C&C member Rod Abouharb, Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, has co-authored a new article with Bernhard Reinsberg who is presenting at C&C this term. The article has now been published in the Review of International Political Economy and is available here
In their article, the authors try to better understand how governments seek political advantage during economically turbulent times. In particular, they wanted to investigate how governments allocate the burden of structural adjustment programs sponsored by international financial institutions. The authors argue that governments allocate the burdens of these programs strategically to protect their own partisan supporters while imposing adjustment costs upon the partisan supporters of their opponents.
For their study, they used individual-level data from the Afrobarometer survey from 12 Sub-Saharan African countries, showing that opposition supporters have consistently more negative evaluations and experiences of IMF structural adjustment programs compared to supporters of the government. Partisan differences in evaluations are greater when governments have greater scope for distributional politics, such as in the public sector and where programs entail more quantitative performance criteria, which leave governments discretion about how to achieve IMF program targets.
In the end, these results emphasise the significant role of borrowing governments in the implementation of IMF-mandated policy measures. They also stress the benefits of reducing the number of IMF conditions in limiting the scope for harmful distributive politics.