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Dr Sarah Brierley CBG 4.37

This course is available on the BSc in International Social and Public Policy with Politics, BSc in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, BSc in Politics, BSc in Politics and Economics, BSc in Politics and History, BSc in Politics and International Relations, BSc in Politics and Philosophy and BSc in Social Policy with Government. This course is not available as an outside option. This course is available with permission to General Course students.

Comfort with basic statistics as covered by Research Design in Political Science (GV249) or an equivalent course in research design or introductory statistics (such as ST102, ST107, ST108, GY140, SA201) is recommended.

The design and implementation of government policies depends on the actions and capacity of politicians and bureaucrats. For policies to be effective, they must be implemented according to programmatic criteria, while avoiding leakage. This course will overview recent theoretical and empirical work on governance, corruption and state capacity. The cases we investigate will be focused on low and middle-income countries in South Asia, South America and Sub-Saharan Africa. We will also use the historic experiences of the USA and UK to investigate paths to better governance in these countries. During the course we will explore questions such as: why do politicians and bureaucrats engage in corruption? Do multi-party elections encourage graft? Are anti-corruption bodies effective? Can technological solutions improve the delivery of public services?

20 hours of seminars in the LT.

This course is delivered through seminars totalling a minimum of 22 hours across the Lent and Summer Terms. This year, some or all of this teaching may be delivered through a combination of online and on-campus seminars.

Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6, in line with departmental policy. 

Students will be expected to produce 1 formative essay of 1,500 words in Week 7.

• Golden and Fisman. 2017. Corruption: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press. 
• Geddes, Barbara. 1994. Politician's dilemma: building state capacity in Latin America. University of California Press.
• David Gingerich. 2013. Political Institutions and Party Directed Corruption in South America. Cambridge University Press.
• Grindle, Merilee S. 2012. Jobs for the Boys: Patronage and the State in Comparative Perspective. Harvard University Press.
• Anna Grzymala-Busse. 2007. Rebuilding Leviathan: Party Competition and State Exploitation in Post-Communist Democracies. Cambridge University Press.
• Svensson, Jakob. 2005. Eight Questions about Corruption, Journal of Economic Prospectives. 
• Olken, Benjamin. Monitoring Corruption: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia, Journal of Political Economy. 
• Brierley, Sarah. 2019. Unprincipled Principals: Co-opted Bureaucrats and Corruption in Ghana. American Journal of Political Science. 
• Gulzar, Saad, and Benjamin J. Pasquale. 2017. Politicians, bureaucrats, and development: Evidence from India." American Political Science Review 111.1. 

Essay (80%, 2500 words) in the ST.
Class participation (10%) and memo (10%) in the LT.

Students will submit a single assessed memo on the week that they are assigned to be the class discussant. This memo should be approx. 3 pages. Criteria will be given on the information that the memo should contain. 

Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.