Many observers decry an "imperial presidency" in war-making, equating unilateral force with an unconstrained executive. This research reframes the war powers debate by centering the powerful incentives lawmakers have to avoid blame for military action.
The rise of international courts has dramatically changed how oppressive leaders are treated when arrested. This paper examines the shift by analyzing exile patterns using a newly compiled global dataset tracking leaders from 1946 to 2023.
A novel dataset quantifies personnel transitional justice events from 1946 to 2016, measuring their severity during democratization periods. This research fills a gap by including both post-conflict and post-authoritarian contexts. Unlike existing datasets, our approach disaggregates accountability measures temporally.
This article examines how worldviews impact the settlement of civil wars. It argues that accountability mechanisms are crucial for achieving lasting peace.
Comparison focuses on Peruvian municipalities where the previous incumbent was ousted through a recall referendum versus municipalities where a recall referendum failed by a small margin. The goal is to estimate how political accountability mechanisms affect who runs for office when those mechanisms are vulnerable to political capture.
This research explores an unexpected relationship: higher educational attainment is linked to increased levels of political corruption in certain contexts.
This research investigates whether combining citizen monitoring with official accountability mechanisms could reduce corruption in Uganda's bureaucracy. Through a field experiment testing the delivery of formal reports generated by citizens to overseeing officials, we found that these reports were actively ignored by bureaucrats. Follow-up interviews suggest local officials avoided knowledge of problems to evade responsibility.
Civil wars often attract intervention from outside states.
This study develops a novel theory of electoral accountability. Candidates strategically decide whether to commit to constituency service or advertise their platform through costly campaigns. We find that campaign costs increase voter welfare when partisan imbalance is low, but have the opposite effect under these conditions. Under high partisan imbalance, higher campaign spending paradoxically leads to greater expected levels of constituency service commitment from candidates. This suggests that expensive electoral campaigns can actually improve representation quality in polarized political environments by encouraging more substantive service promises. The findings challenge conventional wisdom about campaign finance regulation and provide new insights into the complex relationship between campaign expenditures and democratic accountability mechanisms.
The Voting Rights Act's preclearance provision significantly influenced legislative support for civil rights legislation during the study period.
International criminal courts are frequently given mandates but lack the authority or resources to enforce them. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) achieved compliance not through coercion but by assembling an accountability network that amplified its influence across the region.
Decentralization reforms in Colombia aimed to increase local responsiveness but produced mixed results. This study analyzes survey data from citizens across the country to assess perceptions of department-level government accountability following administrative and fiscal decentralization efforts.
Precise international metrics can push governments to reallocate resources to improve scores on those metrics. This study examines a secondary consequence of global performance indicators (GPIs): when a GPI targets a specific public good, governments facing finite resources may boost that targeted good at the expense of related goods.