Latest Resources
Una nueva generación de sistemas de evaluación de desempeño en América Central. Panoramas de un recorrido reciente
Article / Working Paper, Latin America and the Carribean, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankExamina las característica de una nueva generacíon de sistema de evaluacíon de de desempeño en América Central. Se procura identificar si los mismos han tomado elementos de un enfoque centrado en el desarrollo de las personas. El recorrido realizado es importante pero hay pendientes y desafíos con el propósito de lograr un sistema efectivamente centrado en el aprendizaje organizacional, el...
Sanctions, Benefits, and Rights: Three Faces of Accountability
Article / Working Paper, Latin America and the Carribean, Local Governance and Decentralization, Academic/Think TankAs countries throughout the world democratise and decentralise, citizen participation in public life should increase. It is said citizens in a decentralised and democratic system of government are governed better because they can punish electorally those who do not deliver on promises. This paper suggests that local government 'by the people' is enhanced when citizens have access...
The predatory or virtuous choices governors make: political institutions and economic performance
Article / Working Paper, Democracy, Latin America and the Carribean, Political Parties, Academic/Think TankThis paper explores the idea that political institutions are important determinants of the policies implemented in states. The authors propose a model of the policymaking process and then test its implications with state-level data for the period 1999 to 2006 in Brazil. The focus of the empirical tests is on the impact of political competition and checks and...
A methodology for democratic conflict prevention and early warning in Latin America
Article / Working Paper, Conflict, Democracy, Latin America and the Carribean, Academic/Think TankThis paper presents a seven-step methodology designed to analyse violent conflict, assess democratic governance and understand the relationships between the two. It has been developed principally as a tool of analysis to study the nature and quality of democracy in relation to current and future conflicts in a specific world region: Latin America. The methodology identifies...
Assessing the quality of democracy: freedom, competitiveness and participation in eighteen Latin American countries
Article / Working Paper, Democracy, Latin America and the Carribean, Academic/Think TankThis article explores the problem of conceptualising and measuring the quality of democracy in Latin America. The study constructs summary measures of the quality of democracy in several ways, and shows that the ranking of the cases is highly consistent, no matter the procedure applied. The first part of the article discusses the use of the concept and the need for an operational...
Exposing Corrupt Politicians: The Effects of Brazil's Publicly Released Audits on Electoral Outcomes
Article / Working Paper, Corruption, Democracy, Electoral Systems, Latin America and the Carribean, Academic/Think TankThis paper, published in the May 2008 edition of The Quarterly Journal of Economics, uses publicly released audit reports to study the effects of disclosing information about corruption practices on electoral accountability. Using a data set on corruption constructed from the audit reports, we compare the electoral outcomes of municipalities audited before versus after the 2004...
Foreign Direct Investment and Civil Rights: Testing Decreasing Returns to Civil Rights
Article / Working Paper, Democracy, Europe and CIS, Human Rights, Justice, Latin America and the Carribean, Academic/Think TankIn this paper, the effectiveness of improvements in political and civil rights for attracting foreign direct investment flows (FDI) into democracies is examined. The author contends that advances in the quality of democracy – specifically those concerning civil rights – present positive but decreasing marginal returns in attracting FDI inflows. This is empirically proven by using...
Comparing quantitative results from three different methods: do they tell the same story?
Article / Working Paper, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Carribean, Local Governance and Decentralization, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankThis Briefing Note from Oxford Policy Management explores the experience from two studies in the Maldives and in Jamaica. In both studies a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was used, linked by a scorecard approach. By ‘scorecard’ we refer to a set of questions that is the same in the focus groups and the quantitative interviews. Using the results from...
Análisis de políticas para la gestión pública: aspectos metodológicos
Article / Working Paper, Latin America and the Carribean, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankSeñala la importancia del análisis de políticas gubernamentales para el gerente público. Privilegiando su dimensión política dentro de la gestión pública. Incluye una propuesta metodológica de carácter instrumental que recoge una serie de criterios que se deben tener en cuenta a la hora de analizar una política...
Variation in Corruption between Mexican States Elaborating the Gender Perspective
Article / Working Paper, Corruption, Governance and Gender, Latin America and the Carribean, Academic/Think TankThis paper focuses on subnational variation in Mexico. Data from Transparency International indicate that corruption is ten times more likely to occur in requesting or receiving public services in the state most hit by corruption than in the state least affected. There is also considerable variation in the numbers of women elected, and the subnational analysis confirms previous cross-country...