Journal Article
Institutions and African Economies
This article presents an overview of the current special issue ‘Institutions and African Economies’. The findings include: (1) greater prevalence of democratic regimes improved both agricultural productivity and the overall growth of African...
Journal Article
Opposition Parties and the Urban Poor in African Democracies
Africa’s urban poor increasingly represent a key constituency for electoral mobilization. Opposition parties, which are pivotal for democratic consolidation, have nevertheless exhibited disparate success at obtaining votes from this constituency. To...
Working Paper
The Impact of Democracy on Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1982-2012
Does democracy promote economic growth? There is still an ongoing debate over the economic implications of democracy, and this question has gained critical importance particularly in the African context, where a wave of democratization in the early...
Working Paper
Backsliding and reversal
Ian Bremmer published a treatise on the stability of states built on the notion that states fall along a curve resembling a slanted “J” when plotting their stability against openness. States in the turnover process are considered unstable, and are at...
Working Paper
Gender Difference in Support for Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa
Little investigation has been made to explain why women are less likely than are men to support democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. This gender difference in politics has been found in numerous studies and may hinder the much needed legitimation of...
Working Paper
South Africa’s Emerging Black Middle Class
South Africa has seen a significant increase in the size of the black middle class in the post-apartheid period, but the attitudinal consequences of indicators of the middle class, as of 2011, are inconsistent and modest in size. While members of the...
Book Chapter
Benin - a pulverized party system in transition
Benin has seen a rapid proliferation of political parties since the country’s democratic transition in 1990. Recent counts suggest that over a hundred political parties are registered in this nation of just over 9 million people. No single party...
Journal Article
Political participation of Africa’s youth
The youth have long represented an important constituency for electoral mobilization in Africa. Yet, despite their numerical importance and the historical relevance of generational identities within the region, very little is really known about the...
Working Paper
Formal Bureaucracy and the Emergent Forms of the Informal Economy
The following essay has three parts. The first is a story about fluctuations in the balance of the relationship between impersonal and personal principles of social organization. This draws heavily on Max Weber’s interpretation of western history...
Working Paper
Aid Effectiveness and Selectivity
This paper surveys recent research on aid and growth. It also provides an overview of research on inter-recipient aid allocation. The overall focus of the paper is on the relevance of these issues for poverty-efficient aid, defined as a pattern of...
Book Chapter
The Impact of Democracy on Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1982-2012
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
Working Paper
Democracy clusters and patterns of inequality
This paper employs k-means clustering, a multidimensional pattern recognition method, to categorize countries using information from five Varieties of Democracy indices. K-means country clusters are similar but not entirely identical to both k...
Working Paper
The legacy of Mexico’s Drug War on youth political attitudes
We investigate the impact of childhood exposure to organized criminal violence on sociopolitical attitudes in Mexico, where an entire generation of youths has been raised amid the country’s most violent conflict over the past century. We fielded an...
Working Paper
The legacies of authoritarian repression on civil society
In this paper we examine the legacies on civil society of routine repressive activities carried out by authoritarian regimes, such as the targeting of opposition organizations. We focus on participation in voluntary associations in post-authoritarian...
Working Paper
Theorizing revolution in democracies
Scholarly logic holds that revolutionary movements are unlikely to break out in democracies, where citizens may simply remove unpopular leaders through elections. And yet the twenty-first century has witnessed a global series of uprisings against...