to agree on providing broad public goods rather than targeted benefits to their constituents (“pork-barrel politics”; see, for example, Hasnain 2011).

This logic applies directly to public sector reforms. In a paper entitled “Programmatic Political Parties and Public Sector Reform,” Cruz and Keefer (2010) find robust support for the claim that the presence of such parties improves the performance of World Bank PSM projects. They argue that PSM reforms typically aim to strengthen rule-based systems—for example, those governing the use of public money and jobs— and to limit ad hoc decisions on these issues by public administrators. Without party discipline, politicians may prefer an ad hoc over a rule-based process, enabling them to interfere in administrative decisions in favor of particular clients.

One might expect the presence of parties to affect PSM and non-PSM projects alike, as both typically aim to provide public goods (research question 3). But this is contestable. Overall, PSM reforms center on issues that are typically not urgent citizen concerns and are thus not part of parties’ electoral platforms (Schneider and Heredia 2003). At the same time, some PSM reforms—such as public employment or pay reforms—are often unpopular with public employees and may require particularly strong party discipline. This paper seeks to corroborate the findings of Cruz and Keefer. It tests them for a larger array of public sector projects, using a more extensive set of control variables and different estimation techniques. In addition, it tests whether the existence of programmatic parties distinctively predicts the performance of PSM projects more or less than non-PSM projects.

# **3.4 Country Context: Prior Administrative Capacity**

Over the past decade, a strong consensus has emerged that PSM reforms need to be carefully tailored to preexisting administrative capacities—and that transplanting “best practices” from the OECD to developing countries (as in the style of New Public Management reforms) is risky. This consensus is, for example, reflected in Allan Schick’s (1998) dictum of “basics first”<sup>12</sup> in “platform approaches”; in Andrews’ (2010) classification of African countries into five distinct “PFM performance leagues”;<sup>13</sup> and in the argument that the use of performance-related pay requires that an administration have an established culture of meritocracy.<sup>14</sup> It is also reflected in calls for setting modest PSM reform objectives.<sup>15</sup>

> 12 The “basics first” dictum has been contested, however. Andrews (2006), for example, argues that moving toward a performance orientation in budgeting may not necessarily require or even benefit from an established, traditional input-based budgeting system.

> 13 One related argument is that colonial heritage matters—in particular the difference between francophone and anglophone administrative traditions (for this argument, see, for example, Andrews 2009).

> 14 See Pierskalla, Hasnain, and Manning (2012) for an in-depth review of the literature on pay flexibility.

> 15 For example, Andrews, Pritchett, and Woolcock (2010) empirically estimate the speed of state modernization processes and conclude that governments take far longer to develop administrative capacity than is often assumed in development projects.

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