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Heeding the Sirens: The Politics of IMF Program Participation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2014

Irfan Nooruddin  and
Byungwon Woo
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Abstract

Given similar economic distress indicators, why do some states enter into International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs while others do not? Building on extant studies of IMF program participation that highlight the importance of various economic and political determinants, this article proposes an argument focusing on the political incentives of the IMF and a borrowing country when they engage in IMF program negotiations. Specifically, the study develops a domestic politics argument to highlight the interactions among sovereignty costs, competence costs, economic conditions and domestic regime types, and tests the argument using a cross-national time-series dataset of all IMF agreements between 1970 and 2006. It finds that when the economic crisis is mild, democracies are less likely than non-democracies to enter IMF programs, but that when the economic crisis is severe, democracies are more likely to do so than their autocratic counterparts. The article attributes this tendency to democratic leaders’ electoral vulnerability and shows that these patterns become more pronounced as elections draw near.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 73 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2014 

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Footnotes

Irfan Nooruddin is Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, P.O. Box 571040, Washington, DC 20057 ([email protected]). Byungwon Woo is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Oakland University, 421A Varner Hall, 2200 N. Squirrel Rd, Rochester, MI 48309 ([email protected]). We thank Todd Allee, Daniel Corstange, Axel Dreher, Rob Franzese, Susan Hyde, Chris Kilby, Peter Rosendorff, Heidi Sherman, James Vreeland, and participants in the 2009 PEIO conference in Geneva for their comments and feedback. The data and code used in this article are publicly available at http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/irfan. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2014.15.

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