Political Trust, Corruption, and Ratings of the IMF and the World Bank

Abstract

There are only a handful of studies that examine public support for the IMF and World Bank. Public opinion data on attitudes to the economy feature prominently in these studies. Utilizing data from the Afrobarometer survey, we find that evaluations of the economy, ideology, and a range of sociodemographic factors including age, gender, employment status, health, education, and living conditions are not significantly related to ratings of effectiveness. Rather, we find that political trust and corruption—two very important concepts in the wider literature on individual-level attitudes toward international relations and foreign policy issues—are strongly associated with ratings of effectiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Africa
• corruption
• International Monetary Fund
• public opinion
• trust
• World Bank

Notes

¹ For example, they may draw a link between entering into an IMF program and harsh spending cuts.

² The figure of five years comes from Vreeland (2007). For a discussion of “recidivism” in IMF lending see Conway (2007) and Bird, Hussain, and Joyce (2004).

³ While some of these states have used IMF resources, they have not used these resources under a conditional lending arrangement.

⁴ Many studies have questioned the World Bank’s role in fighting corruption (Marquette 2004; Polzer 2001) and designing and implementing reforms in Africa (Harrison 2005).

⁵ For recent work that has considered the question of control see Breen (2013), Copelovitch (2010), and Stone (2011).

⁶ There is also a large literature on how voting rights should be reallocated to strengthen legitimacy in the eyes of member states and the wider public (Bradlow 2006; Eichengreen 2007; Martin and Woods 2005; Meltzer 2007; Rapkin and Strand 2006; Strand and Rapkin 2005; Truman 2009; Woods and Lombardi 2006).

⁷ As of October 2013; http://www.imf.org.

⁸ There is substantial literature that is critical of PRSPs and questions whether they are genuinely participatory (Craig and Porter 2002; Gaynor 2010; Gould 2005).

⁹ The data and full methodology can be obtained from www.afrobarometer.org.

¹⁰ We exclude trust in the presidency as the personality and leadership qualities of the individual may trump trust in the institution of the presidency. Our index of political trust contains substantial within- and cross-country variation.

¹¹ The survey in Mozambique allowed the additional response of always. Very few people opted for this, so we added those that did into the often group.

¹² Our indices for political trust and experience of bribery impose the restriction that each of their elements and intensities matters equally. To test whether our results are robust to this restriction, we created alternative measures using principal component analysis. The details are available on request and the results are nearly identical.

¹³ While education is negative and significant in some of our specifications, recent work by Jacob Hariri, Christian Justesen, and Mogens Bjornskov (2013) find that better informed citizens form more precise evaluations. Such individuals may be less likely to generalize from the performance of domestic institutions to that of IEOs. To test this, we interacted corruption with education and found that it is positive and statistically significant for both IEOs. More-educated individuals who experience corruption tend to award higher ratings. The results from this specification are available on request.

¹⁴ We repeated the test using income deciles instead of our lived poverty index. This halves our sample and as the results are qualitatively similar we favor our poverty index. Results using this alternative are available on request.

¹⁵ A different way to address this issue this is to run a simple binary probit with some threshold for a good evaluation. When we do this with a threshold of 5, both political trust and experience of corruption are highly significant for the IMF, though for the World Bank political trust is significant at 1% but corruption only at 10%. CDA membership is not significant in either case. Results available on request.

¹⁶ Full results available on request.

¹⁷ Existing studies suggest that programs can be highly disruptive. For example, Caroline Hartzell, Matthew Hoddie, and Molly Bauer (2010) have found an association between the adoption of IMF programs and the onset of civil war.

¹⁸ For example, Thushyanthan Baskaran and Arne Bigsten (2013) find that improvements to fiscal capacity is associated with better government in 31 sub-Saharan African countries from 1990 to 2005.