to explain the spread of constitutional courts and the extent of their formal independence. Our comparison of nine former French colonies in West Africa is built upon (a) the combination of the two competing theories of international diffusion and domestic strategic action—the political insurance model—and (b) a new, theoretically and arithmetically refined index of formal independence. The empirical analysis in this area of similar political context supports the argument that global trends and foreign reference models set a minimum standard and that interests in political insurance determine the deviations from institutional diffusion.

Religions such as Catholicism and Islam are generators of substantial amounts of charitable donations and volunteer work, and they sustain themselves as organizations. How do they produce charitable public goods and their own religious club goods when they are open to extensive free-riding? We argue that mainstream religions facilitate club and public goods provision by using their community structures and theological belief systems to activate members’ prosocial tendencies. The study is based on experiments with over 800 Catholics and Muslims in Dublin and Istanbul and on semi-structured interviews with over 200 Catholics and Muslims in Dublin, Istanbul, Milan, and Paris. The article also demonstrates the methodological advantages of combining field experiments with case study-based interviews.

How do religious institutions facilitate secular political activism? Existing literature suggests that mainstream religious organizations provide institutional resources and civic skills that facilitate collective action. However, the literature has generally overlooked the agency of individuals at the grassroots level who pay the costs associated with political activism. This study contends that lay political engagement is impacted by the extent to which the management of religious institutions is decentralized. I test my argument along with several theoretical alternatives using survey data collected from over 9,000 Mexican citizens by the National Survey of Political Culture and Citizen Practices (ENCUP). The results demonstrate that religious decentralization is positively associated with political activism in Mexico. Religious decentralization also interacts with the presence of progressive political theology to positively impact political activism.

This article explores why, quite contrary to what dominant theories of corruption predict, bigger governments tend to be less corrupt than smaller ones. The findings—derived from the combination of an in-depth interview study conducted in Uganda, a cross-country, quantitative analysis, and an illustrative case study of a prominent political scandal in Sweden—reveal the important role of taxation in explaining this puzzle. Where citizens pay few direct taxes, they are less likely to feel a sense of “ownership” of the state and are thus also less likely to punish corrupt behavior. In contrast, citizens that are more heavily taxed are likely to keep track of the use of “their” money and are thus also more likely to hold corrupt public officials accountable.