Populist Strategies in African Democracies

Drawing on insights from Latin America, this paper examines the factors that contributed to the use of populist strategies by political parties during recent presidential elections in Kenya, South Africa, and Zambia. Specifically, the paper argues that the nature of party competition in Africa, combined with rapid urbanization and informalization of the labour force, provided a niche for populist leaders to espouse a message relevant to the region’s growing urban poor. Simultaneously, such leaders employed ethno-linguistic appeals to mobilize a segment of rural voters who could form a minimum winning coalition in concert with the urban poor and thereby deliver sizeable electoral victories. While such strategies are similar to those used by Latin American populists, the paper highlights key contrasts as well. By combining crossregional and sub-national perspectives, this paper therefore aims to contribute to a better understanding of how demographic and socioeconomic changes in Africa intersect with voting behaviour and political party development.Africa, democratization, political parties, populism, urbanization, voting behaviour

Agricultural strategy development in West Africa: The false promise of participation?

"Participatory approaches are an increasingly prominent technique for designing agricultural strategies within Sub-Saharan Africa. However, such approaches are frequently criticized for either not involving enough stakeholders or limiting the scope of their participation. By analyzing the role of stakeholder participation in the formulation of agricultural and rural development strategies in West Africa, this paper finds that a lack of broad-based participation in these strategies was not a major problem. Rather, the real challenge lies in transforming the outcomes of participatory processes into policies that can be feasibly implemented. The paper highlights why an emphasis on participatory processes can sometimes result in disappointment among stakeholders and discusses a range of measures to help overcome this dilemma. " from authors' abstractAgricultural and rural development strategies, Policy process, Participation, Representative democracy, Governance,

Strategic analysis and knowledge support systems for rural development strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa

"While greater growth in agriculture and the broader rural sector is crucial for ameliorating Africa's high levels of poverty and malnutrition, developing strategies to achieve these objectives is hindered by a number of factors, including the broad array of interventions needed, the lack of accurate data, and dearth of trained local policy analysts. As such, this paper proposes a Strategic Analysis Knowledge Support System (SAKSS) in which data, tools, and knowledge are compiled, analyzed, and disseminated for the purposes of identifying a set of priority investment and policy options to promote agricultural growth and rural development. These analyses can in turn help inform the broader process of designing, implementing, and monitoring and evaluating a country's rural development strategy. In order to be an influential and sustainable part of this process and become a genuine "knowledge system," SAKSS will need to be established with an awareness of each country s development priorities and unique political, social, and economic context. By institutionalizing SAKSS through a network structure that includes government ministries, research institutions, universities, regional organizations, non-governmental organizations, and donors, SAKSS can become not only more relevant and legitimate for its intended end-users but also help strengthen local analytical capacity to inform the policy debate on future development strategies and outcomes." Authors' AbstractAgricultural growth ,Strategic analysis ,Development policies Africa, Sub-Saharan ,

Does good governance contribute to pro-poor growth?: a review of the evidence from cross-country studies

"Even though both “good governance” and “pro-poor growth” have become important concepts in development thinking and practice, studies that assess to which extent and how good governance contributes to pro-poor growth are still relatively scarce. After reviewing the two concepts, this paper develops a conceptual framework that specifies the linkages between different aspects of governance and pro-poor growth. Using this framework, the paper reviews a range of quantitative cross-country studies that include measures of governance as independent variables and focuses on the dependent variable in at least two of the three dimensions of pro-poor growth: poverty, inequality, and growth. The review shows that governance indicators that capture a sound decision-making environment for investment and policy implementation, such as political stability and rule of law, are associated with growth but provide mixed results in regard to poverty reduction. On the other hand, governance indicators that refer to transparent political systems, such as civil liberties and political freedom, tend to be conducive for poverty reduction, but the evidence is rather mixed, and the relationship of these variables with growth remains unclear. The paper discusses the methodological challenges inherent in this literature and suggests areas for future research." Authors' AbstractGovernance, Pro-poor growth, Cross-country studies, Growth-poverty linkages, Poverty reduction, Inequality, Decision-making,

Are electoral coalitions harmful for democratic consolidation in Africa?

Electoral coalitions are becoming increasingly popular among opposition parties in Africa because they offer many advantages with respect to reducing party fragmentation and increasing incumbent turnovers. At the same time, however, they are often comprised of parties that are defined predominantly by their leaders' personalities and exhibit little differentiation in terms of their policy orientation. Based on a dataset spanning all opposition coalitions since 2000 in Africa's electoral democracies, this paper demonstrates not only that coalitions rarely defeat incumbents but also that they are only competitive when major opposition parties are involved. More significantly, the paper highlights that in many countries, a sizeable share of total electoral volatility is due to fluctuations in voting for opposition parties that have belonged to coalitions. The paper argues that such volatility reflects the inability of coalition members to build loyal constituency bases over time, which is critical for party development and broader consolidation

Populist strategies in African democracies

Drawing on insights from Latin America, this paper examines the factors that contributed to the use of populist strategies by political parties during recent presidential elections in Kenya, South Africa, and Zambia. Specifically, the paper argues that the nature of party competition in Africa, combined with rapid urbanization and informalization of the labour force, provided a niche for populist leaders to espouse a message relevant to the region's growing urban poor. Simultaneously, such leaders employed ethno-linguistic appeals to mobilize a segment of rural voters who could form a minimum winning coalition in concert with the urban poor and thereby deliver sizeable electoral victories. While such strategies are similar to those used by Latin American populists, the paper highlights key contrasts as well. By combining cross-regional and sub-national perspectives, this paper therefore aims to contribute to a better understanding of how demographic and socioeconomic changes in Africa intersect with voting behaviour and political party development

Foreign aid in Africa: Tracing channels of influence on democratic transitions and consolidation

How does aid impact democracy in sub-Saharan Africa? Drawing on existing literature, this study elaborates on the various channels, direct and indirect, through which development and democracy aid has influenced transitions to multi-party regimes and democratic consolidation within the region. The study's findings are at least threefold. First, development aid was effective at promoting democratic transitions during the 1990s in those African countries that were beset by economic crisis, faced domestic discontent, or possessed a high dependence on aid, as well as when major donors took concerted action. Second, development and democracy aid demonstrate disparate effects on key elements of consolidation, including the avoidance of democratic erosion, the enhancement of accountability, and the promotion of competitive party systems. Development aid's most direct influence is with respect to preventing democratic backsliding, though this is often done in an inconsistent manner. Democracy aid plays a more direct role with respect to enhancing accountability and party systems but, its cumulative impact remains hindered by the dispersion of assistance across different activities and its temporal focus on elections. Third, in some areas of consolidation, the disparate objectives of development and democracy aid create clear trade-offs that remain unresolved

Personalistic policy-making in a vibrant democracy: Senegal's fragmented response to the 2007/08 food price crisis

Since independence, Senegal has been highly reliant on international markets to meet its food needs, and this tendency has only increased with rapid levels of urbanization in recent decades. Poor domestic cereal harvests prior to 2007 exacerbated this import-dependence during a time of high global food prices, resulting in the cost of rice increasing by more than 100 per cent between January 2007 and September 2008. At various points of time during this period, the government responded by suspending customs duties and value added taxes, providing consumer subsidies and other modes of social protection, and launching a high-profile agricultural initiative. The timing, nature, and implementation of these interventions hindered their ability to more effectively tackle the crisis. This paper argues that the policies which emerged reflected the confluence of a strong, diverse civil society placing disparate pressures on a government increasingly centralized around the personality and populist impulses of the former president, Abdoulaye Wade. Consequently, many of the policies were short-term and reactionary, insufficiently targeted, and generated a high level of distrust between consumers and traders. Given that Senegal still remains vulnerable to future food price crises, learning from these policy mistakes should be a key priority for the new government of president Macky Sall

Smallholder African agriculture

In contrast to uniformly pessimistic assessments about Sub-Saharan Africa's (hereafter Africa) ability to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), this paper examines recent trends in poverty, malnutrition, and growth to delineate where the challenges are the greatest within the entire region and sub-region and to highlight informative cases of success in specific countries. The performance of agriculture, especially smallholder agriculture, receives particular attention due to its role in sustaining the livelihoods of a majority of Africa's poor. In recent years, the importance of smallholder agriculture has been greatly recognized, demonstrated by both African governments and the donor community pledging to engage in the requisite interventions for generating agricultural growth. By seizing on this new enthusiasm and learning from case studies of smallholder successes, agriculture could significantly contribute to Africa's ability to meet the MDGs.Millenium Development goal ,

The political participation of Africa's youth: Turnout, partisanship, and protest

The youth have long represented an important constituency for electoral mobilization in Africa. Today, as the region faces a growing 'youth bulge' that is disproportionately burdened by un- and underemployment, capturing the votes of this demographic is becoming more important than ever before. Yet, despite their numerical importance and the historical relevance of generational identities within the region, very little is really known about the political participation of Africa's youth. In order to address this issue, we combine country-level variables for 19 of Africa's most democratic countries with individual-level public opinion data from Afrobarometer survey data. A series of binomial and multinomial logit models are estimated on three key outcome variables: voter turnout in last elections, closeness to political party; and participation in protests. In comparison with older citizens, we find that Africa's youth tend to vote less and express a lower level of partisanship, which is consistent with findings for the youth in other regions of the world. However, Africa's youth are not more likely to protest than older citizens. Collectively, these findings cast doubt that the youth are more likely to turn to the street when they are disgruntled but question the legitimacy of the electoral process as a meaningful conduit for conveying the preferences of Africa's youth