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Essays on Clientelism in New Democracies

Bøttkjær, Louise Thorn (Frederiksberg, 2019)

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Resume:

During electoral campaigns in new democracies, parties and candidates often employ clientelist strategies such as vote buying to mobilize electoral support. The academic consensus is that when voters are offered gifts or money in exchange for their votes, it has detrimental consequences for democratic and economic development. Therefore, it is imperative to explore to what extent, why, and how does clientelism occur in new democracies? A framing paper and four articles address this question using new survey data from South Africa and cross-country data from Africa and Latin America. The framing paper develops a conceptual framework of vote buying as a four-step process, validates why South Africa is a relevant setting for the study of clientelism and outlines the extensive data collection conducted for this dissertation. Using an unobtrusive measurement technique called the list experiment, the first article explores the level of vote buying during the 2016 municipal election campaign in South Africa. Furthermore, the first article provides a methodological contribution to the literature by conducting an experimental test of an augmented version of the list experiment against the classic list experiment and showing that the augmented procedure produces biased results. The second article examines why candidates employ vote buying as a strategy to mobilize electoral support when the ballot is nominally secret, which enables voters to renege on their vote bargain commitments and vote as they please. The third article explores why voters vote for corrupt candidates, which enhances our understanding of how clientelism can mitigate voters’ willingness to punish corrupt politicians. The fourth article examines how the character of the electoral system affects the relationship between poverty and vote buying in Africa and Latin America. Overall, this dissertation increases our theoretical understanding and empirical knowledge of how widespread clientelism is in the developing world and why and under what conditions it flourishes. This dissertation contributes conceptually, methodologically, empirically, and substantially to the literature on clientelism and vote buying and has important implications for policy makers seeking to reduce the prevalence of clientelism in new democracies.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9709

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Louise Thorn Bøttkjær.pdf (4.572Mb)

Policy Learning in Innovation Policy

A Comparative Analysis of European Union Member States

Laatsit, Mart (Frederiksberg, 2019)

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Resume:

This thesis studies policy learning in the field of innovation policy. In particular, I look at the sources of policy learning, with a focus on evaluations and informal networks. I provide a comparative perspective across European Union (EU) member states on how they use these sources for policy learning. As such, this thesis is guided by the research question “what are the differences across countries regarding the way in which they use various sources of policy learning”. The current literature on policy learning contains three important gaps. There is a lack of systematic attention to the sources of policy learning, coupled with a lack of conceptual understanding of these sources. In addition, there is a lack of empirical cross-country studies on how these sources are used in different national contexts. With this thesis and its three consisting articles, I address these challenges. In the first article I analyse evaluations a source of learning and provide an empirical overview of the extent to which EU countries have developed systemic approaches for policy evaluation. In the second and third article I study networks as a source of learning by mapping the informal networks of policy makers and analysing the proximity factors behind these networks. The thesis is based on the theory of policy learning. This theory emphasises the role of knowledge in the process of policy-making, offering an alternative to the power-based explanations of policy change. Policy learning can have different sources – some approaches stress the importance of sophisticated analytical tools, others focus on learning from peers through network connections. In this thesis, I look at one example from both strands. On the one hand, I study how evaluations are used a source of learning, by developing the concept of ‘system oriented innovation policy evaluation’. On the other hand, I analyse how countries learn from their peers through informal networks. The empirical focus of the thesis is on innovation policy in EU member states. Over the recent decades innovation policy has occupied a prominent position in the EU and several initiatives have been launched to enhance policy learning within and between member states. In order to gather data on the use of the two sources for learning, interviews were carried out with senior policy makers from the 28 member states. In addition, policy documents and international databases were used to complement the interview data on evaluations. This information was subsequently used to develop an overview of the evaluation practices in all 28 countries and to map the informal networks between policy makers.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9704

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Mart Laatsit.pdf (2.139Mb)

Complexities of Social Capital in Boards of Directors

Sulinska, Iwona (Frederiksberg, 2018)

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Resume:

The aim of the dissertation is to disentangle complexities of social capital in boards of directors through proposing new theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. Although extant previous research has discussed various aspects of social capital and its association with numerous organizational outcomes, still the literature demonstrates evident shortcomings resulting from overlooking and oversimplifying its complexities. Therefore, to fill gaps in the literature, the dissertation addresses the following research question: in the context of boards of directors, how can social capital be better understood through exploration of its complexities? The dissertation comprises three empirical studies that individually address the identified gaps in the literature and combined address the aforementioned research question. In this way, the dissertation demonstrates that social capital in boards of directors is more complex than it has been assumed in previous studies and its understanding requires a novel approach to conceptualization and empirical research. The first chapter explains the topic and motivation for the dissertation. The following chapter (Chapter 2) synthetizes the previous approaches to investigating board social capital and proposes a new theoretical and methodological approach. It particularly asserts that research on board social capital may be advanced through utilizing configurational perspective and method, what is then shown on an example of the relationship between board social capital and firm performance. Chapter 3 explores social capital of board chair, which has been overlooked in previous studies. It suggests that individual social capital of board chair is as important for organizational performance as social capital of CEO and directors. Therefore, performance effect derives from combined social capital of board chair, CEO, and directors. Further, the dissertation discusses dynamics of board social capital (Chapter 4) in the context of firm expansion. It emphasizes that evolution process of board social capital is driven by multidimensional changes occurring within internal and external networks of social relationships created by board members. Evolution paths are consequently proposed for diversity and strength of external network ties, and for internal network cohesion. In light of the overarching research question, the final chapter summarizes the findings.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9606

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Iwona Sulinska.pdf (3.924Mb)

A Behavioral Theory of Human Capital Integration

Christensen, Jesper (Frederiksberg, 2018)

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Resume:

Human capital – the stock of knowledge and abilities possessed by employees – is consistently touted as an integral part of firm survival and success in dynamic environments. Managers must regularly decide how to allocate employees among competing tasks and projects to optimize the utilization of available knowledge, as well as select and implement the required structural mechanisms to support employees as they combine their knowledge to address complex problems on behalf of the firm. The principal motivation of this thesis is to explore how the effectiveness of particular aspects of organizational design in fostering the integration and use of human capital is bounded by individual cognitive limitations that may lead employees to deviate from expected behavior, both individually and in collaboration. The thesis consists of three research papers relying on comprehensive longitudinal project data from a global manufacturing company to investigate the integration of human capital and attendant consequences for firm performance. The first paper measures cognitive load as an outcome of managerial choices on employee allocation, and examines how cognitive load impacts employee choices on the distribution of working time among competing requirements. The second paper builds on these insights to explore how individuals adapt their information processing behavior in team settings based on cognitive load and the observed behavior of other team members, as well as how these adaptive processes and differences in cognitive load aggregate to impact team performance. The third paper investigates geographical and psychological distance between interdependent employees as important organizational design parameters that determine employee behavior and information use, both separately and in conjunction with one another. The overarching contribution of the thesis is to demonstrate, through the combination of psychological and organizational theory, how the ability of firms to properly activate and apply the knowledge held by their employees is fundamentally contingent on the interplay of cognitive limitations and managerial choices on organizational design. Common to the findings in this thesis is their immediate applicability in managerial and organizational settings as recommendations on how to allocate employees between competing uses. In sum, therefore, the thesis sketches the contours of a behavioral theory of human capital integration.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9594

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Jesper Christensen.pdf (2.717Mb)

The Party-state Order

Essays on China’s Political Organization and Political Economic Institutions

Grünberg, Nis (Frederiksberg, 2018)

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Resume:

The present dissertation is a compilation of three individual papers, and an introduction chapter. While the introduction lays out the theoretic backdrop of the project as a whole, the papers represent interventions into three specific dimensions of China’s Party-state order: structural organizational issues, decision-making institutions, and political economic dynamics. These three dimensions are presented as aspects of the same political organizational order, a Party-state order assembled around the hegemony of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC), conceptualized in the introduction using a Gramsci-inspired theory of the state. Employing a historical institutional approach, the three papers engage with specific strands of literatures of China Studies in a conceptual and theoretic manner, while also contributing with empirical findings. They discuss the concept of Fragmented Authoritarianism (FA), the organization and institutionalization of Leading Small Groups, and the social embeddedness of state-owned enterprise (SOE). FA has been an influential concept to explain structural issues of China’s bureaucracy, and with China’s energy administration as example, I review its value as a theoretic notion today, 30 years after its inception. Discussing the growing importance of Leading Small Groups, the second paper addresses some of the institutional “fixes” to decisionmaking and policy coordination, which have evolved in response to structural fault-lines described in the FA paper. The third paper takes the dissertation into the political economic dimension of the Party-state order, providing a case study of how China National Petroleum Corporation, a central, state-owned and CPC led SOE, is organizationally rooted in its local operations, remaining institutionally embedded in local society through its legacy as a socialist work unit (danwei). Using Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness, the paper reveals how SOEs are split into two tiers each tasked with the respective objectives of economic development and political stability, and thus as Party-state organizations are used to flexibly support CPC hegemony.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9596

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Nis Grunberg.pdf (2.995Mb)

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