Table 19.1Snapshot of a New Africa, 1 January 2010
Notes: * Indicates a country that has experienced an executive and/or legislative turnover. PR refers to Political Rights Score by Freedom House, 2010 rankings.
The Power of Elections
The role of elections in processes of democratization was not analysed in any depth until a few years ago when a vigorous debate emerged on whether the holding of elections in authoritarian regimes furthered democracy or was simply a way for dictators to prolong their stay in power,1 if ‘early’ elections risked plunging complex societies into chaos and civil war, and whether liberalizing reforms had to be sequenced in a certain way to support democratic consolidation. In this chapter I wish to pursue a bold claim. For the first time in Africa’s history, multi-party elections have become the only game in town. As a result, the conditions of ‘the art of ruling’ have changed and the continent is entering a new era. What is happening in these 48 countries today is naturally linked to the past, yet it is also different because incumbents have to deal with a fresh set of political challenges and incentives. We are only at the very beginning of understanding this change, and its consequences.
Let me give a few examples. Mali is almost 100 per cent Muslim and one of the world’s poorest countries, yet has reasonably democratic politics and boasts a higher female political representation than the United States and most European countries. The multi-ethnic, multi-religious, low-income country Benin has held an uninterrupted series of four multi-party elections that have been accompanied by three alternations in power. In December 2008, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the former ruling party in Ghana, won back power by a margin of less than one per cent, thus adding the country to the short list of African states that have passed the ‘two-turnover test’ (Huntington 1991). In a conversation I had with the former dictator of Lesotho, Major-General Justin Lekhanya, he acknowledged that even if he himself and many of his supporters wanted to take over again, the national and international conditions made it plainly impossible.
Young Andry Rajoelina in Madagascar has come to learn a similar lesson, just like President Mwai Kibaki in Kenya. The latter tried the old trick of fabricating election results at the electoral commission’s headquarters, holding an unconstitutional swearing-in ceremony, and deploying the police to intimidate the opposition. Yet, this failed and the ensuing process eventually produced a power-sharing arrangement. Apparently, this cable never reached incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo in Côte d’Ivoire, who tried to steal the presidential runoff election that should have ended a long period of civil war. He and his supporters in the army apparently failed to anticipate the UN Secretary-General, the US president, European Union (EU) member states, and even the regime’s own friends in ECOWAS refusing to recognize him as the legitimate head of state. Other coup leaders such as Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, who took power in Mauritania on 8 December 2005, have caught the drift towards more open and competitive politics and intervened to reignite the democratization process, much like the Turkish military has done in the past.
This is not to say that democratic politics are perfectly functioning in these countries; rather the key point is that the politics are different. Of course, there remain a number of countries that have been bogged down in civil conflict, such as Sudan, Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Somalia, Eritrea, and Swaziland. Moreover, in a few places, such as Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, and Gabon, oil riches help sustain lingering authoritarian regimes. Similarly, American, EU, French, and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) strategic interests help undemocratic regimes in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Republic of Congo stay in power. Nonetheless, almost all of these governments today also feel the need to subject themselves to holding multi-party elections and nowhere on the continent is it simply business as usual.
Elections in the New Africa
A series of recent publications have detailed some of the empirical manifestations of the recent watershed of political reform in Africa.2 Almost all countries in Africa are now holding de jure multi-party elections. The point of multi-party elections is that even if they are held in non-democratic settings, they have the potential to lead to real political competition and meaningful participation – that is, to lead to democracy. It has been shown empirically that dictators in Africa who continue holding an unbroken series of elections typically lose their grip on power. Iterations of electoral contests also tend to unleash a series of self-reinforcing sub-processes making politics become less authoritarian. This is the ‘power of elections’ (Di Palma 1993: 85).
Table 19.1 gives a snapshot of the pattern of elections and democracy in Africa as of 1 January 2010. It shows that 33 of the countries in Africa have held at least three successive elections without a coup, civil war, or other interruption. More than 20 countries have held four elections or more in a row and 12 have completed an uninterrupted sequence of at least five multi-party elections. Among countries that have held at least three successive elections, we find no fewer than 15 relatively democratic regimes, whilst another four or five countries are competitive electoral authoritarian regimes with relatively good prospects of becoming democratic in the future: Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and perhaps Gambia. We must remember that processes of democratization are typically non-linear, unfolding in a zigzag-like pattern. It was no different in the now established democracies where the shift from strong, often personal, monarchies to popular democracies took decades and in some cases centuries. In Africa, a majority of countries are still ‘on the road’. Some may not become democracies in any real sense of the word for a long time. The critical point, however, is that they have begun their journey: the nature of politics on the continent has changed.
Table 19.1Snapshot of a New Africa, 1 January 2010
Notes: * Indicates a country that has experienced an executive and/or legislative turnover. PR refers to Political Rights Score by Freedom House, 2010 rankings.
My own work analysing 282 elections showed that not only are more and more countries holding elections and doing so successfully without a coup, civil war or other major interruption (which is crucial), but an increasing share of these elections are also substantively free and fair. In 1989–2007 only 54 per cent of first (‘founding’) presidential elections in Africa and 49 per cent of second elections were free and fair, yet fully 82 per cent of fourth and later elections received the same judgment. Political participation is steadily high in Africa with average turnout rates hovering around 65 per cent, and as more elections are held, old autocratic rulers are leaving the electoral scene in increasing numbers. Indeed, political competition usually increases as countries hold more elections. The winner’s share of votes in presidential contests goes down from an average of over 60 per cent in most first elections, to less than half (47 per cent on average) in fourth and later elections. This is crucial, as many countries employ a presidential run-off if no candidate secures more than 50 per cent of the vote, and thus have experienced fierce competition for the highest office. Even if opposition parties in many countries are still weak and/or divided, over 30 per cent of countries in Africa have seen alternations in executive power and/or legislative majorities – not counting turnovers seen in founding elections.
The improvements that come with an iteration of the electoral process can also be seen in terms of legitimacy. In elections that were free and fair, losers accepted the outcome in almost two-thirds of the fourth and subsequent polls, compared to only 47 per cent of the first and second. The ultimate indicator of the new dispensation’s legitimacy – survival of the electoral regime – presents even stronger evidence. Breakdowns almost always occur shortly after ‘founding’ elections are held. If the military or militarized factions decide to abort the process, this is almost exclusively done before the electoral regime has become institutionalized. Once more firmly in place, it seems that the perceived costs of a full and radical autocratization are simply too high (Lindberg 2009a: 28–37).
Overall, the pattern in Africa points to what Schedler (2009: 291) calls the regime-subverting potential of elections in authoritarian countries. Another indication of this is that improvements in individual rights, the rule of law, associational rights, and freedom of expression and beliefs, typically occur around elections (Lindberg 2009a: 38). This suggests that elections facilitate challenges to authoritarian rule. Over several iterations of this process, a gradual democratization by elections has taken place in many African countries.
The democratizing power of elections in Africa over the past two decades has an explanatory power that also stands up to alternative explanations featuring factors such as the level of development, socio-cultural modernization, level of education, natural resource-wealth, ethnic/ linguistic fractionalization, religion, and government performance and economic crises. I have tested the power of elections thesis repeatedly in standard regression models alongside all of these factors and consistently find that the number of successive elections held without interruption is by far the strongest predictor of the level of democracy in contemporary Africa (e.g. Lindberg 2009a: 42–44). There is nothing tautological about this finding. While regimes in the Middle East and in Latin America have held long series of multi-party elections without any significant effects, in Africa each successive electoral cycle has tended to have democratizing effects.3
Let me mention one more aspect of this process. Women’s representation has improved with each electoral cycle across different electoral systems, although proportional representation, especially in combination with large parties, also leads to better representation by women in Africa, as in the rest of the world (Lindberg 2004). A series of countries have also adopted national or party-specific women’s quotas that further improve the cause of women’s equal representation; at the time of writing, Rwanda holds the world record with 56 per cent women in the legislature (e.g. Tripp and Kang 2008; Yoon 2004). Thus, African politics is no longer an exclusively male affair, and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s taking of the oath to become the 24th president of Liberia on 16 January 2006 is perhaps the ultimate proof of this. Without multi-party elections, this shift would have been unimaginable.
The Key: Costs of Repression and Toleration
Authoritarian rulers in the Middle East have held long series of elections and yet stand largely uncontested today, orchestrating games of ‘competitive clientelism’ through elections (Lust-Okar 2008; Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2009). Latin American dictators also used to hold elections without allowing them to threaten their hold on power (McCoy and Hartlyn 2009). Although ‘electoral revolutions’ led to democracy in most Eastern European countries (Bunce and Wolchick 2009), the current situation in Russia and many old Soviet republics display ‘autocratization by elections’. Why have authoritarian regimes in Africa been particularly sensitive to processes of democratization by elections?
At this point, consider Dahl’s dictum: ‘The more the costs of suppression exceed the costs of toleration, the greater the chance for a competitive regime’ (Dahl 1971: 15). As I have discussed in more detail elsewhere (Lindberg 2009b), the basis of his thinking was simple but elegant and remains valid today. While acknowledging that costs are subjective, it is clear that any authoritarian government will have to confront two interrelated issues. First, whether the high costs of oppression (in terms of deaths, economic loss, and the impact of issues such as legitimacy and donor assistance, intra-elite splits, defections, and so on) are acceptable. Second, to what extent, or at what point, do the potential costs of allowing increasing competition and inclusion become tolerable in terms of their implication for power, wealth, status, protection, and so on? Figure 19.1 depicts this reasoning graphically. The curved lines, indicating when various regime types are more likely, are based on the idea that both the costs of repression and of reform are important factors shaping whether or not regime change occurs. A dictator facing increasing costs of repression should liberalize but is unlikely to do so if the costs of toleration are still intolerably high (if it would lead to the death of the ruler, his family, and cronies, for example). Conversely, even if the costs of toleration are drastically reduced, autocrats will have no need of democratization as long as the costs of repression are acceptably low.
Yet, there is a blind spot in Dahl’s reasoning. For Dahl, electoral rights, institutions, and processes were only indicators of polyarchy, and this is how they have continued to be used in the literature ever since.4 What has not been acknowledged until recently is how the holding of elections can contribute to changing the costs of oppression and toleration. This is why elections play such an important role as causal factors in both democratization and autocratization.5 Each election becomes a nested ‘sub-game’ to the overall macro-game of regime-transition. Although they appear to be simply about winning votes, they have serious implications for the costs of repression and toleration. With this in mind we can now return to the question why the repetition of elections in so many African countries has had such a democratizing impact over the last few decades.
The end of the Cold War was certainly important (Roessler and Howard 2009), as were the demonstration effects provided by the collapse of authoritarian rule following the colour revolutions in Eastern Europe and the symbolic democratization of South Africa. Diffusion is no illusion, as Coppedge (2006) put it. What is believed to be true, is true in its consequences (Thomas and Thomas 1928),6 and the most powerful diffusion effect was to change the perceptions of both rulers and opposition leaders of what is possible and what cannot be avoided. That 41 countries in Africa suddenly came to hold some kind of multi-party elections in the short period from 1990–94 can hardly be explained without reference to this phenomenon. The shift in the international community towards a stronger emphasis on democracy promotion, heralded by the Clinton Administration, was another important factor that raised the costs of oppression – even if the pressures were and are applied unevenly. As the pivotal event when the most basic rights and institutions of citizenship and liberty are tested, elections became the driving force through which donors could leverage their interests in order to promote democracy.
In a small number of cases, international factors led to elections becoming a tool of autocratization because strategic interests in either natural resources (e.g. Republic of Congo) or in security (e.g. Ethiopia) trumped other concerns. However, in the majority of cases, the gradual institutionalization of multi-party elections strengthened political parties, civil society, and think-tank institutions, developing ever-stronger competencies in organizing and advocating for the expansion of political rights. It is during the campaign and in the immediate post-election period that domestic and international pro-reform forces tend to put all their resources to work to defend key electoral rights and institutions. When these groups succeed in mobilizing support, the costs of repression are radically increased for autocrats. Similarly, media actors typically focus on the flurry of events thrown up by electoral contests and thus typically raise the costs of oppression. These twin processes may not lead to dramatic regime changes immediately, but they change the longer-term calculations and prospects for everyone involved.
A gradual transition in which autocrats stay in power for one or two terms as elected governments (even if by fraudulent means), lowers their fear of elections and so lowers the perceived cost of toleration significantly, thus making democratic reforms more likely. Former abuses of power can be forgiven or tactically ‘forgotten’ by opposition groups and international actors alike, in return for reforms and the spectre of alternation in power in the future. Meanwhile, while foreign donors and scholars may frown upon lingering autocrats who are able to use state resources to co-opt the opposition during transitional periods in order to stay in office, this can nevertheless facilitate a pragmatic approach on behalf of the incumbent and increase the governing capacity among opposition leaders. We are now beginning to realize that through this process an extended period of democratization by elections has led to the moderation of opposition groups in a number of countries, further lowering the cost of toleration for the incumbent regime. With greater experience and successively more effective collective action, opposition groups may subsequently be able to campaign for the respect of political rights and civil liberties, increasing the costs of repression and hence the prospects of a real democratic breakthrough. When the balance of power starts to shift, defections from a coalition of authoritarian forces become more likely. This process has already materialized in a number of African countries as former autocrats have sought to reinvent themselves as born-again democrats and opposition leaders. This is what happened in Kenya and although the outcome there is far from certain, I suspect that the long-term outcome will be successful democratization. Thus, instead of the fatal split in the authoritarian regime occurring before ‘founding’ elections as famously formulated by O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986), repetitive elections in Africa mean that such schisms often occur after the initial transition, further increasing the costs of oppression.
In parallel to this, we have witnessed how the reintroduction of elections has led actors in important state institutions to change their own calculations in a number of countries. With de jure multi-party elections, institutions such as the electoral commission, human rights bodies, the police and courts, and even the military are given a formal role in protecting new democratic rights. Defending the interests of the ruling government is no longer necessarily the default option (Lindberg 2006, 2009b). Bratton and van de Walle (1997) found that the militaries in Africa intervened more often to facilitate democratization than to keep autocrats in power. This trend has continued and the repetition of elections has further lowered the cost of toleration for bureaucrats and the like, thus making it more likely that they will look to further their own careers by acting to promote democracy and defend citizens’ rights to fair and just processes.
These are some of the main causal mechanisms whereby the repetition of multi-party contests has led to a process of democratization by elections. However, the increasing importance of polls for the distribution of power in Africa has also had another equally important impact: it has increased the role of ordinary citizens in African politics significantly.
African Politics: From Elites to Institutions and Citizens
A standard conception about the art of ruling in Africa has been that ‘big man’ politics dominate. In different variants of this broad argument, patronage rather than policy is seen to drive choice and behaviour (e.g. Bates 1981; Hydén 2006; Lemarchand 1972; van de Walle 2001). The consequence, most seem to agree, has been one or the other type of privatization of the state and its resources leading to a series of ‘lost decades’ (Bates et al. 2007). Even the basic notion of sovereignty has been appropriated and distributed to sustain loyalty in countries strapped of resources (Englebert 2009). This expresses itself also in the manifestation of informal institutions, i.e. the prevalence of face to face-based networks that may support or undermine, complement or disregard formal institutions (Helmke and Levitsky 2006; Bratton 2007). What this older literature cannot grapple with is the greater dependence of elites on the consent of the people of Africa in the last 20 years. As scholars we now have to uncover what the ‘demand side’ of African politics looks like. What do citizens want and therefore push to get from political leaders? Do such demands translate into changes in political leaders’ behaviour, and if so how? We know very little about how these things play out in Africa today.
As research on voting behaviour in the United States and Europe confirms, these questions are crucial to understanding in what way and to what extent democratic institutions and citizen-representative relationships make a difference to political outcomes. If the principal-agent relationship suffers from too severe problems of moral hazard7 and information deficits,8 the prospects for accountability are undermined and it is less likely that representatives will behave in ways that reflect the principal’s interests. On the other hand, even if the accountability relationship is strong, collective action problems among the principals are solved, and information deficits compensated by efficacious proxies, political outcomes may be less than optimal from the perspective of collective and club good provision.9 For example, citizens may simply demand private goods rather than club or collective goods either because of poverty or as a result of path-dependent expectations. In either case, we would expect politicians to seek to satisfy such demands in order to secure re-election. The problem is that we do not know much about the principals: citizens as voters.
Vote buying is more likely to occur in poor areas and countries because the marginal utility of one vote is a constant in any given context while the cost of buying a vote varies. More affluent citizens are less likely to sell their votes for a small inducement than very poor people. Yet, in very competitive settings the value of one extra vote can potentially make all the difference between winning and losing, especially in majoritarian systems. As a result, one would expect vote-buying activities to be directed primarily towards independents, or swing voters as described by Nichter (2008). On the other hand, elections can also be won by ‘getting out the vote’ of core supporters, which would suggest that candidates should direct their efforts more to their core constituents to ensure that they actually show up at the polls (e.g. Stokes and Dunning 2008).
There is certainly considerable evidence that supporters expect to be well rewarded for their efforts and that leaders do their best to meet these expectations when they capture office. When a southerner was elected president of Malawi in 1994 the electorate in that region began to expect that they would receive preferential treatment from the government (Kamwambe 1994). In a survey of voter attitudes in the 1991 gubernatorial election in Akwa Ibom State in Nigeria, Ikpe (2000: 148–50) shows that a larger percentage of poor (65 per cent) than well-off voters (39 per cent) viewed elections as occasions in which they could derive benefits from parties and candidates. Yet, much of what passes as knowledge about African voters is still assumed rather than empirically proven. Afrobarometer surveys provide some insights, but it would be premature to draw definite conclusions from an attitude survey that does not specifically target citizens at the time of elections.10 Valuable efforts have been made to try to infer conclusions about the African voter from Afrobarometer data (e.g. Bratton and Kimenyi 2008; Bratton and Logan 2006; Cheeseman and Ford 2007; Eifert et al. 2007; Kramon 2009; Logan 2008; Moehler and Lindberg 2009), but without questions specifically designed to explain voting behaviour, these conclusions are tentative at best. Systematic research on voting behaviour is only now beginning to emerge (e.g. Erdmann 2007; Fridy 2007; Kuenzi and Lambright 2005; Lindberg and Morrison 2005, 2008; Mattes and Piombo 2001; Mulenga 2001; REDET 2004; Wantchekon 2003). Compared to what we know about voting behaviour and alignments in other regions of the world, the African voter remains perhaps not anonymous, but certainly known only in a diffuse manner. In the context of studying the extent to which democracy is being consolidated in Africa, this is a research frontier.
The ‘Demand-Side’ of Private and Public Goods in Ghana
As a final contribution, allow me to illustrate with recent survey data (N = 1,600) from Ghana some trends that are likely to be replicated in other African countries. The survey focused on elections of legislators (MPs) in Ghana’s single-member districts and was carried out in 10 purposively selected constituencies, with a random selection of 160 respondents in each constituency.11 Table 19.2 reports how respondents answered two related questions: ‘What was the main reason you voted for “X” in the legislative election in your constituency?’; and ‘What was the main thing you hoped or expected that the elected MP would do, when you voted in the last election?’
Table 19.2Relationship between reported rationale and expectations on MPs
Source: Author’s survey, August 2008.
Notes: Sign.: Chi2 26.539, df. 9, p = .002.
First, when asked for their voting rationale, very few (less than 4 per cent) respondents acknowledged individual patronage as a reason for voting, and relatively large shares (roughly 30 per cent and 27 per cent, respectively) gave politically correct answers regarding national law making and executive oversight. Let us contrast this with what we interpret as the more genuine indicator – answers to the question regarding what respondents expect the candidate to do if and when elected. Roughly 70 per cent responded that they primarily wanted their MP to provide their community with development projects, in other words ‘club’ goods. This indicates that in the Ghanaian case legislative elections are primarily about local development for voters. This finding echoes what Barkan (1979) and Hydén and Leys (1972) found in East Africa some 35 years ago. However, whereas much of the literature conflates the provision of club or collective goods with clientelism and the creation of long-lasting personal bonds, the survey here suggests that a vast majority of voters put the main emphasis on collective goods that are understood in rational-evaluative (i.e. non-clientelistic) terms. Almost regardless of what voters say was their ‘rationale’ for voting for a particular candidate, around 70 per cent of them first and foremost want their MP to deliver collective goods to their local community (a relatively ‘large’ club good if you like).
Do voters punish incumbents if they fail to deliver better development? If so, this could indicate support for the ‘economic voting’ thesis famously set out by Downs (1957), which adopts a classic rational choice approach to the behaviour of citizens.12 However, it is also possible that voters in Africa punish incumbents for bad economic performance not because of any Downsian economic rationality but instead because they perceive the failure of their leaders to represent a breach of reciprocal norms in a moral economy (see Hydén 1983; Berman 1998). In other words, voters could be acting on the basis of either dispassionate policy evaluations or culturally embedded understandings of political legitimacy. We can start to develop an explanation of which motivation is the more important through a survey question that asks voters if they punish incumbents if their own economic situation or the economic situation of the country becomes worse.
In Table 19.3 we tabulate voters’ assessment of the present state of the economy in Ghana compared to one year ago, with their self-reported projected vote choice for the upcoming elections (7 December 2008). Citizens who thought that the economy over the last year had become ‘worse’ or ‘much worse’ were far more likely to say that they would vote for the main opposition party, or any of the smaller non-ruling parties, while citizens with a positive evaluation of the economy were more than twice as likely to vote for the then-ruling party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP), than other voters. The results are highly statistically significant and remain essentially the same if we substitute the evaluation of the economy with individuals’ evaluation of their own personal financial situation. In short, in this broad sense, the economic voting thesis seems to have something important to say about electoral behaviour in Africa. Yet, there is a catch. An analysis of each party’s core voters’ evaluation of the economy shows that the opposition’s core voters are much more likely to have a negative evaluation of the economy than the core supporters of the ruling party. It is thus very difficult to tell if the evaluation of the economy is endogenous to party affiliation, and so simply reflects the distribution of voters, or is actually based on individuals’ independent analyses of the state of the economy, and directly affects voting behaviour. This question should be the focus of further study.
Table 19.3Perceptions of economy and vote choice
Source: Author’s survey, August 2008.
Notes: Sign.: Chi2 97.284, df = 8, p = .000.
Conclusion
The forms of personal rule common in colonial and post-colonial times have changed fundamentally as a result of the processes of democratization by elections over the past two decades. While we need to remember that transitions to democracy often take a generation or more, a new landscape in which leaders are more dependent on citizens is nevertheless emerging. The underlying drivers of voter behaviour in Africa thus represent a new research frontier. Understanding why politicians act as they do requires us to uncover how politicians understand the incentives facing them, especially with regard to for what citizens hold their political representatives accountable. Data from Ghana indicate that rational politicians in the era of free and fair elections gain many more votes by seeking to further constituency development (a narrow collective/club good) than they lose by disengaging from personalized clientelism. There is therefore some hope that democratic African states will start to see the alleviation of poverty, creation of sustainable economic growth, and production of public goods after 50 years of failure.
1With one significant exception: Hermet et al. (1978).
2A long list of contributions to various aspects of this new era could be mentioned, but space limitations prevent me from doing so. However, Barkan, Bratton, and van de Walle similarly reflect these aspects in their respective chapters in this Handbook.
3The differences should perhaps not come as a surprise. The countries in Latin America have been independent for 200 years and many had experienced prolonged periods of multi-party elections and democracy before the third wave. Many regimes in the Middle East have built their grip on power on the basis of control over natural resource rents and clan-based distributive politics, which served to stabilize the social and political situation – at least for a time.
4See, for example, O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986), followed by scholars such as Diamond (1996), Diamond and Plattner (1999), and Günther et al. (1995). Linz and Stepan (1996) even use the date of the first election as the day when the transition process ended; Bratton and van de Walle (1997: 195) adopted their approach. The number of elections, voter turnout, competitiveness, and turnovers have been used to indicate the degree of democratization (e.g. Barkan 2000; Herbst 2000; van de Walle 2001); the level of democracy (e.g. Altman and Pérez-Linán 2002; Foweraker and Landmann 2002); and the consolidation of democracy (e.g. Diamond 1999; Huntington 1991). Cross-national measures also use election-related indicators (Freedom House; Przeworski et al. 2000).
5See Schedler’s (2002) work on electoral routes to democracy as ‘nested two-level games’ involving strategic dilemmas in the context of structural uncertainty.
6Thomas’s theorem’s original formulation was ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas and Thomas 1928: 571–72). See also Merton (1995).
7The term ‘moral hazard’ originates from the insurance industry and refers to the problem that by protecting their clients from risks (like fire), insurers might inadvertently encourage clients to behave in riskier ways (like smoking in bed).
8‘Information deficits’ refers to situations in which voters have too little relevant information on the intentions and actions of elected politicians to be able to make meaningful decisions. According to economists this is the ultimate source of moral hazard problems, but this has been disputed.
9Public goods are non-excludable and non-divisible goods such as clean air – they can be enjoyed by all. ‘Collective goods’ are non-divisible within a defined group (such as citizens of a particular country). The term ‘club goods’ is typically used to denote that the group enjoying a particular good is rather small and that there are significant barriers of entry to the community in question (in the context of this chapter, think of voters in a particular constituency or village). Private goods are perfectly divisible and excludable, such as cash, a bag of rice, a paid hospital bill, and so on.
10The Afrobarometer round three survey for the first time asked about voting using the question: ‘If (presidential) elections were held tomorrow, which party’s candidate would you vote for?’ Based on studies in other regions, we know that this hypothetical is a highly imperfect measure of actual behaviour and that measurement error increases with the length of time to the upcoming election. In the Afrobarometer’s case, this becomes a huge problem since the length of time to the next election in most cases was more than one year.
11The aim was to get a representative sample of constituents in each district, rather than a nationally representative sample. The strategic selection of constituencies was done in a larger project tracking citizens’ opinions in a series of surveys covering elections from 1996 to 2008.
12Downs assumes that voters support the party closest to their ideal policy position and so punish parties that do not represent their favoured policy positions.
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