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Recent empirical evidence suggests that Chinese development finance may be particularly prone to elite capture and patronage spending. If aid ends up in the pockets of political elites and their ethno-regional networks, this may exacerbate ethnic grievances and contribute to ethnic mobilization. The present paper examines whether Chinese development projects make local ethnic identities more salient in African partner countries. A new geo-referenced dataset on the subnational allocation of Chinese development finance projects to Africa is geographically matched with survey data for 50,520 respondents from 11 African countries. The identification strategy consists in comparing sites where a Chinese project was under implementation at the time of the interview to sites where a Chinese project will appear subsequently. The empirical results indeed suggest that living near an ongoing Chinese project makes ethnic identities more salient. There is no indication of an equivalent pattern when considering development projects of other donors.

In many African countries it is a known fact that a person belonging to the same ethnic group as the president is less likely to be treated unfairly by the government. The same is valid for people living in the president's home region, regardless of their ethnic affiliation. Ethnic and regional favouritism are two distinct but parallel problems. This Policy Note, drawn from data involving 20 000 citizens in 15 African countries, explore the scope of favouritism and its implications for citizens and democratic attitudes.

This paper aims to examine the role of individual resources in explaining African political participation. If political participation is costly and requires inputs in terms of individual resources, and citizens in young developing country democracies face comparatively high participation costs and have more limited individual resource endowments than citizens in more established democracies, a resource approach to political participation should be particularly relevant in the African setting. On the contrary, however, empirical findings drawing on recent data for more than 27,000 respondents in 20 emerging African democracies suggest weak explanatory power of the resource perspective. Often, the relatively resource poor actually participate to a greater extent than the more resource rich. The results are encouraging in that they suggest fairly broad-based political participation, but also call attention to the need to evaluate the motivational forces behind the decision to take part. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]