Revised

1/26/2012

DPI 101C: Political Institutions and Public Policy

Tarek Masoud, Assistant Professor of Public Policy Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:10 11:30 am, L280 Faculty assistant: Mary Anne Baumgartner 124 Mt. Auburn St., 200N-217F Maryanne_Baumgartner@hks.harvard.edu 617.496.7466 Instructors office hours: Tuesdays, 1:00 3:00 pm. Course assistants: Julia Groeblacher, MPP 2012 (Julia_Groeblacher@hks12.harvard.edu) Lauren Harrison, MPP 2013 (Lauren_Harrison@hks13.harvard.edu)

Course Description
This course is about the role of institutions, both formal and informal, in promoting human flourishing. It is explicitly comparative in nature, examining how variation in institutional forms and structures can account for differences in policy outcomes and in overall patterns of political and economic development. If that sounds boring or bloodless, consider one of these real-life scenarios: You are a young, up-and-coming analyst in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordans Ministry of Industry and Trade. The minister has just returned from a trip to South Korea, is awed by what that country has achieved, and wants Jordan to follow the Korean playbook. Your job is to tell him exactly what that might entail, what kind of political and social backlash he can expect, and how to manage it. You are a United Nations Development Programme official in Rwanda, shortly after the end of a genocide that killed more than a million people. While your colleagues have been tasked with helping to rebuild schools, hospitals, and basic infrastructure, you have been given the unenviable and seemingly impossible assignment of advising that countrys government on its new constitution. As you are handed the keys to your office, you are told that you must come up with ideas for how the constitution can be made to forestall the kind of violence and bloodshed that brought the country to its present state. You are domestic policy advisor to the president of Indonesia. The president has just met with the head of that countrys Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi), who has informed him that a large number of cases on the commissions docket involve members of parliamentincluding many from the presidents partywho have been caught with their hands in public coffers. The president, who has run on an anti-corruption platform, wants you to tell him why this is so and what, if anything, he should do about it.

Revised 1/26/2012 Each of these challenges is essentially one of institutional design. Institutions are, fundamentally, rules that govern behavior. Laws, constitutions, electoral systems, property rights regimesall of these are structures that are purposively crafted in order to structure the behavior of actors in order to achieve desired outcomes. Institutions can promote investment, manage conflict, incentivize good behavior, and encourage conservation. Some are crafted at the local level, by nongovernmental actors working to solve collective dilemmas; others are crafted in the loftiest halls of power in the grandest of world capitals. And though many institutional decisionssuch as, for example, the choice of electoral rulemay appear arid and technical, we will see how they can determine how much people get to eat, how safe they are, and how long they live. As a 19th century German physician once put it: politics is medicine on a grand scale. Our mission, then, is to explore over the course of this semester how political institutions can be crafted in order to maximize human welfare and freedom. An important additional aim of this course is to help you hone your analytical skills and presentational abilities. As Harvard graduate students, you come with already formidable endowments in these areas, but our job is to help you develop them even further. By the end of this semester, you will have mastered the arts of composing succinct and potent policy memoranda, of briefing decision-makers on complex political situations with verbal economy and analytical precision, of presenting yourself and your views with clarity and confidence. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, you will have perfected the science of analyzing a policy conundrum: identifying the key players, gauging their interests and capabilities, and figuring out how to navigate, manipulate, harness, and/or overcome them to solve that conundrum and, hopefully, do some good in the world. These skills will stand you in good stead in your post-Harvard careers. They will also equip you for Spring Exercise, the policy simulation that is the capstone of the first year of the Master in Public Policy program.

Expectations, Assignments, Grading

Expectations: This class combines lectures, discussions (both of specific cases and of conceptual issues suggested by the readings), and in-class exercises. On some occasions, you will be cold-called. In order for the class to work, you must stay on top of the readings and come to class ready to participate, ask questions, debate with your colleagues, and contribute your intellectual candlepower to our collective enterprise. In order to nudge you in the right direction, attendance is mandatory, and I have allocated 10% of your grade to class participation. All you need to do is come to class regularly and make a good faith effort to engage the readings, your classmates, and your instructor. For my part, I will work hard to create an environment of mutual respect and professionalism that will allow students to take risks, pose questions, and stake out bold positions. Assignments: The bulk (65%) of your final grade is determined by your performance on four assignmentstwo policy memos (40%) and two group briefings (25%). The final 25% of your grade is determined by a take-home, open-book writing assignment. The schedule 2

Revised 1/26/2012 is detailed below: Assignment Individual Memo 1 Group Briefing 1 Individual Memo 2 Group Briefing 2 Final Exam Date out Th. Feb 2 Tu. Feb 21 Th. March 1 Th. March 8 Tu. April 3 Date in Th. Feb 16 Th. March 1 Tu. March 20 Tu. March 27 Tu. April 10 Grade % 15 10 25 15 25

Requests for extensions will only be granted in exceptional circumstances, and only when accompanied by a note from a doctor, dean, or other suitably authoritative source. Unexcused late assignments will be penalized one point (on the six point scale) for each day they are overdue. Please understand that there can be no exceptions to this policy. Grading: Each assignment will be scored along the six point performance index used in Spring Exercise: 6 = Distinction even by the standards expected of a professional practitioner 5 = Fully meets the standards expected of a professional practitioner 4 = Distinction by the standards expected of a professional school graduate student 3 = Average by the standards expected of a professional school graduate student 2 = Below average by the standards expected of a professional school graduate student 1 = Unacceptable by the standards expected of a professional school graduate student I use this system instead of simple letter grades because it gives you the clearest possible sense of how your performance would be evaluated in the real world, against an absolute standard of professionalism. It is a very high standard: past experience in this and other sections of DPI-101 has been that scores of 6 and 5 are rarely, if ever awarded. This is to be expected: if you were already performing at the standard of a professional, you wouldnt need to be here! However, it is my belief (and experience) that you will meet this standard by the time you have graduated the Kennedy School. That is part of what this course is designed to do. In any event, your final grade for the course will not be based on your absolute score on any of the graded exercises, but rather on how well you performed relative to other students in the class. In other words, the course is graded on a curve, meaning that you probably will not need to have earned a 5 or 6 in all of your assignments in order to achieve a final grade of A. The Kennedy Schools grading curve is as follows: the top 10 to 15% of the class will receive a grade of A; the next 20 to 25% will receive a grade of A-; the next 30 to 40% will receive a grade of B+; the next 20 to 25% will receive a grade of B; and the lowest 5 to 10% will receive a grade of B- or lower. In order to diminish anxiety over

Revised 1/26/2012 grades, I will try to be as generous as the above distribution allows. Moreover, I will do my best to make grading criteria for each assignment transparent at the outset, and to ensure that you always have a good sense of where you stand in terms of your course performance. Academic Honesty: You will be doing a lot of writing in this course, so its important that you adhere to the Kennedy Schools policies regarding proper academic practice. The academic code can be found here: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/degrees/registrar/procedures/integrity I urgenay, imploreyou to read it. Please pay particular attention to the section on plagiarism, which is the appropriation of others words and ideas without proper attribution. The disciplinary consequences of this violation are dire, so please take care to quote and cite your sources. I will discuss strategies for avoiding plagiarism throughout the course, but it is your responsibility to make sure that the words and ideas that appear in your work are your own, and that you give credit where credit is due. Readings: The course packet is available for purchase from the CMO. All readings are required. To reduce the exorbitant cost of course packets, and to mitigate the environmental impact of all that paper, those materials that are available electronically are not included in the course packets. However, they are not optional: read them online (and save paper), or print them out if you must, but please do read them. A further word about the readings is in order. This is an inter-disciplinary course that draws on a variety of social science literatures. Everything on this syllabus has been chosen with a view toward expanding your knowledge and sharpening your intellectual apparatus. I hope you will find the readings fascinating, but recognize that you will occasionally feel yourself far from terra firma, wrestling with technically complex and unfamiliar texts whose policy relevance is unclear at best. This is par for the course in the real world: you will often be called upon to distill academic research for use in the decision-making process. Moreover, you will also find that policymakers are capable of writing briefs and memos that are every bit as abstruse and impenetrable as the densest academic prose. That said, if you have trouble with any of the readings for this course, chances are your colleagues have too. So please speak up if you have questions, or if you found something difficult to understand. For my part, I will do my best to anticipate when particular texts may require additional elaboration. A few more things: Due to the large class size, there will be assigned seating. This will allow us to more easily keep track of class attendance and participation. Please turn off your laptops, tablets, and cell phones before coming to class. You will each be assigned to a six-person study group by Thursday, February 2nd. You are encouraged to meet at least once a week to discuss the readings. (You should not, however, collaborate on your individual memos.) 4

Revised 1/26/2012 I will meet at least twice with each study group during the course of the semester. The course assistants will help in scheduling these. Lecture slides will be uploaded to the course page every two weeks or so. They are intended to help serve as study guides, but they are not substitutes for doing the readings. You are strongly encouraged to attend the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovations seminars on democracy, the schedule of which can be found here: http://ash.harvard.edu/Home/News-Events/Events/DemocracySeminar. You are particularly urged to attend the sessions on February 2 nd (Alfred Stepan) and March 21 (Donald Horowitz).

Schedule of meetings and readings

1 Introductory lecture Tuesday, January 24, 2012 In this session, we will introduce the main aims of the course, introduce some key terms, discuss course assignments and expectations, and get to know each other. We will emerge from this session with a roadmap of what were trying to achieve and how we expect to achieve it. Part I: Political Regimes 2 Conceptions of democracy Thursday, January 26, 2012 Democracy as a regime type enjoys near unassailable legitimacy in the world today. In the next two classes, well discuss what it is and why we might want it. Adam Przeworski, Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defense, in The Democracy Sourcebook, 2003, MIT Press, pp. 12-17 Robert Dahl, Polyarchy, 1971, Yale University Press, pp. 1-16 Miriam Kornbluth (Vinay Jawahar, trans.), Elections versus Democracy, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 16, No. 1, January 2005, pp. 124-137

3 What is democracy good for? Tuesday, January 31, 2012 Does democracy beget development? Should we judge institutions by the outcomes they produce? And if so, which outcomes? Mancur Olson, 1993, Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development, American Political Science Review, 87 (3), pp. 567-576. Mulligan, Casey B., Ricard Gil, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, 2004, Do democracies have different public policies than non-democracies? Journal of Economic Perspectives no. 18 (1), pp. 51-74. Joe Maria Maravall, The Myth of Authoritarian Advantage, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 5, No. 4, October 1994, pp. 17-31 Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,

Revised 1/26/2012 The New York Times, January 12, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezedmiddle-class.html 4 How do we get democracy? Thursday, February 2, 2012 Most democracies are wealthy. Is democracy possible only after a country has attained a certain level of economic development? How do pre-democratic structures and histories affect the potential for and nature of the transition to democracy? Do authoritarian openings always lead to democracy? Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, 1997, Modernization: Theories and Facts, World Politics, 49(2), pp. 155-183. Barbara Geddes, 1999, What Do We Know About Democratization After Twenty Years? Annual Review of Political Science, 2, pp. 115-144 J. Linz and A. Stepan, Implications of Prior Regime type, in Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), pp. 55-65. (Course Packet ) Miriam Lanskoy and Giorgi Areshidze, Georgias Year of Turmoil, Journal of Democracy, October 2008, vol. 19, No. 4. http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/gratis/Lanskoy-19-4.pdf

Thursday, February 2, 4:00-5:30: Public Lecture by Prof. Alfred C. Stepan, Columbia University. Location: Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, 124 Mt. Auburn Street

Case: Can Syria become a democracy? Tuesday, February 7, 2012 Larry Diamond, 2010, Why are there no Arab Democracies, Journal of Democracy, 21(1) Lisa Anderson, Arab Democracy: Dismal Prospects, World Policy Journal, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall 2001, pp. 53-60 Syria Country Report, Freedom in the World 2010, Freedom House. Available at: http://freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=22&country=7928&year=2010

Part II: National Institutions Democracy doesnt just float down from the ether to take root in receptive soils; it has to be built. And the precise way in which it is built can have important implications for the kinds of policies that are possible, and for the durability of the resulting regime. In this section of the course, we explore the variety of democratic forms and institutions and their effects. 6 Constitutions Thursday, February 9, 2012 The first step in a successful transition from authoritarian rule is the establishment of a democratic constitution. Who should have a seat at the constitution-writing table? To 6

Revised 1/26/2012 what extent is a complete break from the authoritarian past necessary or even advisable? What belongs in a constitution, and what doesnt? Jon Elster, Constitution-Making in Eastern Europe: Rebuilding the Boat in the Open Sea, Public Administration, Vol. 71, Issue 1-2, pp. 169-217, March 1993 Donald L. Horowitz, Constitution-Making: A Process Filled with Constraint, Review of Constitutional Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2006 Christina Murray and Catherine Maywald, Subnational Constitution-Making in Southern Sudan, Rutgers Law Journal, vol. 37, 2005, pp. 1203-1234

7 Legislatures and Executives Tuesday, February 14, 2012 Does the extent to which legislative and executive authorities are fused or separated have an impact on policy outcomes? What determines the types of legislative-executive regimes that are possible in new democracies? Are some types of legislative-executive arrangements more durable than others? Why? Terry Moe and Michael Caldwell, 1994, The Institutional Foundations of Democratic Government: A Comparison of Presidential and Parliamentary Systems, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 150 (1), pp. 171- 195. Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Shugart, 1997, Juan Linz, Presidentialism, and Democracy: A Critical Appraisal, Comparative Politics 29(4), pp. 449-471. Arturo Valenzuela, Latin American Presidencies Interrupted, Journal of Democracy, vol. 15, no. 4, October 2004 http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/gratis/Valenzuela-15-4.pdf

8 Political parties Thursday, February 16, 2012 What are political parties and what do they do? Are they all the same? Can democracy function without them? What are the factors that influence their emergence and evolution? Are some kinds of parties (e.g. religious, ethnic) inimical to the durability of democracy? Juan Linz, Parties in Contemporary Democracy: Problems and Paradoxes, in Gunther, Montero, and Liz (eds) Political Parties: Cold Concepts and New Challenges, Oxford University Press 2002, pp. 291-317 Kaare Strom, A Behavioral Theory of Competitive Political Parties, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 34, No. 2 (May, 1990), pp. 565-598 David Samuels, 2004, From Socialism to Social Democracy: Party Organization and the Transformation of the Workers Party in Brazil. Comparative Political Studies 37(9), pp. 999-1024.

9 Electoral systems Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Does how elections are structured matter as much as whether they are even held? How do the rules governing elections impact who gets represented and what policies are made? Can electoral rules ever be changed? 7

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Carles Boix, Setting the rules of the game: The choice of electoral systems in advanced democracies, American Political Science Review, Vol. 93, No. 3, September 1999, pp. 609-624 Pippa Norris, 1997, Choosing Electoral Systems: Proportional, Majoritarian, and Mixed Systems, International Political Science Review, 18 (3) Donald Horowitz, 2003. Electoral Systems: A Primer for Decision Makers, Journal of Democracy, 14:4, pp. 1115-127. (Project Muse Online) John Curtice, The Death of a Miserable Little Compromise: The Alternative Vote Referendum, Political Insight, Vol. 2, Issue 2, August 15, 2011.

10 Local and Participatory Governance Thursday, February 23, 2012 What are the different ways in which subnational political institutions can structured, and to what ends? What are the benefits and drawbacks of increased local input into decisionmaking? Alfred Stepan, 1999. Federalism and Democracy: Beyond the US model, Journal of Democracy, 10:4 Jean-Paul Faguet, 2004, Does Decentralization Increase Government Responsiveness to Local Needs? Evidence from Bolivia, Journal of Public Economics, 88, pp. 867-893. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, 2006, The Citizens of Porto Alegre, Boston Review, March/April. Benjamin Goldfrank, The Politics of Deepening Local Democracy: Decentralization, Party Institutionalization, and Participation, Comparative Politics, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Jan., 2007), pp. 147-168 In-class-exercise: Designing democracy Tuesday, February 28, 2012 Freedom House 2010 country reports on: Myanmar, Kosovo, and Kenya. http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=21&year=2010 In-class group briefings Thursday, March 1, 2012

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Part III: Governance and Policy

In this section of the course, we shall examine policy challenges likely to be confronted by any new (or for that matter, mature) democracy.
13 Distribution and Redistribution Tuesday, March 6, 2012 Why doesnt the political equality supposedly inherent in democracy generate economic equality? Should we want it to? Is the case for (and survival of) democracy undermined by the emergence of significant income gulfs between rich and poor?

Revised 1/26/2012 Mancur Olson, 1982, The Rise and Decline of Nations, Yale University Press, Chapter 2, pp. 17-35. Ian Shapiro, Why the Poor Dont Soak the Rich, Daedalus, Vol. 131, No. 1, Winter 2002, pp. 118-128 Pepper Culpepper, 2010, Quiet Politics, Cambridge University Press, pp. 177-198 Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, 2010, Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States, Politics and Society, 38(2), pp. 152-204.

14 The Welfare State Thursday, March 8, 2012 What are the rights of citizens when it comes to basic welfare? How do we explain the great variation in the ways in which different polities have answered this question? Is it a function of institutions, culture, or accidents of history? What accounts for change over time? And what happens when the state takes a negligible role in welfare provision? Esping-Andersen, 2007, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, in Christopher Pierson and Francis Castles, eds., The Welfare State Reader, Polity Press, pp. 160- 174. Jacob Hacker, 2002, The Divided Welfare State, Cambridge University Press, Chapter 1, pp. 5-27. Melani Cammett and Sukriti Issar, 2010, Bricks and Mortar Clientelism: Sectarianism and the Logics of Welfare Allocation in Lebanon, World Politics, 62(3), pp. 381-421. Hunter, Wendy and Timothy Power, 2007, Rewarding Lula: Executive Power, Social Policy and the Brazilian Elections of 2006, Latin American Politics and Society 49 (1), pp. 1-30.

Spring Break, March 10-18, 2012

15 Governing Across Divides Tuesday, March 20, 2012 Does democracy work best when different ideas and interests are made to compete for voter acclamation in the electoral arena, or when they are instead channeled through consensus-building processes that encourage deliberation and compromise? How do we get one or the other? And how do we prevent cooperative or consensus-based models of governance from devolving into collusion? Arend Lijphart, 1969, Consociational Democracy, World Politics, 21 (2) Martin Rhodes, 2001, The Political Economy of Social Pacts: Competitive Corporatism and European Welfare Reform, in Paul Pierson, The New Politics of the Welfare State, Oxford University Press, pp. 165-194. Jane Mansbridge, A Deliberative Perspective on Neocorporatism, Politics and Society, December 1992, vol. 20 no. 4, pp. 493-505 Wednesday, March 21, 4:00-5:30: Public Lecture: Prof. Donald Horowitz, Duke University. Location: Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, 9

Revised 1/26/2012 124 Mt. Auburn Street 16 The public trust Thursday, March 22, 2012 What are the causes of corruption? Is it always a drag on development? How can it be mitigated, both at the national and sub-national levels? Case study: Corruption in La Paz: A Mayor Fights City Hall. Kennedy School of Government Case Number C16-99-1523.0. Gabriella R. Montinola and Robert W. Jackman, Sources of Corruption: A Cross-country study, British Journal of Political Science, 2002, Vol. 32, pp. 147170 Nathaniel H. Leff, Economic Development Through Bureaucratic Corruption, American Behavioral Scientist, November 1964, pp. 3-14 R. Klitgaard, R. Maclean-Abaroa, and H. L. Parris, Formulating a Strategy, in Corrupt Cities. A Practical Guide to Cure and Prevention (Institute for Contemporary Studies, 2000), pp. 17-30. (Course Packet) In-class group briefings Part IV: Thinking Big Tuesday, March 27, 2012

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By now we will be almost certainly be behind in our syllabus. We will use these last two weeks together to tie up loose ends from earlier parts of the course and to think big about enduring governance and policy challenges posed by deep cultural structures and by the inherent unpredictability of human behavior.
18 Culture Thursday, March 29, 2012 Is obtaining economic prosperity, freedom, and social peace simply a matter of getting the institutions right? Robert Putnam, Chapter 4, Explaining Institutional Performance, Making Democracy Work, Princeton University Press, 1994. Lily L. Tsai, Solidary Groups, Informal Accountability, and Local Public Goods Provision in Rural China, American Political Science Review 101, 2 (May 2007), pp. 355-72. Jim Granato, Ronald Inglehart, David Leblang, The Effect of Cultural Values on Economic Development: Theory, Hypotheses, and Some Empirical Tests, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 601-31 Lisa Cameron, et al. Propensities to engage in and punish corrupt behavior: Experimental evidence from Australia, India, Indonesia, and Singapore, Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 93 no. 7-8, August 2009, pp. 843-851 Unintended consequences Tuesday, April 3, 2012

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Revised 1/26/2012 It is often said that human beings are unpredictable creatures. If this is true, what are the implications of this fact for our ability to construct political institutions to govern their behavior? How do we minimize surprises? Are grand projects to improve the human condition always doomed? James Scott, 1998, Seeing Like a State, Yale University Press, chapter 9, pp. 309341. 20 Concluding lecture Thursday, April 5, 2012

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