Political Institutions in the Developing World

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Political Institutions, broadly defined, have a deep impact and long run effects on all societies. How do gender-equalizing norms interact with bureaucratic institutions? How organizational dynamics impact reportage, accuracy and use of administrative data? What are the consequences of insulating judicial recruitment from the political process? What is the impact of electoral rules on legislation and political party cohesion? The papers on this panel tackle policy relevant questions related to political institutions in developing democracies: Pakistan, India, Colombia and Mexico. Cheema, Farooqui, Khan and Shapiro use a combination of field experiments and semi-structured interviews to study Police officers’ responsiveness towards women in Pakistan. Slough studies agency problems underlying the production and use of administrative data in Colombia, using a randomized encouragement design. Karekurve-Ramachandra studies the unintended effects of separating judicial appointments from the political process in India using an original dataset and novel estimation procedure. Motolinia uses the staggered implementation of electoral reform and text analysis to study content of legislation enacted and party cohesion. The panel assembles comparative political science scholars who engage with varied aspects of political institutions using novel data, and a diverse array of methodological approaches including field experiments, natural experiments, formal modeling, text analysis, structural estimation, participant observation and semi-structured interviews.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• The Organizational Dynamics of Administrative Data Production - Tara L Slough, New York University

• At Making Police Officers Responsive to Women in Gender Segregated Societies - Sarah Khan, American University-SIS; Ahsan Farooqui, Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS); Ali Cheema, Lahore University of Management Sciences; Jacob Shapiro

• Skewed Scales of Justice: Labor Disputes in the Supreme Court of India - Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra, University of Southern California Univeristy

Chair

• Macartan Humphreys WZB

Discussant

• Karen E. Ferree University of California, San Diego