Leila Demarest

Leiden University | LEI · Institute of Political Science

While Nigeria’s National Assembly has become increasingly assertive since the start of the Fourth Republic, lawmakers continue to be heavily engaged in corruption. Such rent-seeking practices are commonly regarded as antithetical to democratization. In this article, however, I argue that individual access to public rents actually supports legislati...

Theories on consociationalism and power-sharing posit that such arrangements are more likely to succeed in small societies. A small population size would produce close-knit, personal relations between political elites from different groups, resulting in consensual political relations. However, the empirical basis for these arguments is very shallow...

Recent studies on conflict and terrorism news coverage have documented an ingroup bias as well as an increasingly negative discourse about Muslims in the wake of Islamist terrorist attacks. Yet, as most of these studies have focused on Western media and settings, the determinants of news media’s religious biases and out-group categorizations remain...

Since attaining independence, Nigeria has experienced recurrent tensions due to the severe horizontal inequalities that exist between different regions and ethnic groups. After the end of the Biafran civil war, consecutive regimes embarked on a reform process intended to address the sensitive issues of inequality and ethnic domination. Key reforms...

(Note: available in open access at publisher's website). While conflict event data sets are increasingly used in contemporary conflict research, important concerns persist regarding the quality of the collected data. Such concerns are not necessarily new. Yet, because the methodological debate and evidence on potential errors remains scattered acr...

In this paper, we investigate the determinants of contact between citizens and Members of Parliament (MPs) in Africa by combining theories of contact developed in advanced Western democracies with theories of clientelism developed in the Global South. Based on Afrobarometer data matched with constituency‐level electoral data, we provide a first ana...

Since independence, Nigeria has adopted federalism to manage the country’s deep ethno-regional divisions, but federalism has not averted instability and return to military rule in the past. This highlights the need for additional factors and mechanisms to secure and stabilize civilian rule in Nigeria. The country’s ethnic party ban ensures that par...

Relations between the National Assembly and the executive in the budget process have commonly been depicted as confrontational with media reports often focusing on the phenomenon of 'budget padding'. In this paper, however, I argue that this focus draws attention away from budgetary scrutiny and profound questions on needs assessment, implementatio...

How does interethnic marriage influence the occurrence of ethnic violence in sub-Saharan Africa? Previous studies on the relationship between intergroup contact and conflict onset have produced mixed findings. Some scholars have argued that this might be due to the way interethnic contact is measured. Building on insights of social psychology, this...

Political parties in Africa and other developing countries are known to forge clientelist rather than programmatic ties to voters. Yet this does not mean that parties reward strong legislator-voter ties. In this paper, I argue for the case of Nigeria that lawmakers seeking to advance their political careers are incentivized to direct public resourc...

Since the turn towards multiparty elections in the 1990s, several sub-Saharan African countries have seen their number of political parties dramatically increase. Many of these parties operate on a small geographical scale, attract only minimal shares of the electorate, and come and go with every election. Given these parties almost negligible impa...

While the number of African COVID-19 cases is relatively limited for now, the pandemic and the restrictive measures to curtail the virus might have important implications for the level of human security. They may give rise to economic decline and rising poverty, authoritarianism, urban violence, and increasing social inequalities. In this proceedin...

In recent decades, governmental and non-governmental organisations have increased the number and scale of Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding (CPPB) activities in conflict-affected countries. This development has also led to an increase in personnel in these organisations, posing challenges for staff training. In response, many organisations are...

While Nigeria has a vibrant press media landscape, freedom of the press is only rated as “partly free” by Freedom House, mostly due to political influences on reporting. Yet the extent to which these influences affect the quality of reporting remains insufficiently investigated. We address this gap by analyzing how three newspapers with different p...

(Note: available in open access at publisher's website, please follow doi link) In recent years, the quantitative study of conflict has increasingly focused on small-scale and/or localized conflicts in the developing world. In this paper, we analyze and critically reflect upon a major methodological shortcoming of many studies in this field of rese...

Conflicts that occur across ethnic and/or religious identity lines generally have underlying root causes such as economic marginalization and political competition. Yet when these causes are ignored by politicians and the media, and conversely differences in ethnicity and religion are simply propagated as the main conflict causes, this may have ser...

Laura Thaut Vinson. Religion, Violence, and Local Power-Sharing in Nigeria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xxvi + 337 pp. £75.00. Cloth. ISBN: 9781107179370. - Leila Demarest

(Note: temporarily available in open access at publisher's website, please follow doi link) African conflicts are highly represented in cross-national conflict event datasets, and their causes are increasingly investigated in quantitative analyses. Many of these datasets make use of international media reports to compile information on different fo...

This chapter explains the main causes of recent violent conflicts in Africa. It emphasizes how the dynamics of violent conflicts have changed over time, specifically, during, and after, the Cold War. As more and more African countries achieved independence during the 1960s and 1970s, their leaders faced the daunting challenge to bring about rapid e...

Social cohesion is a key concept in development studies. Weak social cohesion is often related to slow economic growth and (violent) conflict. So far few attempts have been made to measure this complex concept in a systematic manner. This paper introduces an innovative method to measure national-level social cohesion based on survey data from 19 Af...

This paper advances a resource mobilization perspective on the 2011-12 electoral protests in Senegal based on social movement theory. Motivational explanations, in the form of grievance accounts, have already been used to explain successful protest mobilization in this case. Here the emphasis is placed on organizational efforts and the financial an...

Recent spikes in international food prices and the occurrence of food riots in the period 2007-2008 have led many researchers to investigate more closely the links between rising food prices and conflict or political instability. However, this emerging literature suffers from a number of shortcomings. The objective of this article is to analyze the...