This paper studies the effect of unconditional teacher salary increases on teacher and student outcomes. To study the issue, we evaluate the rural hardship allowance in Zambia, which corresponds to a salary increase of 20%. This allowance is allocated to schools on the basis of a distance criterion allowing us to use a regression discontinuity design. We use administrative data from 2004 to 2015 on school, teacher characteristics and test scores. The administrative data are complemented with a telephone survey of schools close to the eligibility threshold. We find that crossing the threshold increases the share of teachers obtaining the allowance by 40%. Because of some non‐compliance with the allocation rule, our estimates are fairly imprecise. Focusing on provinces with better compliance we find some, albeit weak, evidence that the allowance increases the stock of teachers. We, however, find no effects on teacher characteristics or on student test scores.

Based on an original dataset of merged electoral and census data, this article is a study of electoral support for the Islamist Party in Morocco in the 2002 and 2007 elections. It differentiates between the clientelistic, grievance and horizontal network type of supporters. We disentangle these profiles empirically on the basis of the role of education, wealth and exclusion for Islamist votes. We find no evidence of the clientelistic profile, but a shift from grievance in 2002 to a horizontal network profile in 2007. World Values Survey individual level data are used as a robustness check, yielding similar results. Qualitative evidence on a changing mobilization pattern of the party between 2002 and 2007 supports our conclusions.

This article studies a novel factor relevant for the moderation of an Islamist party: the degree of dependency on a social movement organization. This question is examined in a case study analysing the evolution of the relationship between the Moroccan Islamist party, Party of Justice and Development (PJD), and its founding social movement organization. Over time, the PJD has been gaining autonomy, becoming more moderate and simultaneously gaining strength. Contemporaneously, liberalization in Morocco has been partially reversed, partly as a result of the rising Islamist strength. These findings suggest that it is the strength of the Islamist opposition, rather than its ideological rigidity, that makes MENA rulers reluctant to liberalize. We study the implications of these findings for European Union policy towards Islamist parties in the MENA region.

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