Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: While it is widely recognized that electoral competition can have a major influence on public spending decisions, there has been little effort to consider whether the move to multiparty elections in African countries in recent years has led to a redistribution of public expenditures between social groups. This is a question relevant both for debates about African politics and for broader discussions about the effect of democratic institutions on policy outcomes. I develop a hypothesis, illustrated with a simple game-theoretic model, which suggests that the need to obtain an electoral majority may have prompted African governments to devote greater resources to primary schools. I test this proposition using panel data on electoral competition and education spending in thirty-five African countries. The results show that democratization has indeed been associated with greater spending on primary education, and that governments subject to electoral competition have shifted resources towards primary schools, away from other items in the education budget. These findings are robust to controls for unobserved country effects, and they are also supported by evidence from recent country cases.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the institutionalized legacies of former military versus single party authoritarian regimes in Africa?s newly evolving multi-party systems. The paper argues that the forms of authority, capacity and incorporation of opposition involved in military systems differed from those in single party systems, which conditions the available options to the incumbent regimes as democratization pressures mounted. Field research in four African countries provides data for the hypothesis that former military regimes democratize into less institutionalized multi-party systems, due to the strategic options to maximize incumbency versus dismantling the existing system to face the transition to democratic rule.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The aim of this paper was to reflect and identify the agents of the demise of multiparty politics and democratization in Côte d’Ivoire between 1990 and 1999. Following a historical and paradigmatic approach, the paper articulated two points: 1) that multiparty politics and democratization caused political instability in Côte d’Ivoire and 2) that the political parties, political leadership, and masses failed to re-invent a new political consensual culture to deal with the post-1990 exigencies of multiparty politics. Taking the political behaviors, discourses, and ideologies that prevailed between 1990 and 1999 as variables of analysis, the paper concluded that the transformation of political institutions and structures was achieved without political actors committing to provide a political education that would empower the masses and erase the impact of ethnicity, corruption, and militarization. In fact, the paper concludes that the multiparty and democracy project failed in Côte d’Ivoire because of the prevalence of the one-party culture.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines the transformation of India’s party system fromdominance by the Indian National Congress Party to a competitivemultiparty format since 1989. The recent literature has highlighted theimportance of processes of economic decentrali