This paper examines different approaches for promoting empowerment and discusses conditions required for effective empowerment. It focuses on three empowerment models, including grievance redress, participatory performance monitoring, and community-driven development. There are three sets of...

Existing studies show that village councils led by women result in different policies compared tothose led by men, in India. A dominant narrative is that women-led councils tend to favour policiesrelevant to their own gender. However, given the deep-rooted gender bias in India, the feasibility...

While a vast literature examines the prevalence of ethnic voting and clientelism in low-income contexts, empirical tests of whether elections are being used to hold politicians accountable for public goods provision are few. Leveraging a rare exogenous variation in the World's largest rural...

Despite the extensive literature on distributive politics, we still lack a theory of how political and fiscal institutions interact to shape the pork‐barrelling ability of national leaders in a federal parliamentary democracy. Focusing on party system attributes and governmental incentives...

Citizens in low income democracies depend, to a large extent, on the state for the provision of basic services either due to absence of a market for these services or poverty. This paper synthesizes the findings of the International Growth Centre (IGC) supported research on governance and public...

We examine how overall delivery of public goods (i.e., efficiency) is affected by affirmative action in elections, i.e., restricting candidate entry in elections to one population group. We argue that when group identities are salient, such restrictions on candidate entry need not necessarily...

Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders' quality, the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for contesting elections, making it critical to...

Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders' quality, the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for contesting elections, making it critical to...

We examine how overall delivery of public goods (i.e., efficiency) is affected by affirmative action in elections, i.e., restricting candidate entry in elections to one population group. We argue that when group identities are salient, such restrictions on candidate entry need not necessarily...