One of the most common adjectives used to describe democracy in sub-Saharan Africa is “neopatrimonial.” Characterized by strong executives, pervasive clientelism and use of state resources for political legitimation (Bratton and van de Walle 1997), neopatrimonial democracy has been...

Over 90 percent of the world's states currently select their national leaders through multi-party elections. However, in Africa the quality of elections still varies widely, ranging from elections plagued by violence and fraud to elections that are relatively “free and fair”. The literature...

What citizens hold their political representatives accountable for in the era of democratic elections, constitutes one important set of incentives for politicians in a time of competitive elections. Based on a pre-election survey carried out in Ghana in August 2008, this study finds that 70% of...

What makes African voters “up for grabs”? Existing approaches to the swing voter have several liabilities. This article introduces a new measure enabling a more comprehensive assessment of swing voting, including the differentiation between clientelistic and collective goods motivations. The...

A vast literature suggests that voters in new democracies “sell” their vote to patrons providing private or small-scale club goods, or alternatively, that such goods are distributed along ethnic lines to reinforce ethnic voting. In either case the outcome is undermining democratic...

This chapter first discusses some of the established literature on the effects of natural resource abundance on democratization and then shows how an empirical analysis of the relationship supports the theoretical expectations. We also reveal an under-researched aspect of the “resource curse....