Research

Abstract. How common are invocations and promises of transparency and open government among candidates for municipal office? What factors drive ‘transparency talk’, and does this ‘talk’ translate into the ‘walk’ of transparency policy enactment? This study presents an inaugural mapping and descriptive analysis of transparency talk. Drawing on nearly 40,000 pledges from mayoral candidates across Brazil’s 5,571 municipalities, we analyse the effect of demographic, socioeconomic, and individual-level candidate variables on transparency talk. Our findings confirm many of the canonical findings on municipal transparency performance (e.g. the positive effect of larger municipalities), but also suggest that transparency talk: a) translates into the walk of policy enactment among elected candidates, b) is more common among younger candidates and well-educated females, and, c) has evolved from more generic talk (e.g. ‘transparency’) to more policy-specific language (e.g. access to information), even as specific language has grown at a slower pace.

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Abstract. We know much more about how states become fragile than about how they exit fragility. This paper develops an endogenous theory of fragility exit and introduces a new meas- ure to identify 36 exit episodes between 1971 and 2022. We define fragility minimally, as institutional failure across four dimensions: corruption and elite predation, political violence by non-state actors, legal regularity, and impartial public administration. We argue that fragile orders persist because ruling settlements often preserve power through restricted rents, selective enforcement, politicized administration, and discretionary au- thority. Exits occur when wars, regime transitions, macroeconomic crises, or external interventions disrupt these bargains and create openings for new political settlements. These exits are equifinal: some occur through democratization, others through autocratic consolidation, postwar reconstruction, or crisis-induced elite realignment. Across these pathways, the common mechanism is the reorganization of elite relations in ways that make public authority more predictable, restrained, and impersonal. Empirically, we combine two-way fixed-effects models, staggered difference-in-differences estimates around regime transitions, discrete-time hazard models of sustained exit, and structured case studies of all 36 episodes. The results show that fragility is most consistently associated with autocracy, violent conflict, and lower income. Democratization is followed by declining fragility, while autocratization moves less robustly in the opposite direction. Sustained exit is most consistently associated with higher liberal democracy and GDP per capita, and is less likely under chronic conflict. Acute conflict is positively associated with exit in some specifications, consistent with terminal escalations or settlements that rupture existing fragile bargains. Overall, fragility exits are best understood not as gradual technocratic reforms, but as episodes of political reordering.

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