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Democracy and Socioeconomic Performance in Africa
Abstract
Despite the wide acceptance of democracy as best form of government, coups d'etat seem to have become a never-ending phenomenon in many African countries. The relationship between democracy and socioeconomic performance is examined in this chapter. This study employs exploratory and descriptive techniques in achieving this objective. Socioeconomic performance is measured with indicators such as GDP, life expectancy, literacy rate, unemployment rate, and inflation rate. Selected countries are Sudan, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Seychelles, Botswana, South Africa, and Rwanda. The study didn't find a clear-cut relationship between democracy and socioeconomic performance in the countries under study and so concludes that leadership might be a more important variable to consider.
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Since Barack Obama’s campaign of 2008 and 2012, contemporary discourse and analysis of modern political communication have been variously and increasingly preoccupied with the analysis of the power of new technology-digital media platforms and algorithms as both the main ingredients and infrastructure for modern campaigns and electioneering. However, as important as these mediated tools and platforms have become, we argue that focus on context, ideas, issues, and campaign rhetoric is equally essential in making sense of factors that contribute in shaping and destabilizing elections and democracy. Drawing from an extensive review of campaign related literature in three countries and a constant comparative method of reading the literature, we illustrate such contextual issues, ideas and campaign rhetoric using examples from America, Britain and Nigeria. In all three examples, the literature reviewed highlight that context – i.e. socio-economic, cultural and political all compete to incentivizes and stimulate the formation of ideas and issues that dominate campaign and election cycles.
There is strong debate about the validity of the democratic peace theory (Przeworski, 1995). Does democracy bring domestic peace and stability to countries who embrace it? Are democracies less likely to suffer internal strife and instability? Given the proliferation of violence and conflict in Nigeria's democracy, this is a critical question. This paper explores the link between democracy and violent conflict in Nigeria. I argue that violent conflict in Nigeria is a reflection of the failure of democracy, democratic values, ideals, norms and institutions rather than the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and ethnic confrontations. On the basis of my findings, the study recommends strong democratic institutions, justice, equitable distribution of resources and the fight against poverty and youth unemployment as tools for sustainable national peace.
This paper introduces a new methodology to examine the empirical relationship between democracy and economic growth. Democratic institutions are assumed to affect growth through a series of channels. We specify and estimate a full system of equations determining growth and the channel variables. Results suggest that democracy fosters growth by improving the accumulation of human capital and, less robustly, by lowering income inequality. On the other hand, democracy hinders growth by reducing the rate of physical capital accumulation and, less robustly, by raising the ratio of government consumption to GDP. Once all of these indirect effects are accounted for, the overall effect of democracy on economic growth is moderately negative. Our results indicate that democratic institutions are responsive to the demands of the poor by expanding access to education and lowering income inequality, but do so at the expense of physical capital accumulation.
Using two unifying models and an empirical exercise, this paper presents and extends the main theories linking income distribution and growth, as well as the relevant empirical evidence. The first model integrates the political-economy and imperfect-capital-market theories. It allows for explicit departures from perfect democracy and embodies the tradeoff between the growth costs and benefits of redistribution through taxes, land reform, or public schooling: such policies simultaneously depress saving incentives and ameliorate the wealth constraints which impede investment by the poor. The second model is a growth version of the prisoner's dilemma which captures the essence of theories where sociopolitical conflict reduces the security of property rights, thereby discouraging accumulation. The economy's growth rate is shown to be a decreasing function of interest groups' rent-seeking abilities, as well as of the gap between rich and poor. It is not income inequality per se that matters, however, but inequality in the relative distribution of earning and political power. For each of the three channels of political economy, capital markets, and social conflict, the empirical evidence is surveyed and discussed in conjunction with the theoretical analysis. Finally, the possibility of multiple steady states leads the author to raise and take up a new empirical issue: are cross-country differences in inequality permanent, or gradually narrowing? Equivalently, is there convergence not only in first moments (GDP per capita), but in distribution?
Several influential commentators have suggested recently that democratization in developing countries produces political instability, ethnic conflict, and poor economic outcomes. For instance, Robert D. Kaplan (2000 p. 62) states that “If a society is not in reasonable health, democracy can be not only risky but disastrous. ” Fareed Zakaria (2003 p. 98) points out that “although democracy has in many ways opened up African politics and brought people liberty, it has also produced a degree of chaos and instability that has actually made corruption and lawlessness worse in many countries. ” Amy Chua (2002 p. 124) argues that: “... in the numerous countries around the world with a
This paper expands upon a hitherto underexplored finding by Rich and Banerjee’s 2015 model which finds that Taiwan has done comparatively better with non-democracies in Africa. The paper proposes that democratisation makes an African state more responsive to domestic economic imperatives and thus more likely to form relations with the demographically and economically larger People’s Republic of China because of the prospective trade, aid and investment gains to be made once such a switch is affected. Seven case studies conducted over the 2001–2018 period yield results which are in line with this hypothesis.
Whether democracy causes economic growth has been a matter of theoretical and empirical debate. We argue that looking at the average effect of democracy on long-run growth ignores the heterogeneity of growth experiences among authoritarian regimes relative to democratic regimes. Furthermore, the emphasis on long-run growth is not compatible with the stylized facts of economic growth in developing countries, which is characterized by frequent shifts in growth regimes from stagnant or declining growth to accelerations in growth and back again to decelerating growth. We examine the political determinants of the magnitude of growth in accelerations and deceleration episodes for 125 countries for 1950–2010. We find that the effect of the political regime on growth is asymmetric across accelerations and decelerations and that democracies do not necessarily outperform autocracies in a growth acceleration episode, though they are likely to prevent large growth collapses. We also highlight the importance of the type of autocracy in understanding the effects of regime type on growth.
We study the dynamics of economic and political change, theoretically and empirically. Democratic capital measured by a nation's historical experience with democracy, and the incidence of democracy in its neighborhood, appears to reduce exit rates from democracy and raise exit rates from autocracy. Higher democratic capital stimulates growth by increasing the stability of democracies. Heterogeneous effects of democracy induce sorting of countries into political regimes, which helps explain systematic differences between democracies and autocracies. Our results suggest the possibility of a virtuous circle, where accumulation of physical and democratic capital reinforce each other, promoting economic development and consolidation of democracy.
Economic growth within countries varies sharply across decades. This paper examines one explanation for these sustained shifts in growth-changes in the national leader. We use deaths of leaders while in office as a source of exogenous variation in leadership, and ask whether these plausibly exogenous leadership transitions are associated with shifts in country growth rates. We find robust evidence that leaders matter for growth. The results suggest that the effects of individual leaders are strongest in autocratic settings where there are fewer constraints on a leader's power. Leaders also appear to affect policy outcomes, particularly monetary policy. The results suggest that individual leaders can play crucial roles in shaping the growth of nations.
Despite a sizeable theoretical and empirical literature, no firm conclusions have been drawn regarding the impact of political democracy on economic growth. This article challenges the consensus of an inconclusive relationship through a quantitative assessment of the democracy-growth literature. It applies meta-regression analysis to the population of 483 estimates derived from 84 studies on democracy and growth. Using traditional meta-analysis estimators, the bootstrap, and Fixed and Random Effects meta-regression models, it derives several robust conclusions. Taking all the available published evidence together, it concludes that democracy does not have a direct impact on economic growth. However, democracy has robust, significant, and positive indirect effects through higher human capital, lower inflation, lower political instability, and higher levels of economic freedom. Democracies may also be associated with larger governments and less free international trade. There also appear to be country- and region-specific democracy-growth effects. Overall, democracy's net effect on the economy does not seem to be detrimental.
In the West are the 'haves', while much of the rest of the world are the 'have-nots'. The extent of inequality today is unprecedented. Drawing on an extraordinary range of contemporary and historical examples, Why Nations Fail looks at the root of the problems facing some nations. Economists and scientists have offered useful insights into the reasons for certain aspects of poverty, such as Jeffrey Sachs (it's geography and the weather), and Jared Diamond (it's technology and species). But most theories ignore the incentives and institutions that populations need to invest and prosper: they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep it - and the key to ensuring these incentives is sound institutions. Incentives and institutions are what separate the have and have-nots. Based on fifteen years of research, and stepping boldly into the territory of Ian Morris's Why the West Rules - For Now, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson blend economics, politics, history and current affairs to provide a new, persuasive way of understanding wealth and poverty. And, perhaps most importantly, they provide a pragmatic basis for the hope that those mired in poverty can be placed on the path to prosperity.
The conditions associated with the existence and stability of democratic society have been a leading concern of political philosophy. In this paper the problem is attacked from a sociological and behavioral standpoint, by presenting a number of hypotheses concerning some social requisites for democracy, and by discussing some of the data available to test these hypotheses. In its concern with conditions—values, social institutions, historical events—external to the political system itself which sustain different general types of political systems, the paper moves outside the generally recognized province of political sociology. This growing field has dealt largely with the internal analysis of organizations with political goals, or with the determinants of action within various political institutions, such as parties, government agencies, or the electoral process. It has in the main left to the political philosopher the larger concern with the relations of the total political system to society as a whole.
Journal of Democracy 10.3 (1999) 3-17
In the summer of 1997, I was asked by a leading Japanese newspaper what I thought was the most important thing that had happened in the twentieth century. I found this to be an unusually thought-provoking question, since so many things of gravity have happened over the last hundred years. The European empires, especially the British and French ones that had so dominated the nineteenth century, came to an end. We witnessed two world wars. We saw the rise and fall of fascism and Nazism. The century witnessed the rise of communism, and its fall (as in the former Soviet bloc) or radical transformation (as in China). We also saw a shift from the economic dominance of the West to a new economic balance much more dominated by Japan and East and Southeast Asia. Even though that region is going through some financial and economic problems right now, this is not going to nullify the shift in the balance of the world economy that has occurred over many decades (in the case of Japan, through nearly the entire century). The past hundred years are not lacking in important events.
Nevertheless, among the great variety of developments that have occurred in the twentieth century, I did not, ultimately, have any difficulty in choosing one as the preeminent development of the period: the rise of democracy. This is not to deny that other occurrences have also been important, but I would argue that in the distant future, when people look back at what happened in this century, they will find it difficult not to accord primacy to the emergence of democracy as the preeminently acceptable form of governance.
The idea of democracy originated, of course, in ancient Greece, more than two millennia ago. Piecemeal efforts at democratization were attempted elsewhere as well, including in India. But it is really in ancient Greece that the idea of democracy took shape and was seriously put into practice (albeit on a limited scale), before it collapsed and was replaced by more authoritarian and asymmetric forms of government. There were no other kinds anywhere else.
Thereafter, democracy as we know it took a long time to emerge. Its gradual -- and ultimately triumphant -- emergence as a working system of governance was bolstered by many developments, from the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, to the French and the American Revolutions in the eighteenth century, to the widening of the franchise in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. It was in the twentieth century, however, that the idea of democracy became established as the "normal" form of government to which any nation is entitled -- whether in Europe, America, Asia, or Africa.
The idea of democracy as a universal commitment is quite new, and it is quintessentially a product of the twentieth century. The rebels who forced restraint on the king of England through the Magna Carta saw the need as an entirely local one. In contrast, the American fighters for independence and the revolutionaries in France contributed greatly to an understanding of the need for democracy as a general system. Yet the focus of their practical demands remained quite local -- confined, in effect, to the two sides of the North Atlantic, and founded on the special economic, social, and political history of the region.
Throughout the nineteenth century, theorists of democracy found it quite natural to discuss whether one country or another was "fit for democracy." This thinking changed only in the twentieth century, with the recognition that the question itself was wrong: A country does not have to be deemed fit for democracy; rather, it has to become fit through democracy. This is indeed a momentous change, extending the potential reach of democracy to cover billions of people, with their varying histories and cultures and disparate levels of affluence.
It was also in this century that people finally accepted that "franchise for all adults" must mean all--not just men but also women. When in January of this year I had the opportunity to meet Ruth Dreyfuss, the president of Switzerland and a woman of remarkable distinction, it gave me occasion to recollect that only...
Described here is a new data set including all successful coups
d'état (80), failed coup attempts (108) and reported coup plots (139) for all 48 independent sub-Saharan African (SSA) states for the 46-year period from January 1956 until December 2001. Elite political instability (PI) in this form remains widespread in SSA, in contrast to other regions of the global South. Military-led PI has been shown to adversely affect economic growth and human development in SSA, and is a major cause of the current African ‘crisis’. The frequency of these instability events is given for each state for all 46 years and for the two periods 1956–79 and 1980–2001. A Total Military Intervention Score (TMIS) for each state is calculated and examined over time to explore trends in coup behaviour. The distribution of these events among major African regions is presented. Appendix A lists all coups and failed coups by state and date. Major findings are that military interventions have continued to be pervasive in Africa, despite democratisation trends since 1990; that coups, failed coups and coup plots form a syndrome of military-led PI; that colonial heritage is unrelated to coup activity; that the chance of success when launching a coup attempt has averaged more than 40% since 1958; that once a successful coup has occurred, military factionalism often leads to more coup behaviour; that except for a declining rate of success once a coup is undertaken, there is no major difference between 1956–79 and 1980–2001; that no trends of increasing or decreasing coup behaviour are evident, except that up to around 1975 as decolonisation progressed, TMIS also increased; and that West Africa is the predominant centre of coup activity in SSA, although all African regions have experienced coups. States that have been free of significant PI since 1990 are examined and those with institutionalised democratic traditions appear less prone to coups.
This article investigates the interactions between democracy, political stability and economic growth. Two aspects of the study differentiate it from previous research. First, a simultaneous approach is adopted which combines the study of economic growth and political stability with that of economic growth and democracy. Secondly, a distinction is made between types of political instability, because different kinds of government change have different effects on economic growth and democracy. This analysis employs three-stage least-squares estimation, and utilizes aggregate data covering ninety-six countries from 1960 to 1980. The results indicate that democracy has a positive indirect effect upon growth through its impacts on the probabilities of both regime change and constitutional government change from one ruling party to another. In addition, the evidence indicates that the two kinds of political change mentioned above have significant and opposite effects on growth; that growth has a negative effect on regime change and a positive effect on the probability of the ruling party remaining in power; and that long-run economic growth tends to exert a positive effect upon democracy.
Democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy. We argue that there are significant indirect effects of democracy on growth through public health and education. Where economists use life expectancy and education as proxies for human capital, we expect democracy will be an important determinant of the level of public services manifested in these indicators. In addition to whatever direct effect democracy may have on growth, we predict an important indirect effect through public policies that condition the level of human capital in different societies. We conduct statistical investigations into the direct and indirect effects of democracy on growth using a data set consisting of a 30-year panel of 128 countries. We find that democracy has no statistically significant direct effect on growth. Rather, we discover that the effect of democracy is largely indirect through increased life expectancy in poor countries and increased secondary education in nonpoor countries.
What effects does political democracy have on such development outcomes as economic growth and socioeconomic equality? Competing
theoretical models have been proposed that represent each of the possibilities: democracy as facilitating development, democracy
as a hindrance to development, and democracy as bearing no independent relationship to development outcomes. Each of these
theoretical models is explicated and, then, the evidence from quantitative, cross-national tests of the effects is reviewed.
Overall, the evidence provided by the approximately dozen studies for each outcome yields few robust conclusions with respect
to the theoretical models. To guide in the evaluation of the evidence, the studies are in turn distinguished by such design
characteristics as sample, period observed, measures used, and form of relationship specified. This procedure, while it does
not produce definitive support for any of the models, does assist in interpreting the results of past research as well as
generating fertile guidelines for future research.
Growth and democracy (subjective indexes of political freedom) are analyzed for a panel of about 100 countries from 1960 to 1990. The favorable effects on growth include maintenance of the rule of law, free markets, small government consumption, and high human capital. Once these kinds of variables and the initial level of real per capita GDP are held constant, the overall effect of democracy on growth is weakly negative. There is a suggestion of a nonlinear relationship in which more democracy enhances growth at low levels of political freedom but depresses growth when a moderate level of freedom has already been attained. Improvements in the standard of living—measured by GDP, health status, and education—substantially raise the probability that political freedoms will grow. These results allow for predictions about which countries will become more or less democratic over time.
This note presents a model of endogenous growth where redistribution, determined by a political equilibrium, is in the form of public education. It is shown that there need not be a negative relationship between growth and redistribution as public education increases the level of human capital in the conomy and, at the same time, tends to produce a more even income distribution.
Under anarchy, uncoordinated competitive theft by “roving bandits” destroys the incentive to invest and produce, leaving little for either the population or the bandits. Both can be better off if a bandit sets himself up as a dictator—a “stationary bandit” who monopolizes and rationalizes theft in the form of taxes. A secure autocrat has an encompassing interest in his domain that leads him to provide a peaceful order and other public goods that increase productivity. Whenever an autocrat expects a brief tenure, it pays him to confiscate those assets whose tax yield over his tenure is less than their total value. This incentive plus the inherent uncertainty of succession in dictatorships imply that autocracies will rarely have good economic performance for more than a generation. The conditions necessary for a lasting democracy are the same necessary for the security of property and contract rights that generates economic growth.
A new rationale is presented for why an elite may want to expand the franchise even in the absence of threats to the established
order. Expanding the franchise can turn politicians away from particularistic politics based on ad personam redistribution
within the elite and foster competition based on programs with diffuse benefits. If these programs are valuable, a majority
of the elite votes in favor of an extension of the franchise despite the absence of a threat from the disenfranchised. We
argue that the evolution of public spending and of political competition in nineteenth century Britain is consistent with
our model.
Authoritarianism, democracy and development. DLP State of the Art Working Paper
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