Politics and International Relations Research Collection

The rise of China as a "non-traditional" development partner has been one of the most important phenomena in the field over the past decade. The lack of transparency in Chinese development projects, coupled with an uninterested stance towards governance, lead many to wonder if Chinese engagement will contribute to or undermine existing development efforts. This paper adds to the debate by inquiring as to the relationship of Chinese development efforts with perceptions of, and experiences with, corruption when projects are closely-located to those from a traditional donor, the World Bank. Taking advantage of spatial data, the paper evidences an association between the location of a larger number of Chinese projects and higher experiences with and, to some extent, perceptions of corruption when accounting for co-located World Bank projects. Likewise, while World Bank projects are associated with lower levels of corruption in the absence of Chinese projects, this relationship disappears when Chinese projects are nearby. However, these relationships only hold for Chinese projects which are not "aid-like," suggesting that the differentiation of Chinese overseas flows is an important consideration when studying China as a development partner.

Ethno-regional voting cleavages have featured in a number of sub-Saharan African states during the third wave of democratization. While these voting patterns are well studied, there have been few attempts to understand if pan-ethno-regional coalition building based on targeted economic policies can be employed to secure national electoral coalitions. We examine the 2009 Malawian parliamentary elections where a newly-formed national party used its incumbent position to promote an economic policy based on food security in order to overcome traditional ethno-regional voting patterns. After presenting a formal model of an optimal allocation of an economic resource to induce vote-switching, we use district-level data in a system of equations approach finding that this strategic allocation did indeed contribute to the nation-wide electoral victory.