FR2.3: Women's Voices in Civil Society Organizations: Evidence from a Civil Society Mapping Project in Mali

How does women's engagement in civil society organizations (CSOs) differ from that of men, and what factors predict women's willingness to hold the state accountable? We analyze these questions in the context of rural and urban Mali, leveraging face-to-face data collected as part of a civil society mapping project during February-March 2020 and December 2020, and an in-depth survey conducted with leaders from a randomly-selected subset of these CSOs during January -- March 2021. First, we explore the characteristics of women's groups compared to other CSOs. Second, we explore their likelihood of sanctioning a hypothetical corrupt mayor. We use an embedded survey experiment to try to understand these groups' willingness to report on the mayor. We find that women in Mali are often highly organized at the local level with great mobilization capacity than men--frequently in self-help groups or organizations related to gendered economic activities. However, they are not typically recognized by outside actors; their strong networks and group infrastructure represent untapped social capital. CSOs comprised of women have lower informational and technical capacity, including lower levels of political knowledge, and incur a higher cost of sanctioning public officials. Women are generally less willing than men to sanction, but become more likely when their CSO is less hierarchical, when their technical capacity is higher, and when their political knowledge is greater. However, priming their importance as a CSO (by telling them they were identified by well-connected citizens as influential) reduces sanctioning--perhaps by making them fear reprisals from recommenders

Review of Alice Kang, \u3ci\u3eBargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy\u3c/i\u3e

In Alice Kang’s Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy, readers are introduced to the contentious debates about the inclusion of women’s rights policy in Niger. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork, the author provides a vivid exploration of domestic politics as the Muslim-majority state negotiates its transition to democracy. Kang shows that political actors adopt some women’s rights policy, while simultaneously rejecting comparable legislation on women’s rights. This book offers an important step forward for research trajectories that seriously consider domestic determinants of policy outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa, but also Muslim-majority democracies more broadly

Schooling Citizens: Education, Citizenship, And Democracy In Mali

: This dissertation draws on original data, including a survey of 1000 citizens, to demonstrate the effect of different types of education on political knowledge and political participation in a nascent, African democracy. I find that any level of education, even informal and Islamic education, is positively and significantly correlated with higher levels of political knowledge as compared to having attend no school at all. I find that formal education, particularly at the secondary and university level, is significantly correlated with higher levels of political participation in difficult activities: campaigning, willingness to run for office, and contacting a government official. I argue that education contributes to political knowledge and participation by building citizens‟ sense of internal efficacy, and that the highest levels of education can endow citizens with French literacy - a key component of full political empowerment. Additionally, I identify a positive, significant correlation between parents who enroll(ed) their children in public school, and certain forms of electoral participation, as compared to other Malian citizens. I find a negative, significant correlation between madrassa consumers and voting as compared to any other citizens. I argue that state schooling, as a social service, can foster voting among parents of students through policy feedback mechanisms; however, any form of Francophone schooling contributes to a family‟s ability to participate in politics by endowing them with a linguistic broker. i

Parties and Issues in Francophone West Africa: Towards a Theory of Non-Mobilization

This paper builds a theory about electoral discourse in Africa and the salience of political issues since the return of competitive elections in the early 1990s, based on empirical materials from recent elections in Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Senegal, six roughly similar semi-democratic francophone states in West Africa, which have conducted a least one reasonably free and fair election since the early 1990s. Drawing on content analysis from newspapers, the electronic press, party websites, as well as interviews and secondary sources on elections in these countries, we formulate two empirical arguments; first, issues do in fact captivate and potentially mobilize African voters. Our survey of the subregion suggests that politics is more substantive than generally credited. Second, however, we argue that political parties in the subregion fail to mobilize citizens along many of these issues, for two primary reasons. First, we hypothesize that the shared values and identities of political actors emerging during third wave transitions in the region shaped conceptions of what constitutes democratic politics. For the most part, the world view of Francophone, secular, elites have come to dominate political discourse, restricting the types of issues that could be incorporated into formal politics. Secondly, we employ the concept of issue-ownership to explain why opposition parties have difficulty mobilizing voters with programmatic rhetoric, and shy away from other issues, despite their vote-mobilizing potential

Replication Data for: Capturing the Airwaves, Capturing the Nation? A Field Experiment on State-Run Media Effects in the Wake of a Coup

Investigating the media's effect on citizens immediately after a non-democratic regime transition has thus far remained elusive to scholars, despite the frequency of such transitions. This study examines the effect of putschist-controlled broadcasting in the wake of Mali's 2012 coup and separatist insurgency. We leverage a field experiment of a radio (versus flashlight) distribution program in an area where citizens' only form of mass media is state-run radio. The putschists waged a campaign infused with nationalism to attempt to legitimize their rule. We find that, while radio exposure boosted national identity salience and willingness to delay elections, it did not elevate explicit approval for the junta---which suggests non-democratic regimes are less able to win approval using state broadcasting than previously thought, even while such broadcasting may affect citizens' attitudes and identity

When will civil society sanction the state? Evidence from Mali

Under what conditions will civil society organizations (CSOs) sanction corruption (the private use of public funds)? CSOs have overcome coordination problems, but could either use this capacity to hold government accountable for public goods provision or to extract rents from politicians. We develop a model and test its predictions using a face-to-face survey with 1,014 CSO leaders from 48 communes in Mali. We describe a forthcoming performance-based funding program (PBF) providing a formal channel for civil society monitors to sanction mayoral corruption: they influence whether or not mayors receive a performance bonus. We ask CSO leaders their likelihood of sanctioning known corruption under the program and their expected transfer price if they instead enter into a collusive bargain. We find that CSOs most embedded in the community are best able to extract informal transfers from the mayor and least likely to sanction. By contrast, CSOs with high technical and informational capacity are most likely to sanction

Malian Crisis and the Lingering Problem of Good Governance

This article draws on an original survey of 892 displaced persons in Bamako and Mopti/Sevare right before the 2013 presidential elections, which ushered Mali back into multi-party democracy. Our data demonstrates their prioritization of good governance reform as an important solution for the Malian crisis. We then leverage public opinion polling between 2014 and 2015 in Bamako to evaluate how far the government has come in good governance reform. We demonstrate Malians’ dissatisfaction with the government’s efforts to reduce corruption as well as concerns about instability in the capital