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Meeting of the Political Economy of Public Expenditure
(PEPE) and the Distributive Politics Working Groups
Stanford University, September 22-23, 2006
Sponsored By:
Center
for Democracy, Develpment, and Rule of Law (CDDRL)
Stanford Center for International
Development (SCID)
Center for Poverty and Inequality
Distributive Politics and Development
Organizers: Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Beatriz Magaloni (Stanford University)
Background:
The Political Economy of Public Expenditure (PEPE) working group
brings together economists and political scientists who work to understand
private and public goods provision in developing countries. On Nov 28
– Dec 2 2005 they met for the conference “Poverty Democracy
and Clientelism: The Political Economy of Vote Buying” at the
Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Conference Center. The meeting focused
on the political economy of clientelism – namely, the pervasive
use by politicians of public funds and programs to enhance their electoral
prospects in exchange for votes.
The Distributive Politics Working Group is a related
effort at understanding distributive politics more broadly. Miriam Golden
and Yusaku Horiuchi organized a meeting at UCLA on December 7, 2006
to discuss ways of advancing in the understanding of distributive politics
more broadly, in both advanced industrial democracies and developing
countries. The core members are Gary Cox, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Jana
Kunicova, John Londregan, Beatriz Magaloni, Frances Rosenbluth, Miriam
Golden and Husaku Horiuchi. The group plans to hold meetings in the
coming years at Caltech, UCLA, UCSD and Princeton.
The Stanford Meeting. There will be a joint meeting
of the PEPE and the Distributive Politics working groups at Stanford
University on September 23. It will focus on distributive politics in
developing countries. The exchange of public projects, goods and transfers
for electoral support is pervasive in developing countries. Despite
the high hopes that democratization and decentralization would bring
greater accountability and more capacity for local governments to respond
to citizens, the reality is that distributive politics in most developing
countries is more about the pursuit of electoral support than about
fighting poverty or improving living conditions. The project aims to
advancing our understanding of distributive politics in developing countries.
In addition to the meeting on Distributive Politics and Development,
we plan to hold a workshop the day before, devoted to discussing the
book manuscript, Poverty, Vote Buying and Democracy: Strategies
of Electoral Investment in Mexico, by Beatriz Magaloni, Alberto
Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez. The book is a study of the political
economy of poverty relief funds in Mexico, bringing together research
on clientelism, vote buying and distributive politics in Mexico. The
workshop will be an opportunity for participants to enrich the project
with their expertise from both policy and academic perspectives. The
workshop is optional but all participants in to the joint meeting are
invited.
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