Abstract:

Political polarization has paralyzed the functioning of democracy in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Taiwan, where students have recently occupied the parliament building.  Civil liberties and political opposition are under intensified assault by an abusive prime minister in Turkey.  Indian democracy is increasingly diminished by brazen corruption and rent-seeking. Several African democracies have failed, and others are slipping.  The Arab Spring has largely imploded, and Egypt is in the grip of military authoritarian rule more repressive than anything the country has seen in decades.  After invading and swallowing a piece of Ukraine, Russia now poses a gathering threat to its democratic postcommunist neighbors.  For the eighth consecutive year, Freedom House finds that the number of countries declining in freedom have greatly exceeded the number improving.  And most of the advanced industrial democracies, including the United States, seem unable to address their long-term fiscal and other policy challenges.  Is there an emerging global crisis of democracy?  And if so, why?

Speaker Bio:

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he directs the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Diamond also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Co-Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant (and previously was co-director) at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. During 2002-3, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has also advised and lectured to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental agencies dealing with governance and development. His latest book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (Times Books, 2008), explores the sources of global democratic progress and stress and the prospects for future democratic expansion.

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Abstract:

Decisions about “who gets what, when, and how” are perhaps the most important that any government must make. So it should not be remarkable that around the world, public officials responsible for public budgeting are facing demands—from their own citizenry, other government officials, economic actors, and increasingly from international sources—to make their public financial management more transparent and their decision-making around budgets more participatory. Surprisingly, rigorous analysis of the causes and consequences of fiscal openness is thin at best. Open Budgets seeks to fill this gap in existing knowledge by answering a set of key empirical questions: How and why do improvements in fiscal transparency and participation come about? How are they sustained over time? When and how do increased fiscal transparency and participation lead to improved government responsiveness and accountability? Theoretically, it seeks to examine the relationships between fiscal openness and democracy, development and the rule of law.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is the holder of the $12million endowed John Parke Young Chair in Global Political Economy at Occidental College, and also currently a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. He was previously Professor and Director of the Center for International Development at the University of Washington, Visiting Professor at Stanford's Institute of International Studies, Wyss Visiting Professor at the Harvard Business School, and Assistant and Associate Professor at Harvard's JFK School of Government.  Khagram has published widely including authoring the award winning book, "Dams and Development," co-editing the volumes "Restructuring World Politics," and, "The Transnational Studies Reader," as well as writing numerous peer reviewed articles including, "Inequality and Corruption," in the American Sociological Review and, "Future Architectures of Global Governance," in Global Governance. In the world of practice, Khagram was Deputy Secretary General of the World Commission on Dams (where he authored the widely acclaimed Final Report of the Commission), Dean of the Desmond Tutu Peace Center, and Author of the UN Secretary General's Report on the Impacts of the Global Economic Crisis in 2009.  Most recently, Dr. Khagram was the Architect/Coordinator of the mullti-stakeholder Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency and Founder/Head of Innovations for Scaling Impact. He has worked with global networks, multi-stakeholder initiatives, international agencies, governments, corporations, civil society organizations, professional organizations and universities all over the world. Dr. Khagram received his BA, MA, PhD Minor and PhD all from Stanford University.

Abstract:

It is almost too obvious to state, but access to public services and the nature of governance varies hugely within countries, regions and cities. Nevertheless, most work on the “quality of government”, rule of law, corruption, etc. focuses on between-country comparisons. After providing some evidence that within-country variation belies any notion of a national “quality of government”, I lay out a framework for explaining why outcomes vary so much across localities within countries. I explore the usefulness of the framework by providing evidence from three ongoing projects. The first relies on surveys designed to examine the role of slum-level social and political networks in conditioning access to basic public services in Udaipur, India. The second project relies on four post-civil war settings to understand why authorities target some localities with electrification projects but not others.  The third project involves a field experiment embedded in an aid program that compares alternative means of improving accountability in Ghana’s district governments. I will conclude with some reflections on the costs and benefits of working with donors on governance programming.

Speaker Bio: 

Erik Wibbels is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University. His research focuses on development, decentralized governance and other areas of political economy. He has also spent considerable time working with USAID's Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance in an effort to improve the quality of aid programs aimed at decentralized governance and service provision.