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- Convenors:
-
Bernadette Louise Halili
(University of the Basque Country)
Miguel Ángel Casaú Guirao (Autonomous University of Madrid)
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- Format:
- Experimental format
- Stream:
- The Future of Development Studies
- Location:
- 8W 1.32, 8West Building
- Sessions:
- Friday 27 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract
This panel proposal wishes to establish a collaboration between the Development Studies Association and the Young Scholars Initiative to forge connections among early career researchers working on institutions and development across different fields of study and through different perspectives.
Description
Taking the momentum gained by institutional perspectives from the 2024 Nobel Prize win by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson and acknowledging the need for discourse on economic development to be more meaningfully informed by different social sciences, I propose a partnership with DSA by holding an experimental panel session at the DSA2025 Conference. The proposed Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) panel will take an experimental format given that the main objective is to establish theoretical nexus, empirical extensions, and concrete opportunities for interdisciplinary work in investigating the role of institutions on development. Thus, this panel will welcome papers highlighting how institutions have been theorised and operationalised across social sciences such as political economy and development studies, contextualised within the conference theme of navigating the present polycrisis. As a novelty, each participant will not present their own submission but will instead be in charge of discussing a paper submitted by another Young Scholar. Their discussion must focus on how their own research benefits from and informs the work that has been assigned to them. Young Scholars will then be able to provide clarifications and facilitate a deeper understanding of their own work. Thus, a concrete outcome from this experimental panel would be a network of early career researchers working on closely related topics, which can potentially lead to joint research projects and future collaborations.
Accepted contributions
Session 1 Friday 27 June, 2025, -Contribution short abstract
This paper examines the political determinants of universal healthcare reform in contrasting the role of government partisanship and electoral competition and their interaction with interest-based politics for determining the type of reform pursued in countries of the Global South.
Contribution long abstract
What explains divergent reform trajectories in the expansion of healthcare across the Global South? While achieving universal health coverage is central to the international development agenda, national implementation remains uneven - raising concerns about the political constraints shaping healthcare reform. Some governments pursue comprehensive reforms to establish unified, equitable systems, while others adopt segmented approaches that expand access but maintain socio-economic hierarchies.
This paper develops a political economy framework to examine the conditions under which governments adopt universal versus segmented healthcare reforms. I theorise two main drivers ofsocial policy expansion,: government ideology and electoral volatility, and how they interact with vested interests. I argue that left-wing governments are more likely to pursue universal reforms aligned with newly enfranchised electorates, while high electoral volatility reduces incentives for clientelism and increases the appeal of visible policies demonstrating broad-based development. However, these dynamics are conditioned by vested interests, with private providers and organised labour often resisting broad expansion to protect their own benefits.
Empirically, I introduce a novel dataset of health system reforms across 90 countries in the Global South (1990–2023), classifying reforms as universal or segmented based on their impact on equity. Using event history analysis, I show that left-wing governments are significantly more likely to adopt universal reforms but are constrained by organised labour, while right-wing governments favour segmented reforms, shaped by the degree of healthcare privatisation. Overall, the findings challenge technocratic models and highlight the central role of electoral incentives, ideology, and vested interests in shaping healthcare expansion.
Contribution short abstract
The research involves the development of a partisan disconfirmation model (PDM), which builds on Oliver's (1971) expectancy disconfirmation model (EDM) on citizen satisfaction and its application in citizen satisfaction with public services (Van Ryzin, 2004, 2006, 2013).
Contribution long abstract
The partisan expectancy disconfirmation model states that citizens' evaluation of economic performance depends on citizens' identification with either the ruling or opposition party. That is, the interaction between partisanship and perceived economic performance results in citizens formulating satisfaction judgements with the ruling party's performance. If perceived economic performance is higher than citizens’ alignment with the ruling political party, it leads to positive disconfirmation and, hence, higher satisfaction with the incumbent president’s performance. Similarly, when citizens alignment with an opposition political party is higher than perceived economic performance, it leads to negative disconfirmation and hence lower satisfaction with the ruling party or president’s performance, making up the two confirmation hypotheses. On the other hand, when citizens’ identification with either the ruling (supporters) or opposition (sympathisers) party is weaker, they are more likely to give honest evaluations of the economic performance as well as honest satisfaction judgements of the ruling party's performance, thereby yielding the two disconfirmation hypotheses where we find ruling party supporters evaluating economic conditions as bad and dissatisfied with the ruling party’s performances, as well as some opposition party sympathisers who eventually evaluate economic conditions as good and expressing satisfaction with the ruling party’s performance. This model is tested using Afrobarometer survey data from an African country. The Chi2 statistic confirms the existence of the association between partisanship and economic performance, and the Cramer's V ascertains a moderately strong relationship between the two variables, hence the need to test the model's disconfirmation process using advanced econometric analyses.