7. The bureaucracy is not an effective corps to which to delegate the technical implementation of policy bargains.

8. The judiciary does not provide much intertemporal “glue” to political or policy agreements.

9. Nongovernmental actors in the policy process (such as business groups and unions), lacking a well-institutionalized environment for political exchange, usually follow strategies that attempt to maximize short-term benefits and to build in rigidities into future policies.” On the macro policy front, one can see clearly how these features translate into the historical experience. Given the historic inability to reach agreements in Congress – along with fiscal federalism tensions -- the only way to bring discipline to macro-policy was to tie the policy framework to the currency board. This rigidity proved flawed when the external economic environment changed, and there was no clear way to negotiate a credible new macro framework. The rigidity of federal revenue-sharing arrangements is another example, cited by Spiller and Tommasi, of locking in place privileges for jurisdictions receiving extraordinarily high transfers per capita. In brief, the authors note that, in the 1990s, “...many reform measures amounted to a front-loading of payoffs to many key actors, such as local business groups favored by privatization, key unions favored by reforms in the health and pension system, and pension funds that charged very high up-front commissions.”<sup>70</sup> _Citizens’ perceptions and engagement: Foundations for future credibility?_ There is a rapidly growing, recent literature on transparency, government accountability and political engagement.<sup>71</sup> Both the theoretical and empirical literature has evolved. One strand focuses on transparency itself, defined as “...citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government and the consequences of these actions.”<sup>72</sup> Recent research has focused on the information content of what is disclosed to the public and also how the mass media delivers that content to the public.<sup>73</sup> Transparency of information can fall into a vacuum unless the public is politically engaged enough to use that information.<sup>74</sup> Political engagement can be defined as “...the participation of citizens in selecting and sanctioning the leaders who wield power

> 70 Ibid, page 8 .

> 71 Guidance from Stuti Khemani on these issues is gratefully acknowledged.  This brief section and footnotes draw on the World Bank Policy Research Report _Making Politics Work for Development:  Harnessing Transparency and Citizen Engagement_ (World Bank, 2016).

> 72 World Bank (2016), page 5.

> 73 Besley and Burgess (2002), Stromberg (2004), Snyder and Stromberg (2010) show that mass media enables political accountability through political engagement . Prat and Stromberg (2011) show how the coverage of issues, or the information content and framing of messages in media markets is a function of political institutions, which in turn shapes the impact of media on political accountability. Keefer and Khemani (2014 and 2012) show that the content of media programming matters in whether it impacts government accountability.

> 74 Bobonis et al (2013) provide direct evidence that transparency’s impact in reducing corruption is significant only in municipalities where there is effective political competition. On the negative side, Chong et al (forthcoming) show that NGO-provided information about corruption in municipal governments in Mexico led to voter discouragement and fall in vote shares of all political parties, not just the incumbent. Cruz, Keefer and Labonne (2015) et al show that greater information can even lead to increases in the use of vote buying as a political strategy.

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