This special issue of Development Policy Review reflects on European Union (EU) efforts to build a more effective global development policy amid a rapidly changing international context. As 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals have made clear, global development challenges require collective action if they are to be resolved. Contributions to the special issue explore the ways in which the EU approaches collective action challenges in different development cooperation frameworks and policy settings. Themes explored include strategies for overcoming collective action problems, the impacts of these interactions on EU and member state aid policies, coherence between development and other policy fields, relations between European and other development actors, and the reception of the EU's efforts in developing countries.
We provide evidence on the individual and country‐level determinants of citizens' support for political conditionality in foreign aid, using novel survey data for 27 European countries. Based on the welfare state literature and existing public opinion research in foreign aid, we expect citizens with more rightist political orientations as well as those who do not perceive their own state apparatus to function in a meritocratic way to be more likely to support political conditionality. Our multi‐level analysis supports these hypotheses in general, but also shows that the effect of political orientations on support for political conditionality in foreign aid is limited to traditional EU donor countries, where the left/right‐cleavage has been dominant in politics.
A number of societal and institutional factors enhance the development of a vibrant civil society, such as a country’s socioeconomic traditions and societal structure, political institutions, or foreign influence. But the question of which one of these factors contributes most to a vibrant civil society still remains unanswered. Using ordinary least square techniques, this article statistically tests the competing factors with a large- N design that includes 42 countries. Our dependent variable is the new Civil Society Index, composed of a structural and a value dimension of civil society. The results show that a country’s quality of political institutions and a high degree of religious fragmentation have the strongest impact on the development of a vibrant civil society. In order to examine the causal relationship, we reassess our findings by conducting two case studies on Chile and Russia. The case studies corroborate the causal direction from the quality of political institutions to a stronger civil society.
The current debate on the role of regional politics in the Euro pean Union (EU) is dominated by approaches that focus upon either intergovernmental bargaining or multi-level govern ance. Because Structural Funds are the main EU-wide redis tributive policy, we propose to apply the traditional literature on partisan politics and national redistribution to the case of the EU. We use a new data set on both the distribution of Structural Funds across regions and the distribution of vote shares for different factions of the European Parliament. These data provide empirical details for some of the partisan competition that takes place at the regional level. Specifically, we show that the traditional left vs. right cleavage can have an impact on the size of regional transfers.
This article presents new measures of foreign economic openness in the transition countries that allow us to distinguish between non-tariff barriers to trade and capital controls. We argue that this distinction is important for the analysis of foreign economic relations in the postcommunist world. While most states lowered barriers to trade since 1993, they increased the number of capital controls, which had been low at the beginning of the transition process. The ELITE (Economic Liberalization in the Transition Economies) data set, which is based on the IMF statistics on exchange arrangements and exchange restrictions and encompasses 24 transition countries, further demonstrates important exceptions to this trend. The comparison of the ELITE indicators with alternative measurements of economic openness indicates the need to move towards more refined analyses of the political economy of the transition process.
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