IRCPPS in the Links: Linking Human Rights and Development Assisstance

via Dart-Throwing Chimp:

...The big idea behind the MCC was to give poor countries stronger incentive to improve their economic and political governance by making a big, new pot of aid funding available, but making access to that pot conditional on countries’ performance on a basket of governance indicators. In theory, it’s like setting up a smoothie bar  in a high-school cafeteria and then telling the hungry students they’ll get free smoothies, but only if they’ve done well enough on their report cards. If they’re hungry enough (and like smoothies enough), anticipation of that reward should encourage them to improve their schoolwork, and everyone ends up better off for it....

IRCPPS in the Links: Can Libya's NTC Pull Itself Up By Its Bootstraps?

Dart-Throwing Chimp examines the challenges Libya's National Transition Council faces going forward:

...Libya is a collapsed state. It has no functioning central authority. The NTC has proclaimed itself to be the country’s national government, and the international community has endorsed that claim, but that claim is only now starting to get tested. The conventional view is that internal authority and external endorsement are intertwined, but that’s an international legal fiction, not real politics. As places like Afghanistan and Somalia remind us, international endorsement does not magically cause domestic factions to fall in line behind the anointed party....

IRCPPS in the Links: Administrative Resource Abuse in Elections in Developing Democracies

Dart-Throwing Chimp writes on how this problem manifested itself in Kyrgyzstan:

...seeing that state resources are being used to partisan advantage does not necessarily reveal that a conspiracy is afoot. And the distinction matters. If Atambaev wins and his campaign was aided by overzealous bureaucrats, we have a structural problem. If Atambaev wins and his campaign was aided by a directed effort to take advantage of his party’s incumbency, we have a cheating problem. The first challenge for Kyrgyz watchdogs and international observers is going to be figuring out if there’s fire behind all that smoke about abuse of administrative resources.  If they do find fire, the next–and probably harder–challenge is going to be determining if it was set deliberately by Atambaev or erupted spontaneously under propitious conditions...

IRCPPS in the Links: Why Don't Dictators Move to Florida?

...or at least retire, anyway?  Dart-throwing Chimp:

Most theories of authoritarian rule solve this problem by fiat. Rulers are simply assumed to value staying in office over everything else, and at virtually any cost. If we start with that assumption, Gaddafi’s behavior is not puzzling at all–but recently “retired” Tunisian president Ben Ali‘s is. Recall that Ben Ali fled his country just a few weeks after Tunisia’s popular uprising started to gain steam, before it was apparent whether or not the challenge could be sustained. Clearly, retirement is an option for some dictators.

IRCPPS in the Links: Are Military Coups Making a Comeback?

Dart-Throwing Chimp runs the numbers:

The answer is a flat “no.” The chart below plots annual counts of successful coups from 1946 through the first half of 2011, using data compiled by the Center for Systemic Peace. As the chart clearly shows, the incidence of coups has fallen substantially in the post-Cold War period and remains historically low. (NB: Those figures don’t adjust for the large increase in the number of countries worldwide in the past 20 years. Against that growing baseline, the rate of successful coups has fallen even further.)

IRCPPS in the Links: Is Burma on the verge of a democratic thaw?

in Dart-Throwing Chimp, Jay Ulfelder gives some analysis:

...Viewed through this wider lens, recent events in Burma make a little more sense. Like Gorbachev’s initially timid steps toward openness (glasnost) in support of economic restructuring (perestroika), the Burmese government’s recent reforms seem to identify that country as a budding case of liberalization by imposition. After the collapse of the USSR, dictators may have become more inclined to err on the side of caution and forego the potential gains from reduced economic friction. More recently, though, the Chinese government’s success (so far) in managing these trade-offs in its favor seems to have re-opened the door to liberalization from above.

IRCPPS in the Links: The International Roots of Arab National Councils

Jay Ulfelder writes about insights into the international system that we can gain from studying the formation of Arab National Councils during the "Arab Spring."  He argues that they represent a manifestation of the second image reversed:

The important point here, though, is that these national councils have not arisen organically from domestic politics. There is undoubtedly some domestic logic to their creation–unified and coordinated revolutionary movements usually stand a better chance of toppling incumbent rulers than fragmented ones–but there is a strong outward-facing element as well. I think these councils came into being as quickly as they did–and maybe even at all–in response to pressures from foreign governments whose endorsements and material support they thought they needed to win their revolutions. Tellingly, SNC spokesman Ghalioun said at the international press conference announcing the council’s formation that one major benefit of the SNC’s existence “would be to provide a single body with which other countries could coordinate.”

IRCPPS in the Links: Democratic Consolidation and Time

At Dart-Throwing Chimp, Jay Ulfelder re-considers the relationship between a democracy's age and the likelihood of if breaking down.  In two separate posts, he argues that:

 traditional thinking about the relationship between the passage of time and democratic consolidation is biased by a selection effect. Yes, the risk of a reversion to authoritarian rule is lower in older democracies than it is in younger ones, but that’s really because the democracies most susceptible to breakdown have already been weeded out. For fragile democracies, the risk of breakdown actually increases over time, unless and until they manage to transform themselves into lower-risk cases by producing an alternation in power or deepening protections for civil liberties. After that, there is essentially no association between the passage of time and the prospects for regime survival...