Reassessing World Bank conditionality : beyond count measures

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Winter, Jacob and Cormier, Ben and Kramarz, Teresa and Manger, Mark S. (2025) Reassessing World Bank conditionality : beyond count measures. Political Science Research and Methods. ISSN 2049-8489 (https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2025.19)

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Abstract

Many studies argue that the World Bank grants favorable loan conditions to allies of its powerful principals. These studies typically use the count of conditions as a proxy for how demanding loans are on borrowers, even though some conditions are more difficult to comply with than others. We propose a new operationalization: a measure of conditionality stringency in Bank loans constructed using Latent Semantic Scaling. Using this new measure, we find little evidence of a generalizable influence of powerful principals. Instead, the stringency of loan conditions is associated with bureaucratic assessments of risk. To facilitate future research, we provide a new dataset of World Bank loan condition texts and our measure of text stringency for all loans in the dataset.

ORCID iDs

Winter, Jacob, Cormier, Ben ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9278-5308, Kramarz, Teresa and Manger, Mark S.;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)