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This article investigates accountability in South Africa's dominant party system by studying how the African National Congress (ANC) reacts to electoral incentives at the local level. It compares the ANC's degree of responsiveness to voters across municipalities with different levels of political competition. The analysis focuses on whether and under which conditions the ANC is more likely to renominate better quality municipal councillors. It examines the relationship between renomination as ANC municipal councillor and local government performance – as measured by voter signals, service delivery and audit outcomes. The results show that the ANC does indeed adapt its behaviour to electoral incentives. In municipalities where the ANC has larger margins of victory, performance matters little for renomination. In contrast, in municipalities with higher electoral competition, local government performance is strongly correlated with renomination. These results suggest the need to expand dominant party research to topics of voter responsiveness and sub-national behaviour.

Parlamentswahlen in arabischen Autokratien bieten wenig Überraschungen. Das gilt auch für die marokkanischen Wahlen vom 7. September 2007. Nicht erwartet hatte man jedoch, dass die islamistische Partei für Gerechtigkeit und Entwicklung (Parti de la Justice et du Développement - PJD) nur als zweitstärkste Kraft aus den Wahlen hervorging. Zweifelsohne wurde in einigen europäischen Hauptstädten aufgeatmet: Europäische Politik wird sich in den kommenden fünf Jahren nicht mit einem islamistischen marokkanischen Premierminister auseinandersetzen müssen. Doch ist damit weder das »islamistische Problem« in Marokko gelöst, noch sind die Wahlen ein Fortschritt in Richtung Demokratisierung. Es ist an der Zeit, die europäische Politik gegenüber den Islamisten und dem marokkanischen Regime zu überdenken. (SWP-aktuell / SWP)

Postconflict reconstruction programmes often aim to improve state–society relations but fail to spell out the underlying process. We specify a mechanism that links aid programmes through (1) short-term and (2) medium-term improvements in basic services and (3) subjective progress to (4) perceptions of the state and spell four conditions (quality, sustainability, magnitude and attribution to the state) that must be met for this process to occur. We use this framework to evaluate a large-scale reconstruction programme in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). We find that the programme improved basic services in the short term and midterm and positively affected beneficiaries' subjective well-being. However, we do not find evidence that aid benefits have translated into political trust towards state institutions—on the contrary, project villages display slightly more negative attitudes than control villages. We suggest that this is due to lack of attribution of the improvements to the state that which was included in the selection phase but largely absent in the implementation. This implies that improved services can erode state legitimacy when citizens interpret the provision by nonstate actors as a signal of the state's inability or unwillingness to provide these services.

Electoral politics in the Arab world are either portrayed as clientelistic affairs void of content or as highly ideological clashes between Islamist and Secular Left forces. Although both arguments are intuitively appealing, the empirical evidence to date is limited. This article seeks to contribute to the debate by investigating the extent of programmatic voter support for Islamist and Secular Left parties in seven Arab countries with data from recent surveys by the Arab Barometer, Afrobarometer and World Values Survey. Ideological congruence between voters and parties exists but is limited to the Islamist–Secular core divide with regard to the role of religion in politics and gender values. In contrast, there are virtually no differences in economic attitudes between respondents and there is no evidence of class-based voting, with Islamist and Secular Left parties sharing the same voter base of better-off, more educated voters. Core results are robust across surveys.