Collective Action, Political Parties, and Pro-Development Public Policy

Philip Keefer

Asian Development Review (ADR), 2011, vol. 28, issue 01, 94-118

Abstract: Broad consensus exists that the ability of political actors to make credible commitments is key to development. An important and little-explored determinant of the credibility of political commitments is the existence of organizations that facilitate citizen collective action to sanction political actors who renege. This paper focuses on one essential organization, the political party. Three measures of political parties are used to assess cross-country differences in the degree to which politicians facilitate the ability of citizens to act in their collective interest. Each of these measures is associated with superior development outcomes, above and beyond the effects of competitive elections. These results have implications for understanding the extraordinary economic success of some East Asian countries and notable lags among others. East Asian nondemocracies exhibit more institutionalized ruling parties than other nondemocracies, while East Asian democracies exhibit equally or less institutionalized parties. The evidence suggests that greater research and policy emphasis be placed on the organizational characteristics of countries that allow citizens to hold leaders accountable.

JEL-codes: D72 H4 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0116110511500053
Open Access

Related works:
Journal Article: Collective Action, Political Parties, and Pro-Development Public Policy (2011)
Working Paper: Collective action, political parties and pro-development public policy (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:adrxxx:v:28:y:2011:i:01:n:s0116110511500053

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0116110511500053

Access Statistics for this article

Asian Development Review (ADR) is currently edited by Tetsushi Sonobe

More articles in Asian Development Review (ADR) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().