Lindert (2004) makes claims about democracy and basic service provision in a historical context, Sen (1999) has also long been associated with the idea that democratic governments might be more likely to fulfill certain needs of their population.
Do voters in Africa use elections to hold governments accountable for their performance in office? In contexts of limited information and weak state capacity, it can be difficult for citizens to attribute the provision of public goods and services to political action. As a result, voters often have little information about government performance on which to condition their electoral support. Such contexts are frequently characterized by clientelism or ethnic politics, and there is a widespread impression that African elections are little more than contests in corruption or ethnic mobilization. Using an original panel data set containing electoral returns and detailed information on road conditions throughout Ghana, the author provides robust evidence that when a public good can be attributed to political action, as is the case with roads in Ghana, electoral support is affected by the provision of that good. The author also uses data on a variety of educational inputs to test the claim that votes are conditioned only on attributable outcomes.
How do African governments respond to democratic electoral competition? Although the common perception is that African governments have sought to win elections by combining various types of electoral fraud, clientelism, and ethnic mobilization, I argue that democratic elections in Africa have also induced governments to compete for votes by providing basic services. One implication of this is a rural bias in the impact of democracy on basic health and education outcomes. Using individual-level data from 27 African countries, I investigate the theoretical claim that competitive elections create incentives for African governments to implement prorural policies in order to satisfy the rural majority. The results demonstrate that democratic elections significantly increase access to primary education and reduce infant mortality rates, but only for children in rural areas. As the argument expects, these effects are conditional on the level of urbanization.
Intuitively it would seem that choice is important for democracy. Yet the empirical question, whether people actually do value facing distinct platforms when they vote, remains open. In this paper I seek to remedy that situation by systematically addressing the question using cross-national survey data. Specifically, I investigate whether satisfaction with democracy depends on the number and/or the substance of the choices that are available to people when they vote. The analysis offers strong support for the idea that what matters most to voters is the substance of electoral choices. Although the number of choices also matters, the significance of this factor is conditional on being able to vote for a party that represents one's views, or on voting for the winner.
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