A substantial body of scholarship has considered the impact of regime types on public spending and basic service provision, much of which has implications for education. While some of the theoretical and empirical conclusions from this work are globally applicable, there are also important ways in which the relationship between democracy and education may be influenced by the African context. The most useful theoretical arguments for why democracy may influence public spending, and spending on education in particular, focus on the political incentives generated by multiparty electoral competition. Related but distinct arguments focus on how this may impact in turn on education outcomes, and on why these dynamics may vary because of factors that are particularly pertinent in many African countries. These include variations in the degree of electoral competitiveness and political competition as well as in levels of economic development and ethnic fractionalization. A large body of empirical evidence investigates these various arguments, evaluating the impact of democracy on both education spending and education outcomes. Although evidence for the positive impact of democracy on education is compelling, evidence for this relationship in Africa remains limited and is hampered by limitations to data. In particular, although evidence suggests democracy may have a positive impact on access to education in Africa, there is less evidence for its impact on the quality of education. Future work should continue to address these issues while seeking to investigate sources of heterogeneity in the impact of democracy on education in Africa.
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The Democratic Dividend: Public Spending and Education Under Multipartyism
Robin Harding
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The Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)
Lucia Quaglia
The Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is one of the most important policy areas of the European Union (EU). Academic research on EMU in political science is well established and ever-evolving, like EMU itself. There are three main “waves” of research on EMU, which have mostly proceeded in a chronological order. The first wave of scholarly work has focused on the “road” to EMU, from the setting up of the European Monetary System in 1979 to the third and final stage of EMU in 1999. This literature has explained why and how EMU was set up and took the “asymmetric” shape it did, that is to say, a full “monetary union,” whereby monetary policy was conducted by a single monetary authority, the European Central Bank (ECB), but “economic union” was not fully fledged. The second wave of research has discussed the functioning of EMU in the 2000s, its effects and defects. EMU brought about significant changes in the member states of the euro area, even though these effects varied across macroeconomic policies and across countries. The third wave of research on EMU has concerned the establishment of Banking Union from 2012 onward. This literature has explained why and how Banking Union was set up and took the “asymmetric” shape it did, whereby banking supervision was transferred to the ECB, but banking resolution partly remained at the national level, while other components of Banking Union, namely a common deposit guarantee scheme and a common fiscal backstop, were not set up. Subsequently, the research has begun to explore the functioning of Banking Union and its effects on the participating member states.
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From Elections to Democracy in Hard Times
Anna M. Meyerrose, Thomas Edward Flores, and Irfan Nooruddin
The end of the Cold War, heralded as the ideological triumph of (Western) liberal democracy, was accompanied by an electoral boom and historically high levels of economic development. More recently, however, democratic progress has stalled, populism has been on the rise, and a number of democracies around the world are either backsliding or failing entirely. What explains this contemporary crisis of democracy despite conditions theorized to promote democratic success?
Research on democratization and democracy promotion tends to focus predominantly on elections. Although necessary for democracy, free and fair elections are more effective at promoting democratic progress when they are held in states with strong institutions, such as those that can guarantee the rule of law and constraints on executive power. However, increased globalization and international economic integration have stunted the development of these institutions by limiting states’ economic policy options, and, as a result, their fiscal policy space. When a state’s fiscal policy space—or, its ability to collect and spend revenue—is limited, governments are less able to provide public goods to citizens, politicians rely on populist rather than ideological appeals to win votes, and elections lose their democratizing potential.
Additional research from a political–economic framework that incorporates insights from studies on state building and institutions with recent approaches to democratization and democracy promotion, which focus predominantly on elections, is needed. Such a framework provides avenues for additional research on the institutional aspects of ongoing democratization and democratic backsliding.
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Globalization and Regionalism in Africa
Pádraig Carmody
Globalization, or increased interconnectedness between world regions, is a dialectical and recursive phenomenon that consequently tends to deepen through time as one set of flows sets off other related or counterflows. This is evident in the history of the phenomenon in Africa, where transcontinental trade, and later investment, were initially small but have grown through different rounds including slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and the early 21st-century era of globalization. However, globalization on the continent, as in other places, is not unilinear and has generated a variety of “regional responses” in terms of the construction of organizations such as the African Union and other more popularly based associations. The phenomenon of globalization on the continent is deepening through the information technology “revolution,” which also creates new possibilities for regional forms of association.
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Land-Related Conflict and Electoral Politics in Africa
Catherine Boone
Land-related disputes and land conflicts are sometimes politicized in elections in African countries, but this is usually not the case. Usually, land-related conflict is highly localized, managed at the micro-political level by neo-customary authorities, and not connected to electoral competition. Why do land conflicts sometimes become entangled in electoral politics, and sometimes “scale up” to become divisive issues in regional and national elections? A key determinant of why and how land disputes become politicized is the nature of the underlying land tenure regime, which varies across space (often by subnational district) within African countries. Under the neo-customary land tenure regimes that prevail in most regions of smallholder agriculture in most African countries, land disputes tend to be “bottled up” in neo-customary land-management processes at the local level. Under the statist land tenure regimes that exist in some districts of many African countries, government agents and officials are directly involved in land allocation and directly implicated in dispute resolution. Under “statist” land tenure institutions, the politicization of land conflict, especially around elections, becomes more likely. Land tenure institutions in African countries define landholders’ relations to each other, the state, and markets. Understanding these institutions, including how they come under pressure and change, goes far in explaining how and where land rights become politicized.
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The Political Economy of Monetary Policy
Cristina Bodea
The recent global economic crisis has renewed interest in the nature and history of monetary policy, the distributional effects of central bank policy, central bank governance, and the personalities at the helm of major central banks. In modern times, a country’s central bank formulates, or, to a minimum, implements, a country’s monetary policy, or the process of adjustment of a country’s money supply to achieve some combination of stable prices and sustainable economic growth. Monetary policy depends heavily on a country’s exchange rate system. Under fixed exchange rates, the country’s commitment to keep the level of the currency at a certain level dictates monetary policy to a great degree. As the gold standard was unraveling after World War I, many countries experienced high inflation or even hyperinflation. A similar situation faced monetary policy after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in the 1970s. By the 1980s, however, countries turned toward central bank independence as an institutional arrangement to control inflation. The current issues surrounding monetary policy have emerged from the historical increase in central bank independence and the 2007 economic and financial crisis. In particular, the opacity of central bank decisions, given their autonomy to pursue stable prices without political interference, has increased the demand for transparency and communication with the government, the public, and financial markets. Also, the 2007 crisis pushed central banks toward unconventional measures and macro-prudential regulation, and brought back into focus the monetary policy of the euro area.
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Traditional Leaders and Development in Africa
Lauren Honig
Traditional leaders have a significant role in the social, political, and economic lives of citizens in countries throughout Africa. They are defined as local elites who derive legitimacy from custom, tradition, and spirituality. While their claims to authority are local, traditional leaders, or “chiefs,” are also integrated into the modern state in a variety of ways. The position of traditional leaders between state and local communities allows them to function as development intermediaries. They do so by influencing the distribution of national public goods and the representation of citizen demands to the state. Further, traditional leaders can impact development by coordinating local collective action, adjudicating conflicts, and overseeing land rights. In the role of development intermediaries, traditional leaders shape who benefits from different types of development outcomes within the local and national community. Identifying the positive and negative developmental impacts of traditional leaders requires attention to the different implications of their roles as lobbyists, local governments, political patrons, and land authorities.
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The U.S. Politico–Military–Industrial Complex
John A. Alic
The three large military services—Army, Navy, and Air Force—comprise the core of the U.S. politico–military–industrial complex. They dominate decision making on multi-billion dollar weapon systems and the operational concepts these are intended to embody. The armed forces need private firms to realize their visions of new weaponry, since government has limited capacity in engineering design and development and limited production facilities. Running a successful defense business means giving the services what they want, or think they want, whether this makes technical and operational sense or not; thus industry caters to the views of the services, and while it seeks to influence them, does so mostly at the margins.
The political dynamics of the complex take place in two primary domains, only loosely coupled. The first is largely contained within the Defense Department. This is the main arena for conflict and bargaining within and among the services and between the services, individually and collectively, and Pentagon civilians. Most of what happens here stays hidden from outsiders. Service leaders generally seek to resolve disagreements among themselves; the goal, often although not always achieved, is to present a united front to civilian officials and the public at large. The second domain extends to the rest of government, chiefly Congress, with its multiple committees and subcommittees, and the White House, home of the powerful Office of Management and Budget among other sources of policy leverage.
The complex as a whole is an artifact of the Cold War, not greatly changed over the decades. Repeated efforts at restructuring and reform have led to little. The primary reason is that military leaders, senior officers who have reached the topmost ranks after lengthy immersion in generally conservative organizational cultures, usually have the upper hand in bureaucratic struggles. They believe the military’s views on choice of weapons—the views of seasoned professionals—should have precedence over those of civilians, whether Pentagon appointees and their staffs, elected officials, or outside experts. They usually prevail, since few of the political appointees on the civilian side of DoD and in policy-influencing positions elsewhere can command similar authority. If they do not prevail on a particular issue, service leaders expect to outwait their opponents; if they lose one battle over money or some cherished weapon system, they anticipate winning the next.
