Abstract: This article reconsiders the relationship between authoritarian elections and democratization. Examining legislative elections in the Middle East, it argues that elections are best understood as "competitive clientelism," a competition between elites over privileged access to a limited set of state resources that they can then distribute to their clients. This drives the behavior of voters and candidates in systematic ways that promote proregime parliaments and allow incumbent elites to manage elections largely through institutional rules rather than extralegal manipulation. The article concludes by considering mechanisms that may more effectively help to foster democratization, given the logic of authoritarian elections.
Conflict across African states has often been linked to ethnic-based biases in government, and exclusive policies. However, the domestic politics of developing states, and the elites who contest for power therein, have often been overlooked when explaining the patterns and risk of disorder and violence. We consider how African leaders practice politics in whom to represent, and at what level. These choices have consequences as how regimes accommodate political elites creates different competitive conditions which, in turn, create incentives and opportunities for political violence. Using a dataset on cabinet appointments over twenty years, we find that high levels of elite political inclusion and mal-apportionment in positions is consistently associated with increases in non-state violence. Power distribution levels among those groups included in senior positions account for more political violence than that which stems from exclusive politics.
AbstractConflict across African states has often been linked to ethnic-based biases in government, and exclusive policies. However, the domestic politics of developing states, and the elites who contest for power therein, have often been overlooked when explaining the patterns and risk of disorder and violence. We consider how African leaders practice politics in whom to represent, and at what level. These choices have consequences as how regimes accommodate political elites creates different competitive conditions which, in turn, create incentives and opportunities for political violence. Using a dataset on cabinet appointments over twenty years, we find that high levels of elite political inclusion and mal-apportionment in positions is consistently associated with increases in non-state violence. Power distribution levels among those groups included in senior positions account for more political violence than that which stems from exclusive politics.
Ghana's Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) cash transfer programme has been widely characterised as 'home grown'. This article challenges such accounts of the LEAP by showing how donors used their financial muscle to shape the LEAP both at the level of programme adoption and implementation. However, the extent to which donor interests and ideas influenced the programme's design and implementation depended on the degree to which such interests were aligned with those of domestic political elites. While it was donors who first pushed cash transfers on the agenda of the Ghanaian government, electoral calculus took centre stage in driving the programme's subsequent expansion and institutionalisation. The article suggests the need to move beyond the donor-driven versus state-led type of arguments to explore the complex ways in which transnational factors and the formal and informal aspects of domestic politics interact to produce different levels and types of commitment to social protection in Africa.
Ghana has exhibited rather strong economic growth since the 1980s, but little transformation of the productive structure of its economy. The paper argues that ruling elites' policy choices are shaped by their political survival strategies. In turn, these strategies are shaped by (1) the characteristics of the ruling coalitions, which include a high degree of vulnerability in power, strong lower-level factions of the ruling coalition, and a substantial amount of fragmentation among the higher factions of the ruling coalition; (2) the weak capabilities and political influence of the nascent productive capitalists; and (3) easy access to financing for the state and the ruling coalition from foreign aid, mining and cocoa bean exports. As a result, ruling elites' policy actions did not prioritize the development of new productive sectors (or upgrading of old ones), but were geared towards delivering benefits to the higher and lower levels of the ruling coalition, as well as delivering a small amount of visible goods and services to as much of the population as possible in an effort to 'swing' voters their way at election time. Neither of these political survival strategies resulted in significant productive sector investments.
The success of Kenya's garment export sector relative to other African countries challenges a growing pessimism regarding the prospects of devising and implementing industrial policy in contemporary Africa, particularly in contexts characterized by Competitive Clientelism. Kenya became sub-Saharan Africa's fourth largest exporter of garments by value during the last two decades, catching up with major players like Lesotho and South Africa while converging on the two largest exporters, Mauritius and Madagascar. Nuancing existing explanations for the sector's growth, which emphasize external factors like trade regimes and donor interventions, this article assigns a central role to the state and the balance of power that underpins it. The interests of key actors within Kenya's political settlement aligned in a way that allowed the country's Export Processing Zones (EPZ) programme to be relatively insulated from political pressures, giving the Export Processing Zones Authority (EPZA) sufficient autonomy and coordination capacities to administer a highly-conducive business environment for predominantly foreign garment firms. However, while the sector's employment and foreign exchange contributions have ensured ongoing political support, the resulting increase in garment firms' holding power has made them more assertive in demanding policies that are not only decoupled from learning processes, but detrimental to other industry players.
This article examines how parties use clientelism in competitive and uncompetitive electoral environments. It argues that parties enjoy wide discretion to target clientelistic payoffs to inexpensive voters in their strongholds, but that head-to-head competition compels them to bid for more expensive voters. Empirically, it uses a list experiment embedded in a postelection survey to study electoral clientelism in Lebanon, a country with a mix of competitive and uncompetitive electoral districts. It finds respondents underreport clientelistic transactions by a factor of two. Proxies for the cost of a vote explain payoff targeting decisions in party strongholds, but lose their explanatory power in the competitive districts.
The dominant literature on Cambodian politics over the past two decades suggested that a mixture of elite and mass clientelism had enabled the hegemonic Cambodian People's Party (CPP) to rule via competitive but authoritarian elections, while lessening its previous reliance on repression and violence. Such explanations did not predict the upswing in contestation in the country in 2013 and thereafter. Neither do they account for the crackdown that followed. Following literature that draws attention to the tensions in building and maintaining political coalitions under authoritarianism, and demonstrating the difficulties in maintaining competitive authoritarianism over time, this article draws attention to structural, institutional, and distributional impediments to the CPP leadership in building and maintaining effective reciprocal relations with electoral clients while simultaneously balancing the interests of the military and other elites at the core of the regime. To make its argument, the article compares weaknesses in the CPP's electoral clientelism with the effectiveness of patronage within the security forces, seen through the lens of Cambodia's experience of land dispossession. It shows that an extractive and exclusive political economy privileged the interests of regime insiders over potential mass electoral clients precisely during the same period the CPP was supposed to be securing its hold on power via mass electoral clientelism. This further explains why the regime fell back on repression over reform in response to the upswing in contestation manifest from 2013, and why, despite the failings of its mass patronage project, repression has nevertheless been successful as a strategy for regime survival during a period of heightened popular contestation. (Pac Aff/GIGA)
