Rachel M. Gisselquist, a political scientist, is a Senior Research Fellow with the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) and a member of the institute’s senior management team. She works on the...
223 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Journal Article
Ethnic Politics in Ranked and Unranked SystemsThis article explores how ethnic politics may operate differently in societies with “ranked” versus “unranked” ethnic systems, where ethnicity and class correlate closely versus very little. It focuses on two hypotheses suggested, but not tested, in...
Journal Article
Ethnic Divisions and Public Goods Provision, RevisitedA considerable amount of recent work in political science and economics builds from the hypothesis that ethnic heterogeneity leads to poor provision of public goods, a key component of poor governance. Much of this work cites Alesina, Baqir and...
Working Paper
State Capability and Prospects for Close Co-ordinationRecent research highlights the considerable potential of industrial policy to support structural transformation in sub-Saharan Africa. Given the importance of the state in industrial policy, this paper considers the implications for these discussions...
Blog
A WIDER perspective on migrationWhile many WIDER Development Conferences emerge from ongoing projects, our latest conference in October — ‘Migration and mobility: New frontiers for...
Book
Development Assistance for PeacebuildingThis is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at www.tandfebooks.com and offered as a free PDF download from Taylor & Francis Group and selected open access locations. Development assistance...
Book Chapter
Benin - a pulverized party system in transitionBenin has seen a rapid proliferation of political parties since the country’s democratic transition in 1990. Recent counts suggest that over a hundred political parties are registered in this nation of just over 9 million people. No single party...
Book
Fragility, Aid, and State-buildingFragile states pose major development and security challenges. Considerable international resources are therefore devoted to state-building and institutional strengthening in fragile states, with generally mixed results. This volume explores how...
Working Paper
Legal empowerment and group-based inequalityLegal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles as an approach to addressing poverty and exclusion. At the same time, it has received relatively little attention from political scientists and sociologists working on...
Journal Special Issue
Legal Empowerment and Group-Based InequalityThe articles in the forthcoming special issue are already available online on full open access. The special issue will be officially published in March 2019, vol. 55, issue 3. Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles...
Journal Article
Legal Empowerment and Group-Based InequalityPart of Journal Special Issue Legal Empowerment and Group-Based Inequality
Blog
COVID-19 and the Global South — From crisis response to sustainable developmentAround the world, the pandemic, and the measures taken to address it, have had far reaching effects on poverty, inequality, and governance. And even...
Blog
A ‘data revolution’ for sustainable development leaves gaps on inequalityAmong the many things said about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the description by the President of the UN General Assembly’s 70th...
Book Chapter
Foreign aid and peacebuildingForeign aid is a core component of peacebuilding and among the largest external financial flows to fragile states and conflict-affected areas. Nevertheless, troubling critiques have been raised about its overall impact and effectiveness. Some of the...
Working Paper
Evaluating Governance IndexesRecent years have seen a proliferation of ‘composite indicators’ or ‘indexes’ of governance. Such measures can be useful tools for analysing governance, making public policy, building scientific knowledge, and even influencing ruling elites, but some...
Journal Article
Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile StatesPart of Journal Special Issue Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile States
Journal Special Issue
Aid to Support Fragile StatesThis special issue has its origins in work conducted under the Governance and Fragility theme of UNU-WIDER’s ReCom - Research and Communication on Foreign Aid programme (2011–13), and particularly the work on ‘Aid and Institution-building in Fragile...
Blog
WDR 2017 does not disappoint: Four implications for work in developmentAs a political scientist specializing in the comparative politics of development, including particular attention to issues of governance and democracy...
Policy Brief
Can legal empowerment help to address ethnic exclusion?‘Legal empowerment’ is defined as a process of systemic change through which the poor and excluded become able to use the law to protect and advance their rights and interests as citizens and economic actors. Since the 2000s, legal empowerment...
Working Paper
Involuntary migration, inequality, and integrationAcross the world, we observe different experiences in terms of inequality between migrant and ‘host-country’ populations. What factors contribute to such variation? What policies and programmes facilitate ‘better’ economic integration? This paper...
Journal Article
How the cases you choose affect the answers you get, revisitedExternal validity is a major challenge for experimental research. I offer a new perspective on this challenge, drawing on work on case studies and causal inference – the sort of material regularly covered in introductory methods courses in political...
Journal Article
Developing and Evaluating Governance IndexesRecent years have seen a proliferation of composite indicators or indexes of governance and their use in research and policy-making. This article proposes a framework of 10 questions to guide both the development and evaluation of such indexes. In...
Blog
What Does Good Governance Mean?Rachel M. Gisselquist Almost all major development institutions today say that promoting good governance is an important part of their agendas. The...
Blog
Dear Nicholas Kristof, We Are Here, Too!21 February 2014 Rachel M. Gisselquist Earlier this month, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a scathing critique of the role of...
Blog
Taking Inequality into Account in the Post-2015 Development AgendaRachel M. Gisselquist There is much to commend in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as we approach their target deadline of 2015. In addition to...