Can democratic elections reduce rent extraction by public decision makers? Existing research suggests that reelection incentives can reduce the embezzlement of public funds. This paper examines three additional mechanisms through which democratic elections could have an impact on embezzlement, even in the absence of reelection incentives: (1) electoral selection effects, (2) social norms and norm enforcement, and (3) citizens' trust in decision makers. Evidence from an experiment with 472 groups of citizens in rural Burkina Faso suggests that electoral selection favors benevolent candidates. Furthermore, elections increase citizens' willingness to punish corrupt decision makers, even if their ability to do so remains unchanged. However, these beneficial effects of elections are offset by an unexpected adverse effect: elections cause citizens to trust decision makers more than they should be trusted. These findings have important implications for the role of information in electoral democracy.
When public goods are co-produced by citizens and public authorities, problems of free riding and problems of provider accountability frequently coincide. How are voluntary contributions to a public good sustained when they are vulnerable to rent extraction by a third party? In a laboratory experiment, I test whether contributions in a public goods dilemma can be decentrally enforced through costly, mutual sanctioning capacity, even if the contributions can be misappropriated by a third party. I find that costly sanctioning capacity among the beneficiaries of a public good can substantially reduce free riding, without increasing the rate at which contributions are misappropriated by the provider. However, this effect can be undermined if mutual sanctioning capacity exists between the third-party provider and the beneficiaries. Contrary to existing predictions, social sanctioning relationships which both embed the provider and encompass the beneficiaries of a public good are not associated with greater, but partly with lower public goods provision than sanctioning relationships which are only embedding or encompassing.
Motivation: Budget support is the form of aid most commonly associated with recipient‐country ownership. However, a number of scholars and practitioners have criticized the approach as masking new forms of conditionality. Was budget support simply a guise for increasing donor influence in recipient countries? How can we explain the rapid shift towards budget support, as well as the rapid decline in its popularity after only a few years? Purpose: We use a bargaining framework to explain the rise and fall of budget support. Contrary to explanations that suggest that budget support was a normative decision by donors designed to increase aid effectiveness by fostering ownership, a bargaining framework emphasizes that aid policy is the result of sustained negotiations between donors and recipients. These negotiations, however, are constrained by donors' inability to deliver aid as promised. Approach: We use a Nash bargaining framework to formalize the predictions of a bargaining model. From the model, two testable predictions emerge: (1) in exchange for more credible commitments, recipient governments are willing to selectively offer donor agencies greater access to and influence over domestic policy decision-making; and (2) in exchange for such influence, donor agencies are willing to exert less pressure on recipients to be politically inclusive. We then test the implications of the model using case‐study evidence from Rwanda and Tanzania. Findings: The empirical data, based on over 80 interviews with practitioners over several periods of research in both countries, provide substantial evidence in support of the model's core assumptions and predictions. Contrary to claims that budget support increased recipient‐country ownership, interviews (identified as personal communications) suggest that, in exchange for more credible commitments, recipient governments were willing to grant donors greater access and influence. In return, donor agencies reduced demands on the recipient government regarding political inclusivity, tacitly accepting arrangements that centralized decision‐making and excluded civil society. When donor agencies could no longer provide budget support as promised, these negotiated arrangements broke down. Policy Implications: The findings challenge a common narrative that donors embraced budget support because of a normative commitment to ownership. They also demonstrate the value of a bargaining framework. To understand why particular forms of aid, like budget support, rise in popularity only to quickly fall by the wayside, we need to understand what donor agencies and recipient governments bargain over and why.
"Die Kernthese dieses Beitrags lautet, dass die momentan zu beobachtende Verringerung der Problemlösungsfähigkeit der Partnerschaftspolitik zwischen Russland und den EU-Staaten keine zwangsläufige Entwicklungslinie darstellt, sondern ihre Ursache zu großen Teilen in der unterschiedlichen Perzeption und Interpretation politischer Vorgänge und dabei besonders in der irrationalen Festlegung der russischen Regierung auf eine bestimmte Weltsicht hat. Durch die gemeinsame Erarbeitung alternativer Deutungsangebote für die Politik in den latenten Problembereichen ließe sich daher die Kluft in den politischen Auffassungen überwinden und die Problemlösungsfähigkeit der Partnerschaftspolitik erhöhen, wenn dabei die innenpolitischen Zwänge, unter denen die politische Elite in Russland steht, ausreichend berücksichtigt würden." (Autorenreferat)
The swift rise of military juntas in the Sahel, their alignment with Russia, and their adept use of anti-colonial and anti-French rhetoric have left many in Europe grappling for answers. Was Europe's engagement in the Sahel in vain? How should Europe position itself vis-à-vis the new military regimes?
The withdrawal of European engagement in the Sahel has fuelled narratives of sovereignty and anti-colonial emancipation. However, the populist rhetoric of the military juntas masks a more complex reality: they govern fragile states, with the social order in flux. Their power is tenuous, hinging on fleeting public support and the acquiescence of elites.
The military juntas continue to enjoy significant public support. Their support is driven by a combination of populism, militarism, conflict aversion, and sheer desperation. However, beyond the hard-to-fulfil promise of regaining control over the security situation, the military juntas have little to offer to society. If public dissatisfaction grows, they have to choose between ramping up repression or eventually relinquishing power.
While African societies have not lost their preference for democracy, public opinion has become more divided. Unconditional support for democracy is nowhere near the supermajority it was a few years ago, but it is still dominant in all Sahel countries except for Mali.
Within just one year, the world witnessed the collapse of elected governments in Mali, Afghanistan, and Guinea. While the power grabs by military juntas in Mali and Guinea and by the Taliban in Afghanistan caused fear among the respective populations, many citizens were also willing to acquiesce to the overtaking forces, because the deposed civilian governments were perceived as failing and corrupt. These developments highlight important lessons about government legitimacy in fragile states. There is more to government legitimacy than elections. The holding of elections alone often does not suffice to render a government legitimate in the eyes of citizens. Questionable or botched elections can do more harm than good to government legitimacy. In weak and fragile states, governments cannot rely on citizens' acceptance of state institutions to legitimate their authority. They must find alternative ways to continually legitimate their rule in the eyes of citizens. Insights from Burkina Faso suggest that government legitimacy can be improved by addressing problems of state-society relations. Even in communities that have very strained relations with the state, most citizens actually desire greater state presence and would be willing to give state institutions and security forces the benefit of the doubt - if they were perceived to be doing more to protect people's safety and livelihoods. If the conditions are right, local governments can play a crucial role in mitigating the central state's deficient capacity and legitimacy. In some areas, local governments are the most powerful and legitimate political actors in citizens' lives. In dealing with governments that are deficient in legitimacy, international actors should be guided by a careful analysis of state-society relations. Calls for rapid elections are no panacea, and elected governments should not automatically be considered legitimate representatives of society. Instead, international actors should focus on identifying and supporting societal changes that are prerequisites for more legitimate governance.
Since the Northern Mali war of 2012, the Sahel countries have seen substantial international aid and military involvement. Yet, the region is more fragile than ever. As jihadist groups have established themselves throughout Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, violence has escalated dramatically and states have been pushed to the brink of collapse. In August 2020, after weeks of public unrest, Mali's government was toppled by a military coup. There is a palpable need to rethink international engagement in the Sahel region. Policymakers in Africa and Europe must realise that governments are involved in asymmetric conflicts that they cannot win militarily. Parts of the Sahel will remain ungovernable for the foreseeable future. As the situation takes a growing toll on societies, state legitimacy and social order are eroding. National policy and international assistance risk doing further damage, by narrowly focusing on counterterrorism, by taking sides in local conflicts, and by fuelling corruption through ill-designed development programmes. To prevent these unintended consequences, policymakers should adopt a holistic understanding of the Sahel crisis that explicitly considers the risks and consequences of military and development interventions. Governments and their international partners still lack coherent strategies to mitigate the impacts of violent jihadism on states and societies, to strengthen state-society relations and to address growing intercommunal violence. International involvement, including military assistance, is necessary to stop the spiral of violence and counter state fragility in the Sahel region. However, it must be centred on the objective of strengthening state-society relations. Preventing abuses against civilians and advocating for profound security-sector reform should be top priorities. Governments must begin to address growing injustices and economic grievances at the local level, to prevent further intercommunal violence. At the same time, targeted strategies need to be developed to undermine jihadists' recruitment strategies, intimidation tactics, revenue streams, and internal cohesion.
Despite the rise of multiparty democracy, many African governments still struggle to control corruption and to improve the legitimacy of the state. To promote better governance, international development assistance supports ambitious reform agendas and idealistic models of governance. However, these programmes and interventions frequently misunderstand the realities of governance in weak and fragile states. Corruption and patronage are usually not clandestine, but highly visible. It is not a lack of information or awareness that keeps citizens from holding their governments accountable, but a lack of effective and legitimate channels for public dissent. In many countries, elite networks continue to protect their members as they violate laws - and also expect them to bend formal rules to advance the interests of their group. Public participation can only contribute to government legitimacy if it has a genuine impact on political decisions. However this is often not the case, because elites have little to gain from building political consensus or aggregating competing interests into collectively rational decisions. Decentralisation reforms result in the proliferation of local-level institutions, but fail to bring the state closer to the people. Most African states have never had strong control over peripheral territories, and have relied on informal gatekeepers and traditional authorities to access local populations. Neither central governments nor local gatekeepers have strong incentives to cede real authority to local-level political institutions. Well-intentioned reform programmes fail to have the desired effects, because they attempt to change the political reality to conform to idealised conceptions of governance. Governance reforms might be more successful if they focus instead on reducing the contradictions between formal institutions and informal practices in weak and fragile states. To this end, development organisations should actively engage in research and innovation.
Socio-economic and political developments in sub-Saharan Africa remain a mixed bag. While crises and structural problems occupy our attention, other developments justify a more optimistic outlook: relations between countries on the continent as well as with Europe and other world regions show signs of hope and improvement. We present a selective list and analysis of "ten things to watch" in Africa in 2020. Elections and democratisation: The year ahead will be one of high-risk elections in many African countries, of which five arguably stand out: Burkina Faso, Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, and Guinea. "Explosive" elections are often connected to contested term limits for presidents. Peace and security: As in previous years, challenges emerge from ever-present power struggles as well as from contested elections, weak states, conflicts between identity groups, and - particularly in West and East Africa - jihadism. The latter poses the biggest challenge in the Sahel, where international support has simultaneously become both more important and more difficult. Socio-economic development: While many structural problems persist, there are signs for winds of change. Regional economic integration projects such as the African Continental Free Trade Area and the common currency, eco, in West Africa advance, and legal obstacles to more equal gender relations are increasingly being called into question. In times of global confrontations between the United States, China, and other countries, "trade wars" provide threats but also opportunities for Africa. As a member of the United Nations Security Council and assuming the EU presidency, Germany's involvement in African affairs will be greater than usual in 2020. African and external actors, such as the European Union, should act early to mitigate conflict risks, especially with regard to high-stakes elections in several countries and to contain the spread of jihadist violence. Reform efforts require strong but prudent international support, so they can survive domestic political pushback.
Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives' performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.
Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives' performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.
Voters may be unable to hold politicians to account if they lack basic information about their representatives' performance. Civil society groups and international donors therefore advocate using voter information campaigns to improve democratic accountability. Yet, are these campaigns effective? Limited replication, measurement heterogeneity, and publication biases may undermine the reliability of published research. We implemented a new approach to cumulative learning, coordinating the design of seven randomized controlled trials to be fielded in six countries by independent research teams. Uncommon for multisite trials in the social sciences, we jointly preregistered a meta-analysis of results in advance of seeing the data. We find no evidence overall that typical, nonpartisan voter information campaigns shape voter behavior, although exploratory and subgroup analyses suggest conditions under which informational campaigns could be more effective. Such null estimated effects are too seldom published, yet they can be critical for scientific progress and cumulative, policy-relevant learning.
