Large-N studies reveal a strong, negative relationship between income-based measures of the middle class and perceptions of grand corruption. Yet significant cross-country variation exists, even when accounting for regime type. Why are some countries with large middle classes nonetheless perceived to be persistently corrupt? This paper argues that the effect of middle-class size on grand corruption is moderated by the strength of horizontal accountability institutions.

While there is a lot of research about how redistributive preferences change in times of economic crisis, and some studies about how those preferences shape party voting, there are no investigations about how the effect of redistributive preferences over vot-ing changes in time of economic crisis. This paper fills this gap, expecting that in times of economic crisis the effect of redistributive preferences over voting increases, since economic issues become more relevant.

Do political crisis at the national level alter or shift service delivery allocation at the local level? When budget planning and expenditure practices are regulated by law, the provision of public goods and services should be reflective of a locality's needs. This paper uses rich administrative micro-data to study the effects of critical political events at the national level on the spending decisions of local bureaucrats and how these vary depending on the local government's party alignment with respect to the incumbent in power at the national level.

Identifying the differing ways in which political actors and groups express themselves is a key task in the study of legislatures, campaigning, and communication. A variety of computational tools exist to help find and describe these patterns, typically summarizing differences with weighted word lists representing either lexical frequencies or semantic fields. I identify two limits to the inferences that can be made based on this method: the ambiguity of the semantic value of words without wider context and an inability to detect differences outside of lexical semantics.

Under what conditions do voters from marginalized ethnic groups support parties that promise to address economic inequality concerns over ethno-national identity? In an inequality-based ethnic vote equilibrium, ethnic-majority parties seeking to build a minimum-winning coalition target ethnic minorities by offering targeted economic incentives and ignoring ethnic identity concerns, which are designed to change the strategic voting calculus of ethnic minorities.

How do changes to the global political economy shape the development strategies available to African countries? This paper tackles this question by examining the drivers and outcomes of Ethiopia’s ambitious experiment with integration in textile and garments global value chains through the construction of “plug-and-play” industrial parks (IPs). The paper makes two main arguments. Firstly, I show how the diversification of Ethiopia’s external relations expanded the government’s policy space, while also offering new sources of technical and financial assistance.

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