Comparative Politics Workshop with Edmund Malesky

DateMarch 2, 2015

Time12:30pm

Location
4357 Bunche Hall

Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu

Presenter:Edmund Malesky,  Duke UniversityTitle: “Participation in Legal Drafting and Compliance with Business Regulation: Evidence from Vietnam” About the Speaker:Edmund Malesky is Associate Professor of political economy, and a specialist on Southeast Asia — particularly Vietnam. Currently, his research agenda falls into three major categories: 1) authoritarian political institutions and their consequences; 2) the political influence of foreign direct investment and multinational corporations; and 3) political institutions, private business development, and formalization. Prof Malesky has published in leading political science and economic journals, including the American Political Science Review and Journal of Politics,  He also serves as the lead researcher for the Vietnam Provincial Competitiveness Index.Abstract:International development organizations invest millions of dollars each year into legislative participation campaigns in an effort to foster improved governance. This work has been undergirded theoretically by political scientists in the “deliberative democracy” tradition, who argue that participation in the drafting of new rules, through public comment periods, provides information about citizens’ needs and preferences to government. Governments can then use this information, they argue, to make laws and regulations that will enjoy wider societal compliance.  Relatedly, studies in psychology and organizational behavior indicate that individuals are more likely to follow rules they have had the opportunity to influence.  We propose that a similar dynamic between participation and compliance applies among businesses as well.  In this paper, we first test this theory using survey data from an emerging economy, where we find that a firm is more likely to comply with business regulations when it has participated in the design of the regulatory framework. Importantly, however, we find evidence that this relationship only holds when the firm sees government to be attentive to its input, and that participation may actually be associated with less compliance when government is seen to be disinterested.   We note that our effort to test theory in this space still faces significant issues of selection bias, and therefore discuss the design and preliminary results of our ongoing field experiment, where we randomized opportunities for participation by small businesses in Vietnam to a forthcoming regulation on storage of hazardous chemicals.Pre-analysis Plan:Click here to download.Provincial Competitive Index:Click here to download.

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