Clark Gibson
University of California, San Diego, Political Science, Faculty Member
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Supplemental Material, PPQ_Appendix_Table_1_(1) for Why the salience of social divisions matters in party systems: Testing the interactive hypothesis in South Africa by Karen Ferree, Clark Gibson, and Barak Hoffman in Party Politics
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Research Interests: Law, Environmental Law, Conservation Biology, Environmental policy, Conservation, and 15 moreCorporate Governance, Governance, Animal Law, Biodiversity, Biological Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Elephants, Crime, Corruption, Federal Government, Forest Management, Animals, Forests, Conservation of Natural Resources, and Causal Models
Randomized field experiments have gained attention within the social sciences and the field of democracy promotion as an influential tool for causal inference and a potentially powerful method of impact evaluation. With an eye toward... more
Randomized field experiments have gained attention within the social sciences and the field of democracy promotion as an influential tool for causal inference and a potentially powerful method of impact evaluation. With an eye toward facilitating field experimentation in democracy promotion, I present the first field-experimental study of international election monitoring, which should be of interest to both practitioners and academics. I discuss field experiments as a promising method for evaluating the effects of democracy assistance programs. Applied to the 2004 presidential elections in Indonesia, the random assignment of international election observers reveals that even though the election was widely regarded as democratic, the presence of observers had a measurable effect on votes cast for the incumbent candidate, indicating that such democracy assistance can influence election quality even in the absence of blatant election-day fraud.
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Research Interests: Program Evaluation, Economics, Forestry, Photography, Research Methodology, and 14 moreNatural Resources, Political Science, Environmental Change, Public Policy Analysis, Policy Analysis, Interviews, Measurement, Public Policy and Administration, Natural Resource, Condition dependence, Policy Analysis and Management, Remote Sensing Image, Public Policy, and Outcome measure
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We propose and implement a new empirical strategy to measure the causal impact of foreign aid on the quality of governance in Africa. We present a simple theoretical model which illustrates the endogeneity problem present in much of the... more
We propose and implement a new empirical strategy to measure the causal impact of foreign aid on the quality of governance in Africa. We present a simple theoretical model which illustrates the endogeneity problem present in much of the extant literature, and use this model to motivate a method for calculating the component of fluctuations in aid which is driven solely by changes in donor generosity and not by events at the recipient level. Using this instrumented measure, we find that aid has strong negative impacts on the quality of governance. This relationship is however primarily driven by a ‘Cold War’ effect which saw donor generosity peak at the moment at which governance was at its nadir, and is not robust to the inclusion of a full set of time fixed effects. We find that donors are likely to increase aid in response to economic disaster if the incumbent government falls, and to decrease it if the incumbent stays in power. *School of International Relations and Pacific Studi...
Does a government’s source of revenue explain its policies? The predominate view in development studies contends that policy variation results directly from institutional variation. Building on a literature which we label fiscal theories... more
Does a government’s source of revenue explain its policies? The predominate view in development studies contends that policy variation results directly from institutional variation. Building on a literature which we label fiscal theories of governance, we argue that a government’s sources of revenue strongly affect its public expenditures, independent of institutions. Using data from local government budgets in Tanzania and Zambia, we find that local governments in both countries produce more public services as their budget’s share of local taxes increases. Alternatively, revenue that local governments receive from sources outside their boundaries -transfers from the central government and foreign assistance -increases the share of local budgets consumed by employee benefits and administrative costs. Because there is no variation in the powers of local governments in Tanzania and Zambia, the effects of revenue sources on public expenditure that we find are independent of political i...
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We develop and apply a theoretical framework for understanding how local governments respond to the perceived costs and benefits of intergovernmental cooperation. Our theory connects local government decisions to economic and political... more
We develop and apply a theoretical framework for understanding how local governments respond to the perceived costs and benefits of intergovernmental cooperation. Our theory connects local government decisions to economic and political costs and benefits at both the local and regional levels, as well as the institutional context in which collaborative decisions take place. We develop and test hypotheses with data from a sample of regional councils. We find preliminary support for our institutional, local, and regional hypotheses. • Prepared for presentation at the Creating Collaborative Communities Conference, Wayne State University, October 31, 2005. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the National Science Foundation and the University of Michigan’s Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy. INTRODUCTION During the 1980s, the Grand Rapids, Michigan metropolitan area experienced unprecedented population and economic growth (Fulton et al. 2001). This growth to...
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Can technology help citizens overcome barriers to participation in emerging democracies? We argue that, by lowering costs, technology can bring new participants into the political process, but in so doing generates a ‘crowd’ of... more
Can technology help citizens overcome barriers to participation in emerging democracies? We argue that, by lowering costs, technology can bring new participants into the political process, but in so doing generates a ‘crowd’ of participants that is both more responsive to incentives (malleable) and more sensitive to costs (fragile). We illustrate these dynamics using VIP:Voice, a platform we engineered to encourage South African citizens to engage politically through an ICT/DM platform. VIP:Voice recruited South Africans through a variety of methods, including over 50 million ‘Please Call Me’ messages, and provided a multi-channel platform allowing citizens to engage via low-tech mobile phones and high-tech social media. VIP:Voice generated engagement of some form in over 250,000 South Africans, but we saw large attrition as we asked people to switch from low-cost digital forms of engagement to high-cost real-world engagement. The implementation of a standard platform across multipl...
In a shocking victory in Ghana’s 2008 presidential election, the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) prevailed over the incumbent New Patriotic Party (NPP) by one-half of one percentage point, after trailing far behind the NPP... more
In a shocking victory in Ghana’s 2008 presidential election, the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) prevailed over the incumbent New Patriotic Party (NPP) by one-half of one percentage point, after trailing far behind the NPP according to most opinion polls. What were the attributes of voters for each party? Standard theories about elections in Africa suggest that they are little more than ethnic headcounts and that parties typically are a thin cover for ethnicity. Data from a survey we conducted shortly before the 2008 seriously challenges this view. The NDC and the NPP drew support from a range of ethnic groups and there was little evidence of ethnic block voting. Moreover, while supporters of each party do not fit a clear ethnic profile, they possess strong beliefs about the parties. In addition, in the final weeks of the election, a sizable proportion of the electorate remained undecided and was amenable to voting for either party. For these reasons we contend that th...
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The Political Science Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) announces it awards for basic research support and dissertation improvement grants for fiscal year 2009. The program funded 56 new projects and 34 doctoral... more
The Political Science Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) announces it awards for basic research support and dissertation improvement grants for fiscal year 2009. The program funded 56 new projects and 34 doctoral dissertation improvement proposals. (Additional program funds were spent on continuing grant increments. These result from awards that were made in previous fiscal years, but where funds are being disbursed on a yearly basis instead all up front.) The Political Science Program spent $10,461,799 on these research, training, and workshop projects and $383,238 on dissertation training grants for political science students. In addition, the program contributed $345,000 to support three Graduate Research Fellowships. The program holds two grant competitions annually (Regular Research, August and January 15; Dissertation Improvement, January 15) and constitutes a major source of political science research funding as part of fulfilling NSF's mission to encourage ...
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Scholars have long argued social diversity, and electoral institutions interactively shape party systems: diversity has little effect on the effective number of parties (ENP) in single member plurality (SMP) systems but increases ENP in... more
Scholars have long argued social diversity, and electoral institutions interactively shape party systems: diversity has little effect on the effective number of parties (ENP) in single member plurality (SMP) systems but increases ENP in proportional ones. We argue instead that where diversity is salient enough to generate demand for parties, it also hinders strategic coordination, preventing SMP rules from reducing the number of parties and producing a correlation between diversity and ENP. In contrast, non-salient forms of diversity have little impact regardless of institutional rules. We test this intuition using data from South Africa’s municipal mixed-member system and explore its highly salient racial cleavage and less salient ethnic one. We find racial diversity correlates with ENP in SMP systems while ethnic diversity correlates with ENP in neither SMP nor proportional representation systems. Our study contributes to mounting evidence questioning the interactive hypothesis an...
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Policy makers around the world tout decentralization as an effective tool in the governance of natural resources. Despite the popularity of these reforms, there is limited scientific evidence on the environmental effects of... more
Policy makers around the world tout decentralization as an effective tool in the governance of natural resources. Despite the popularity of these reforms, there is limited scientific evidence on the environmental effects of decentralization, especially in tropical biomes. This study presents evidence on the institutional conditions under which decentralization is likely to be successful in sustaining forests. We draw on common-pool resource theory to argue that the environmental impact of decentralization hinges on the ability of reforms to engage local forest users in the governance of forests. Using matching techniques, we analyze longitudinal field observations on both social and biophysical characteristics in a large number of local government territories in Bolivia (a country with a decentralized forestry policy) and Peru (a country with a much more centralized forestry policy). We find that territories with a decentralized forest governance structure have more stable forest co...
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... The programme featured interrlational experts including experienced organ-izers of electionmonitoring groups from Chile, the Philippines and 22. National Democratic Institute and the CarterCenter of Emory University The October 31)... more
... The programme featured interrlational experts including experienced organ-izers of electionmonitoring groups from Chile, the Philippines and 22. National Democratic Institute and the CarterCenter of Emory University The October 31) 1991 Elections in Zambia, [hereinafter ...
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ABSTRACT Data from a unique nationwide exit poll of 6258 voters are employed to explore two central themes of the 2013 Kenyan Election: (1) the correlates of individual vote choice; and (2) the credibility of the electoral process. The... more
ABSTRACT Data from a unique nationwide exit poll of 6258 voters are employed to explore two central themes of the 2013 Kenyan Election: (1) the correlates of individual vote choice; and (2) the credibility of the electoral process. The analysis reveals several striking relationships between an individual's vote choice, personal attributes, and perceptions of the campaign and candidates. We find that the leading coalitions mostly kept their co-ethnics together, although ethnic alliances proved somewhat less certain than in the past. We find that, for the most part, voters treated Uhuru Kenyatta - not sitting Prime Minister Raila Odinga - as the incumbent. The data show that campaign issues also influenced the vote: Odinga garnered more support on issues related to constitutional implementation, corruption, and the International Criminal Court (ICC), while Kenyatta won on the economy, employment, and security. Exit poll data also reveal irregularities in the electoral process, including some evidence of inflated vote totals benefitting the Jubilee coalition and illegal administrative activities. The data, while not definitive, are highly suggestive of a deeply flawed electoral process and challenge claims that Kenyatta won a majority in the first round.
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Abstract Does aid itself create incentives that undermine sustainable outcomes? This is the provoking question underlying the present study. The study explores how incentives that arise in the system of development co-operation affect the... more
Abstract Does aid itself create incentives that undermine sustainable outcomes? This is the provoking question underlying the present study. The study explores how incentives that arise in the system of development co-operation affect the sustainability of development ...
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ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT
Abstract Property rights are central to debates about natural resource policy. Governments traditionally have been seen as the appropriate custodians of natural resources for their citizens. More recently, many argue the privatization of... more
Abstract Property rights are central to debates about natural resource policy. Governments traditionally have been seen as the appropriate custodians of natural resources for their citizens. More recently, many argue the privatization of rights will ensure that users have incentives to manage their resources well. Common property, to the extent it is discussed at all, is seen as leading to