Democracy and Education Spending in Africa

Abstract

, seminar participants at CSAE, Oxford and at the LSE, as well as three anonymous referees and the editors for comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the Department for International Development (UK) for funding this research.While it is widely believed that electoral competition influences public spending decisions, there has been relatively little effort to examine how recent democratization in the developing world has resulted in changes in basic service provision. There have been even fewer attempts to investigate whether democracy matters for public spending in the poorest developing countries, where "weak institutions" may mean that the formal adoption of electoral competition has little effect on policy. In this paper I confront these questions directly, asking whether the shift to multiparty competition in African countries has resulted in increased spending on primary education.I develop an argument, illustrated with a game-theoretic model, which suggests that the need to obtain an electoral majority may have prompted African governments to spend more on education, and to prioritize primary schools over universities within the education budget. I test three propositions from the model using panel data on electoral competition and education spending in African countries. I find clear evidence that democratically elected African governments have spent more on primary education, while spending on universities appears unaffected by democratization. 1 1. IntroductionAt the time of the African democracy movements of the early 1990s opinions varied widely about the effect of democratization on economic performance and on economic policy. While some authors predicted that democracy would be associated with major economic changes, other observers were less optimistic, suggesting that the formal trappings of multiparty democracy would have only a limited impact. With several years of hindsight, we can begin to ask whether and how policies adopted by elected African governments have actually differed from those pursued by authoritarian regimes. African countries represent an important set of cases for scholars interested in investigating whether democratic transitions can have an impact on policy even in "weaklyinstitutionalized polities" where democratic rules may be imperfectly respected, and where policy choices may depend primarily upon patron-client relationships. In this paper I ask whether the move to multiparty electoral competition that took place in many African countries during the 1990s has prompted governments to spend more on primary education. This paper contributes to a small but growing literature that examines whether democracies behave differently from their authoritarian counterparts when it comes to the provision of public services. Work by Brown and Hunter (1999), Kaufman and Segura-Ubiergo (2001), and Ames (1987) has found that democracies in Latin America tend to spend more on items like education and health than do autocracies. Brown and Hunter (2004) have found that Latin Am...

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