
40 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Blog
Africa's Youth: A New Vanguard for Democracy?
Danielle Resnick The victory of the opposition party, the Patriotic Front (PF), in Zambia’s presidential elections this month heralds a new era in...
Working Paper
Are Electoral Coalitions Harmful for Democratic Consolidation in Africa?Electoral coalitions are becoming increasingly popular among opposition parties in Africa because they offer many advantages with respect to reducing party fragmentation and increasing incumbent turnovers. At the same time, however, they are often...
Working Paper
The Political Participation of Africa’s YouthThe youth have long represented an important constituency for electoral mobilization in Africa. Today, as the region faces a growing ‘youth bulge’ that is disproportionately burdened by un- and underemployment, capturing the votes of this demographic...
Working Paper
Campaign externalities, programmatic spending, and voting preferences in rural MexicoThis study presents an analysis of the electoral impacts of one of the most prominent conditional cash transfers in the world: Mexico’s Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera (POP) programme. Using population censuses, and POP’s administrative records and...
Journal Article
Political participation of Africa’s youthThe youth have long represented an important constituency for electoral mobilization in Africa. Yet, despite their numerical importance and the historical relevance of generational identities within the region, very little is really known about the...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (March 2012)
Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a...
Blog
Lessons from Africa's Democratic Upheavals
Danielle Resnick During the last month, three democracies in Africa witnessed incumbent presidents exit office in very different ways. The most...
Working Paper
Voter coercion and pro-poor redistribution in rural MexicoVoter coercion is a recurrent threat to pro-poor redistribution in young democracies. In this study we focus on Mexico’s paradigmatic Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera (POP) programme. We investigate whether local mayors exploited POP to coerce voters...
Working Paper
Can a Populist Political Party Bear the Risk of Granting Complete Property Rights?The Mexican land reform, one of the most sweeping in the world, proceeded in two steps: it granted peasants highly incomplete property rights on more than half of the Mexican territory starting in 1914, creating strong economic and political...
Working Paper
Populist Strategies in African DemocraciesDrawing on insights from Latin America, this paper examines the factors that contributed to the use of populist strategies by political parties during recent presidential elections in Kenya, South Africa, and Zambia. Specifically, the paper argues...
Working Paper
Income Inequality, Redistribution and PovertyBased on the standard axiom of individual utility maximization, rational choice has postulated that higher income inequality translates into greater redistribution by shaping the median voter’s preferences. While numerous papers have tested this...
Journal Article
Are Land Reforms Granting Complete Property Rights Politically Risky?Part of Journal Special Issue Land and Property Rights
Working Paper
Human capital inequality and electoral outcomes in South AfricaThis paper examines the nature and evolution of horizontal and vertical human-capital inequality in South Africa since the end of apartheid. Using census data from 1996, 2001, and 2011, we use different measures of years of schooling to examine the...
Working Paper
Competing cleavages in sub-Saharan Africa?Does economic standing cross-cut ethnicity in African electoral politics? In many countries in the region, ethnicity appears to be a major consideration in individuals’ political decision-making. However, there is significant variation in the extent...
Journal Article
Income Inequality, Redistribution, and PovertyPart of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (December 2013)
10 December 2013 Tony Addison Our November-December Angle comes amid intense activity on our ReCom—Research and Communication on Foreign Aid—programme...