Clark Gibson | University of California, San Diego (original) (raw)

Papers by Clark Gibson

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2022

Supplemental Material, PPQ_Appendix_Table_1_(1) for Why the salience of social divisions matters ... more Supplemental Material, PPQ_Appendix_Table_1_(1) for Why the salience of social divisions matters in party systems: Testing the interactive hypothesis in South Africa by Karen Ferree, Clark Gibson, and Barak Hoffman in Party Politics

Conservation Biology, 2006

We argue that two problems weaken the claims of those who link corruption and the exploitation of... more We argue that two problems weaken the claims of those who link corruption and the exploitation of natural resources. The first is conceptual. Studies that use national level indicators of corruption fail to note that corruption comes in many fofms, at multiple levels, that may affect resource use quite differently: negatively, positively or not at all. Without a clear causal model of the mechanism by which corruption affects resources, one should treat with caution any estimated relationship between corruption and the state of natural resources. The second problem is methodological. Simple, atheoretical models linking corruption measures and natural resource use typically 4o not account for other important control variables pivotal to the relationship between huijaans and natural resources. By way of illustration of these two general concerns, we demonstrate that the findings of a recent, well-known study that posits a link between corruption and decreases in forests and elephants are not robust to simple conceptuaf and methodological refinements.

Perspectives on Politics, 2010

Randomized field experiments have gained attention within the social sciences and the field of de... more Randomized field experiments have gained attention within the social sciences and the field of democracy promotion as an influential tool for causal inference and a potentially powerful method of impact evaluation. With an eye toward facilitating field experimentation in democracy promotion, I present the first field-experimental study of international election monitoring, which should be of interest to both practitioners and academics. I discuss field experiments as a promising method for evaluating the effects of democracy assistance programs. Applied to the 2004 presidential elections in Indonesia, the random assignment of international election observers reveals that even though the election was widely regarded as democratic, the presence of observers had a measurable effect on votes cast for the incumbent candidate, indicating that such democracy assistance can influence election quality even in the absence of blatant election-day fraud.

World Development, 2006

The success of efforts to decentralize governance responsibilities hinges upon the incentives of ... more The success of efforts to decentralize governance responsibilities hinges upon the incentives of local politicians. We test this argument by studying the experiences of forestry sector decentralization in Bolivia and Guatemala. We analyze the survey responses of 200 mayors and show that local-level institutional incentives are systematically linked to variations in local politicians' interest and investment decisions in the forestry sector. Further, we find that a decentralization policy that transfers very limited decision-making powers to local governments stifles local interest in organizing resource governance activities.

Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2006

Dozens of countries have decentralized at least part of their natural resource policies over the ... more Dozens of countries have decentralized at least part of their natural resource policies over the last two decades. Despite the length of time that these policy experiments have been in force, there is little agreement about their effectiveness. We argue that part of this ambivalence stems from three limitations of extant studies, suggesting that future studies of decentralized natural resource governance should consider a combination of 1) variation in the local institutional context, 2) the fit between the reform and other public policies, and 3) more adequate outcome measures for decentralized resource governance. After developing such an approach, we posit that varying forest conditions depend on the moderating effects that local institutions have on the socioeconomic and biophysical drivers of environmental change. Analyzing data from interviews and remotely sensed images from 30 municipalities in the Bolivian lowlands, we find that the local institutional performance affects unauthorized deforestation directly and indirectly, but detect no effects on either permitted or total deforestation.

Conservation Biology, 2007

Perspectives on Politics, 2007

What's wrong with development aid? It is argued that much of aid's failure is related to the inst... more What's wrong with development aid? It is argued that much of aid's failure is related to the institutions that structure its delivery. These institutions govern the complex relationships between the main actors in the aid delivery system, and often generate a series of perverse incentives that promote inefficient and unsustainable outcomes. The theoretical insights of the new institutional economics are applied to several settings. First, the institutions of Sida, the Swedish aid agency, is investigated to analyze how that aid agency's institutions can produce incentives inimical to desired outcomes, contrary to the desires of its own staff. Second, cases from India, a country with low aid dependence, and Zambia, a country with high aid dependence, are used to explore how institutions on the ground in recipient countries might also mediate the effectiveness of aid. Suggestions are offered on how to improve aid's effectiveness. These include how to structure evaluations in order to improve outcomes, how to employ agency staff to gain from their on-the-ground experience, and how to engage stakeholders as "owners" in the design, resource mobilization, learning, and evaluation process of development assistance programs. end p.xxii PART I INTRODUCTION end p.1 end p.2 1 What's Wrong with Development Aid? Clark C. Gibson 1.1. RETHINKING DEVELOPMENT AID Development aid is under increasing scrutiny. Many policymakers, aid practitioners, and scholars have called into question the effectiveness of development aid to increase economic growth, alleviate poverty, or promote social development (

SSRN Electronic Journal

The preference of African voters for co-ethnic candidates is well documented in studies of Africa... more The preference of African voters for co-ethnic candidates is well documented in studies of African political behavior. However, African voters also seem to value good government performance. When does ethnicity trump performance? We theorize that a citizen's vote choice depends in part on the cognitive complexity she faces when assessing candidates. We argue that citizens incur greater cognitive costs when appraising candidates with mixed-versus uniformly positive or negativeperformance records, inducing them to rely more on informational shortcuts like ethnicity to guide their vote. Thus, performance voters may become ethnic voters when the challenges of evaluating performance increase. We test and find support for this hypothesis using a survey experiment implemented in a nationally representative exit poll during Kenya's 2013 election. Findings demonstrate that ethnic and performance voting are not always the product of fixed dispositions, but instead may emerge in response to voters' informational context.

We propose and implement a new empirical strategy to measure the causal impact of foreign aid on ... more We propose and implement a new empirical strategy to measure the causal impact of foreign aid on the quality of governance in Africa. We present a simple theoretical model which illustrates the endogeneity problem present in much of the extant literature, and use this model to motivate a method for calculating the component of fluctuations in aid which is driven solely by changes in donor generosity and not by events at the recipient level. Using this instrumented measure, we find that aid has strong negative impacts on the quality of governance. This relationship is however primarily driven by a ‘Cold War’ effect which saw donor generosity peak at the moment at which governance was at its nadir, and is not robust to the inclusion of a full set of time fixed effects. We find that donors are likely to increase aid in response to economic disaster if the incumbent government falls, and to decrease it if the incumbent stays in power. *School of International Relations and Pacific Studi...

Does a government’s source of revenue explain its policies? The predominate view in development s... more Does a government’s source of revenue explain its policies? The predominate view in development studies contends that policy variation results directly from institutional variation. Building on a literature which we label fiscal theories of governance, we argue that a government’s sources of revenue strongly affect its public expenditures, independent of institutions. Using data from local government budgets in Tanzania and Zambia, we find that local governments in both countries produce more public services as their budget’s share of local taxes increases. Alternatively, revenue that local governments receive from sources outside their boundaries -transfers from the central government and foreign assistance -increases the share of local budgets consumed by employee benefits and administrative costs. Because there is no variation in the powers of local governments in Tanzania and Zambia, the effects of revenue sources on public expenditure that we find are independent of political i...

We develop and apply a theoretical framework for understanding how local governments respond to t... more We develop and apply a theoretical framework for understanding how local governments respond to the perceived costs and benefits of intergovernmental cooperation. Our theory connects local government decisions to economic and political costs and benefits at both the local and regional levels, as well as the institutional context in which collaborative decisions take place. We develop and test hypotheses with data from a sample of regional councils. We find preliminary support for our institutional, local, and regional hypotheses. • Prepared for presentation at the Creating Collaborative Communities Conference, Wayne State University, October 31, 2005. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the National Science Foundation and the University of Michigan’s Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy. INTRODUCTION During the 1980s, the Grand Rapids, Michigan metropolitan area experienced unprecedented population and economic growth (Fulton et al. 2001). This growth to...

Can technology help citizens overcome barriers to participation in emerging democracies? We argue... more Can technology help citizens overcome barriers to participation in emerging democracies? We argue that, by lowering costs, technology can bring new participants into the political process, but in so doing generates a ‘crowd’ of participants that is both more responsive to incentives (malleable) and more sensitive to costs (fragile). We illustrate these dynamics using VIP:Voice, a platform we engineered to encourage South African citizens to engage politically through an ICT/DM platform. VIP:Voice recruited South Africans through a variety of methods, including over 50 million ‘Please Call Me’ messages, and provided a multi-channel platform allowing citizens to engage via low-tech mobile phones and high-tech social media. VIP:Voice generated engagement of some form in over 250,000 South Africans, but we saw large attrition as we asked people to switch from low-cost digital forms of engagement to high-cost real-world engagement. The implementation of a standard platform across multipl...

In a shocking victory in Ghana’s 2008 presidential election, the opposition National Democratic C... more In a shocking victory in Ghana’s 2008 presidential election, the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) prevailed over the incumbent New Patriotic Party (NPP) by one-half of one percentage point, after trailing far behind the NPP according to most opinion polls. What were the attributes of voters for each party? Standard theories about elections in Africa suggest that they are little more than ethnic headcounts and that parties typically are a thin cover for ethnicity. Data from a survey we conducted shortly before the 2008 seriously challenges this view. The NDC and the NPP drew support from a range of ethnic groups and there was little evidence of ethnic block voting. Moreover, while supporters of each party do not fit a clear ethnic profile, they possess strong beliefs about the parties. In addition, in the final weeks of the election, a sizable proportion of the electorate remained undecided and was amenable to voting for either party. For these reasons we contend that th...