VoxDev Development Economics
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<div>Hear about the cutting edge of development economics from research to practice. </div>
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8/27/2018
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Recent Episodes
June 24, 2026
S7 Ep32: Courts in the Global South
<div> <p>How do courts work when they work well? You would expect them to be impartial, neutral, and consistent. In much of the Global South that is a tall order. </p><p>So when courts fall short of it, are they failing?</p><p>Development institutions ask states to build strong courts on the North American and Western European model. Good governance follows, they argue. This model treats poorer, less democratic systems as deviations from a norm rather than as institutions doing different work.</p><p>Fiona Shen-Bayh (University of Maryland) joins Tim Phillips to review the evidence on what courts in the Global South actually do, and who they help. Where the state is weak, customary elders, NGOs, even rebel groups step in to adjudicate, and people often trust these forums more than the state's own courts. </p><p>Taliban courts in Afghanistan upheld due process during civil war. Dictators sometimes build genuinely independent courts, because property rights attract investment and citizens' lawsuits tell the centre what local officials are doing.</p><p>The research behind this episode:</p><p>Rios-Figueroa, Julio, and Fiona Shen-Bayh. 2025. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-040623-113225">"Courts in the Global South."</a> Annual Review of Political Science 28. </p><p>To cite this episode:</p><p>Phillips, Tim, and Fiona Shen-Bayh. 2026. "Courts in the Global South." VoxDev Talks (podcast). <br><br>Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.<br><br><strong>About the guest<br></strong><br><a href="https://gvpt.umd.edu/facultyprofile/shen-bayh/fiona">Fiona Shen-Bayh</a> is Assistant Professor of Government and Politics, with a joint appointment at the College of Information Studies, at the University of Maryland. Her research spans authoritarian regimes, judicial politics, and the use of legal and judicial institutions as instruments of power, often drawing on digitised archives and text-as-data methods. Her book Undue Process: Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts (Cambridge University Press) won the APSA-IPSA Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award, the Giovanni Sartori Book Award, and the Juan Linz Best Book Prize.</p><p>The paper is co-authored with <a href="https://rios-figueroa.com/">Julio Rios-Figueroa</a>, Professor in the Department of Law at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM), whose work spans comparative judicial politics, the rule of law, and empirical legal studies, with a focus on Latin America.</p><p><strong>Research cited in this episode<br></strong><br><strong>The triad logic of conflict resolution.</strong> Drawn from Martin Shapiro's Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis (1981). A court is effective when two parties appeal to a third to settle their dispute, and three conditions hold: the parties believe the third party is impartial; the third party is neutral, not predisposed to favour either side; and the rationale for the decision is consistent with existing norms, the idea of precedent. The review deliberately relaxes the assumption that courts are effective only when all three conditions are met.</p><p><strong>The rule of law revival.</strong> The wave of good-governance programmes promoted by the United States and Western European governments and NGOs after the fall of the Soviet Union, presenting strong courts as a remedy for corruption, instability, and tyranny in the Global South.</p><p><strong>The fallacy of legalism.</strong> The belief that creating law through statute, legislation, or precedent is enough to bring about social change. The phrase, from Sandra Joireman's work on property rights in Africa, names a habit of thought rooted in the Western experience, where the state has historically enforced property rights and contracts. In much of the Global South the absence of the state does not mean the absence of rules and order.</p><p><strong>Stateness.</strong> The extent to which a state exercises authority across its territory: its monopoly on violence in the classic Weberian sense, but also the creation of law and the administration of public affairs. Where stateness is low, non-state actors fill the judicial vacuum.</p><p><strong>Taliban and Islamic State courts.</strong> Recent fieldwork-based research finds that Sharia courts run by the Taliban in Afghanistan upheld notable degrees of due process and impartiality, offering predictability during civil war, and that the coercion associated with the Taliban featured in only a minority of the cases their courts heard.</p><p><strong>Courts in authoritarian regimes.</strong> A growing literature shows what courts do for dictators: establish credible property rights that attract foreign capital; monitor administrative conflict, as in China, where citizens' grievances against the state feed information upward to the centre; and, at other times, repress opponents or legitimise the regime by delivering popular moral outcomes even against the letter of the law.</p><p><strong>Political competition and judicial independence.</strong> Electoral competition can sustain independent courts in healthy democracies, partly because divided governments struggle to coordinate against unfavourable rulings. Under instability or an expected change of regime, the relationship can reverse: incumbents pack courts to entrench their interests before leaving, and judges may rule strategically to align with whoever they expect to hold power next, a pattern visible across Latin America.</p><p><strong>Access to justice and legal mobilisation.</strong> Social transformation through courts depends on people developing a "legal conscience", an understanding of the law and how to use it, and on support structures outside the judiciary: civil society organisations, bar associations, prosecutors, lawyers, and human rights groups that help citizens bring and sustain claims.</p><p><strong>Courts and democratic backsliding.</strong> Courts hold neither the purse nor the sword, which makes them easy targets for hostile rhetoric, legislative threats, pressure to resign, and court-packing. Courts that are neither impartial nor neutral can still stabilise a democracy while rival parties remain uncertain of each other's intentions, provided both still accept competitive elections. Once a party, especially an incumbent, abandons that commitment, there is little a court can do alone.</p><p><strong>Digitised judicial data.</strong> The digitisation and free publication of court records across the Global South has opened large-scale, fine-grained study of everyday jurisprudence, useful to scholars and to the judges, lawyers, and litigants who can now see how the law works in their own context.</p></div>
June 18, 2026
S7 Ep31: Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics
<div> <p>The usual way to measure women's power in politics is to count the seats they hold in parliament. But most women who take part in politics never stand for office. They vote, attend meetings, petition, protest, or try to get the water supply fixed. </p><p>In this week's VoxDev Talk, Soledad Artiz Prillaman of Stanford talks to Tim Phillips about her new review of the research into non-elite women's participation in politics, written with Peace Medie (University of Bristol).</p><p>They are not elite women with less money, she argues. They want different things and face different constraints. Social norms can prevent them from achieving the change they want. But in the Global South there is evidence that non-elite women are using collective action to gain access to politics, and using that access to renegotiate the norms that hold them back, rather than waiting for those norms to shift first.</p><p>The research behind this episode:</p><p>Medie, Peace A., and Soledad Artiz Prillaman. 2026. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-042924-095655">"Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics."</a> Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 29.</p><p>To cite this episode:</p><p>Phillips, Tim, and Soledad Artiz Prillaman. 2026. "Nonelite Women's Participation in Politics." VoxDev Talks (podcast). <br><br>Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.<br><br><strong>About the guest<br></strong><br><a href="https://www.soledadprillaman.com/bio">Soledad Artiz Prillaman</a> is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and faculty director of the Inclusive Democracy and Development Lab. Her research spans comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus on South Asia and on how and when women gain access to politics, both as citizens and as representatives. She is the author of The Patriarchal Political Order: The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India (Cambridge University Press, 2023).</p><p>The paper is co-authored with <a href="https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/peace-medie">Peace A. Medie</a>, Associate Professor in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her work covers gender, security, and politics in Africa, including the campaigns to end violence against women.</p><p><strong>Research cited in this episode<br></strong><br><strong>Elite and nonelite women.</strong> The paper defines eliteness by access to political power, not by office held or income alone. Elites include elected representatives, but also academics and business executives whose position gives them access to power. Nonelites are those who lack that access. The distinction matters because policy aimed at getting more women into elite positions only helps everyone else if elite and nonelite women want the same things, and the evidence that they do is thin.</p><p><strong>The income puzzle.</strong> At the individual level, income is generally uncorrelated with women's turnout; at the national level, GDP predicts nonelite women's participation only in some places. Women in paid work do participate more, but the driver appears to be the networks and information that come with a job, not the wage.</p><p><strong>Vote agency.</strong> Showing up to vote is not the same as voting freely. Asked whether they would vote for their own preferred party or the one a male gatekeeper preferred, at least half of women in some South Asian settings say they would defer. Work by Sara Khan shows that the women with the least agency are those whose preferences differ most from the men who hold power over them.</p><p><strong>Varieties of patriarchy.</strong> All societies are patriarchal, but patriarchy operates differently across them. In parts of South Asia it takes the form of explicit, socially sanctioned control over where women go and how they vote. In the United States and Europe it shows up earlier, as socialisation, producing large gender gaps in stated political interest. Same underlying force, different mechanics, different policy conclusions.</p><p><strong>Quotas.</strong> More than 100 countries have adopted some form of electoral gender quota, making it the most widespread women's empowerment policy in the world. The evidence on whether quotas help nonelite women is mixed; they raise some women's participation in some places, but in others the effect is null or negative. In India, Prillaman notes campaign material for quota seats that pairs the woman candidate's name with a man's photograph.</p><p><strong>Collective action.</strong> Networks outside the home, through women's groups, microcredit groups, churches, unions or friendship circles, raise women's participation by widening their information and giving them cover against backlash. Prillaman argues that in the Global South women are increasingly using collective action to gain access to politics, and using that access to renegotiate norms, rather than waiting for norms to change first.</p><p><strong>More from VoxDev<br></strong><br><a href="https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/where-are-indian-female-politicians">Where are the Indian female politicians?</a>, an interview with Lakshmi Iyer on why a woman winning office in India does not lead to more women standing next time.</p><p><strong>Related reading on VoxDev<br></strong><br><a href="https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/grassroots-party-activism-women-promotes-equal-political">Grassroots party activism by women promotes equal political participation</a>, in which Tanushree Goyal finds that women politicians in Delhi recruit women activists, narrowing gender gaps in political knowledge and participation.</p><p><a href="https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/womens-microcredit-groups-empower-women-politically">Women's microcredit groups empower women politically</a>, in which Prillaman shows that microcredit groups raise women's political participation in India by building their networks, not their bank balances.</p></div>
June 10, 2026
S7 Ep30: The end of aid dependency
<div> <p>This episode follows a wide-ranging panel convened at Stanford's King Center on Global Development, featuring Gyude Moore, as well as Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman, former USAID Administrator and Ambassador Mark Green, and Chair and Founder of the Liquidity and Sustainability Facility Vera Songwe - <a href="https://voxdev.org/topic/future-global-development-approaches-and-partnerships-new-reality">The future of global development: Approaches and partnerships for a new reality</a>.</p><p>Bilateral aid to sub-Saharan Africa will fall by between 16% and 28% this year, according to the IMF. In past downturns, multilateral and humanitarian funding tended to fill the gap when bilateral aid dropped. This time those channels are shrinking too.</p><p>Gyude Moore, who ran the Liberian President's Delivery Unit under Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, thinks the contraction is structural rather than a passing effect of the Trump administration, and that recipient countries should stop expecting the old arrangement to return. He wants economic growth put at the centre of development rather than treated as one programme among several. Instead of letting donors decide which programmes are run, he says, countries should run a growth diagnostic: a way of identifying the two or three constraints doing most to hold an economy back. Governments can then reorganise their budgets around removing those constraints, and use the diagnostic to decide which offers of aid to take and which to turn down. Moore calls this “sovereignty through analytics”. Aid was meant to be temporary, he argues, and the job now is to quickly reach the point of not needing it.</p><p>To cite this episode:</p><p>Phillips, Tim, and W. Gyude Moore. 2026. "The end of aid dependency.” VoxDev Talks (podcast). <br><br>Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.<br><br><strong>About the guest<br></strong><br><a href="https://energyforgrowth.org/team/w-gyude-moore/">W. Gyude Moore</a> is a distinguished fellow at the Energy for Growth Hub and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development. He was Liberia's minister of public works from December 2014 to January 2018, and before that deputy chief of staff to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and head of the President's Delivery Unit, which oversaw more than $1 billion of road, power and port projects in a country rebuilding after civil war. He also lectures at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. His work covers African infrastructure, energy, industrial policy and development finance.</p><p><strong>Cited in this episode<br></strong><br><strong>The scale of the cuts.</strong> The IMF's October 2025 <a href="https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/REO/SSA/Issues/2025/10/16/regional-economic-outlook-for-sub-saharan-africa-october-2025">Regional Economic Outlook</a> for sub-Saharan Africa, using OECD figures, projects bilateral aid to the region falling by 16% to 28% in 2025, with more cuts likely. Moore says the cuts to multilateral and humanitarian funding run higher again, and that the most aid-dependent countries have been hit hardest, through weaker health, education and nutrition systems.</p><p><strong>Growth diagnostics.</strong> A way of finding the constraints that matter most: the one or two that, once removed, allow others to ease. Moore likens it to a doctor running tests before prescribing. The method is associated with the Growth Lab at Harvard. He suggests governments hire an independent party to run the analysis, so the findings cannot be dismissed as political.</p><p><strong>The Millennium Challenge Corporation.</strong> A US agency that runs what it calls a constraints analysis, then funds the removal of the constraint it finds. Moore offers it as an existing model for diagnostic-led aid, while noting that it has critics.</p><p><strong>Sovereignty through analytics.</strong> Moore's phrase for using a credible diagnostic to set the terms with donors. A government can say what it is trying to do, ask for help where it needs it, and decline what does not fit. He points to Ghana, Zambia and Zimbabwe rejecting or walking away from US health agreements under the America First Global Health Strategy as evidence that recipient governments now have that leverage and are willing to use it.</p><p><strong>The Development Alliance.</strong> Liberia's attempt, around 2014 and 2015, to bring every donor and NGO into one room to map who was doing what, spot duplication and find the sectors nobody was covering. Moore's assessment: useful, but voluntary, not written into law, and not built around a single diagnostic. His conclusion is that such a framework should be put on a legal footing.</p><p><strong>Five-year plans.</strong> Moore, who teaches in China each autumn, points to the discipline that fixed planning periods impose, and argues that legislation can do a similar job of holding a development strategy steady across changes of government.</p><p><strong>Delivery units.</strong> Small teams set up to push complex projects through where the wider bureaucracy cannot. Moore ran one in the Liberian presidency and calls them islands of competence; he offers them as a way around weak implementation.</p><p><strong>The European politics of aid.</strong> Moore's reason for thinking the window may close. Nativist parties are gaining ground across Europe, from the AfD to Reform UK to the PVV in the Netherlands, and an ageing population will pull more public money homeward. Countries that do not adjust, he warns, may find the external funding gone.</p></div>
323 total episodes available
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