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| 1 |
ID:
186701
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| Summary/Abstract |
Awareness-raising messages feature prominently in most anticorruption strategies. Yet, there has been limited systematic research into their efficacy. There is growing concern that anticorruption awareness-raising efforts may be backfiring; instead of encouraging citizens to resist corruption, they may be nudging them to “go with the corrupt grain.” This study offers a first test of the effect of anticorruption messaging on ordinary people’s behavior. A household-level field experiment, conducted with a representative sample in Lagos, Nigeria, is used to test whether exposure to five different messages about (anti)corruption influence the outcome of a “bribery game.” We find that exposure to anticorruption messages largely fails to discourage the decision to bribe, and in some cases it makes individuals more willing to pay a bribe. Importantly, we also find that the effect of anticorruption messaging is conditioned by an individual’s preexisting perceptions regarding the prevalence of corruption.
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| 2 |
ID:
145955
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Kenya's March 2013 elections ushered in a popular system of devolved government that represented the country's biggest political transformation since independence. Yet within months there were public calls for a referendum to significantly revise the new arrangements. This article analyses the campaign that was led by the newly elected governors in order to understand the ongoing disputes over the introduction of decentralisation in Kenya, and what they tell us about the potential for devolution to check the power of central government and to diffuse political and ethnic tensions. Drawing on Putnam's theory of two-level games, we suggest that Kenya's new governors have proved willing and capable of acting in concert to protect their own positions because the pressure that governors are placed under at the local level to defend county interests has made it politically dangerous for them to be co-opted by the centre. As a result, the Kenyan experience cannot be read as a case of ‘recentralisation’ by the national government, or as one of the capture of sub-national units by ‘local elites’ or ‘notables’. Rather, decentralisation in Kenya has generated a political system with a more robust set of checks and balances, but at the expense of fostering a new set of local controversies that have the potential to exacerbate corruption and fuel local ethnic tensions in some parts of the country.
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| 3 |
ID:
085972
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| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In order to complement ongoing current empirical research, this article draws wider lessons from the crisis that grew out of the disputed Kenyan presidential election of December 2007. Looking beyond the immediate trigger for the subsequent violence - namely, the election itself - the paper instead locates the roots of the crisis within three historical trends: elite fragmentation, political liberalization, and state informalization.The origins of each can be traced to the style of rule employed by Daniel arap Moi. Even though his first government of 2002-5 perpetuated these trends, President Mwai Kibaki failed to recognize their implications for national unity and the exercise of power in 2007. The article then addresses the sequencing debate within the literature on democratization, identifying the lessons that can be taken from the Kenyan case for other states. Kenya has shown again that political liberalization is a high-risk activity that can produce unintended side-effects. Drawing on examples from other African states, we argue that the processes of democratization and reform can be undertaken simultaneously, but that this twin-tracked approach requires institutional reforms not yet undertaken by a large number of African polities.
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| 4 |
ID:
062034
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| 5 |
ID:
093879
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2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The death of President Levy Mwanawasa in August 2008 plunged Zambian politics into a state of flux. This article argues that the way the main parties responded to the challenge of the resulting presidential by-election has three lessons to teach the emerging literature on political parties. First, Rupiah Banda's rise to power within the MMD demonstrates the extent to which intra-party machinations can leave a party saddled with an unpopular leader, and hence illustrates the great significance of succession struggles within dominant-party systems. Second, the main parties' continual repositioning of their electoral platforms reveals that not all African elections take place in an ideological vacuum, and shows that the platforms parties adopt can only be fully understood in the context of the wider party system and the way in which parties interact over time. Finally, the ability of controversial opposition leader Michael Sata to mobilize a diverse support base - by employing a 'populist' message in urban areas at the same time as receiving the support of his ethno-regional community in rural areas - lays bare the complexity of party strategies and the limits of the 'ethnic census' model of party support. Taken together, these findings suggest that the tendency to divorce the study of elections from the study of how parties function and interact impoverishes our understanding of African politics
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| 6 |
ID:
157865
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| Summary/Abstract |
A growing number of academics are engaging in collaborative research projects with development organizations and policy makers. Increasingly, this includes efforts to co-produce research, rather than simply share information. These new ways of doing research raise important ethical and practical issues that are rarely discussed but deserve attention. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region of the world in which these new approaches are particularly prevalent, and one where the challenges created by those approaches tend to manifest in distinct or acute ways. In this Research Note, we draw on a collaborative research project with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy to illuminate these difficulties. We also offer suggestions for how to manage the challenges that arise when academics conduct research with policy makers and development organizations. Ensuring that such collaborations are both effective and ethical is not easy, but it must be done if we are to develop better informed policy and scholarship.
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| 7 |
ID:
096125
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| 8 |
ID:
158478
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The historical literature on statebuilding in Europe has often portrayed a positive relationship between war, state making and long-term democratisation. Similarly, a number of large-n quantitative studies have concluded that war promotes democracy – even in cases of civil war. Against this, a growing area studies literature has argued that violent conflict in developing countries is unlikely to drive either statebuilding or democratisation. However, this literature has rarely sought to systematically set out the mechanisms through which war undermines democracy. Contrasting three ‘high conflict’ cases (Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda) with two ‘low conflict’ cases (Kenya and Tanzania) in East Africa, we trace the way in which domestic conflict has undermined three key elements of the democratisation process: the quality of political institutions, the degree of elite cohesion, and the nature of civil-military relations. Taken together, we suggest that the combined effect of these three mechanisms helps to explain why Kenya and Tanzania have made significantly greater progress towards democratic consolidation than their counterparts and call for more in-depth research on the long-term legacy of conflict on democratisation in the African context.
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| 9 |
ID:
168275
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| Summary/Abstract |
ON 14 NOVEMBER 2017, the Zimbabwean military launched ‘Operation Restore Legacy' in a bid to force President Robert Mugabe out of office and facilitate a transfer of power to his former Vice President, Emmerson Mnangagwa. The intervention was triggered by Mugabe’s move to sideline senior military figures—including army chief Constantino Chiwenga—and to sack one of their closest political allies, Mnangagwa, just over a week earlier. The president justified this ‘night of the long knives' on the basis that some of the most influential figures in the country had been plotting to undermine his authority. However, ultimately Mugabe’s gambit only served to weaken his hold on power.
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