The framing of IMF and World Bank in political reform debates: The role of political orientation and policy fields in the cases of Russia and Ukraine

Heiko Pleines

doi:10.1177/1468018120929773

Abstract

The article presents a content analysis of assessments of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in parliamentary debates in Russia (1998–2008) and Ukraine (2010–2019) in order to understand the position of domestic actors in cases of conditionality-based international support. Russia and Ukraine offer the opportunity to compare periods with and without an active loan agreement with the IMF for domestic actors across the full political spectrum. In addition, the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization are included in the analysis to allow a comparison with international organisations not working with financial conditionality. The analysis examines the general image of international organisations and differentiates between political camps and policy fields, with a special focus on social policy.

Highlights

The speaker and all policy fields related to the discussion of the role of International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Health Organization (WHO) or International Labour Organization (ILO) have been coded
For obvious reasons the IMF is more visible in the periods with an active loan agreement, but it is much more visible in the debates in Ukraine than in Russia
There are on average 167 individual speech segments per year referring to the IMF in Ukraine’s parliamentary debates during the period with an IMF agreement (UA+), while the same measure stands at 94 segments for Ukraine without an active agreement (UA–)

Summary

Introduction

International organisations (IOs) are seen as major actors in transnational policy-related knowledge transfer.1 In this context, academic research on social policy has strongly focused on the content2 and policy implications of the ‘Washington Consensus’ – a set of neoliberal policy prescriptions promoted by, among others, Washington-based international financial organisations as part of conditional loan agreements (e.g. Appel and Orenstein, 2018; Babb, 2013; Ban and Gallagher, 2015; Béland and Orenstein, 2013; Broome, 2015; Farnsworth and Irving, 2018; Kentikelenis and Seabrooke, 2017; Li et al, 2015; Sabatovych, 2016; Schlaufer, 2019; Vadlamannati, 2019).The role of the Washington Consensus and related conditionality in national political debates and decision-making processes has gained much less attention in academic research. The speaker (i.e. the person making the respective statement in a parliamentary debate) and all policy fields related to the discussion of the role of IMF, World Bank, WHO or ILO have been coded.5 The codebook and quantitative results of the content analysis will soon be available online at www.discussdata.net (for details on Discuss Data see Heinrich et al, 2019; Heinrich and Klein, this issue).

Results

Conclusion