Agnes Cornell

Plus ça change? County-level politics in Kenya after devolution

For the first time on 4 March 2013, Kenyans voted for county governors. Devolution has significantly changed fiscal and administrative organization, but has it led to changes in politics? Has it enabled the emergence of new elites, the entrenchment of old ones or rebalanced power between the counties and the centre? These issues are explored, by asking, first, whether gubernatorial candidates were ‘insiders’ who had held public office before, or ‘outsiders’, and whether they were locals or not; and second, how national forces impacted on the gubernatorial campaigns. These questions are answered using original primary data on four counties: Nakuru, Kiambu, Mombasa and Kilifi, and aggregated data from all 47 counties. We find that the majority of winning candidates were ‘insiders’ who won using existing patronage networks, suggesting that the gubernatorial elections led to the entrenchment of existing elites and patronage networks. However, the lack of involvement of national leaders in crucial party primaries allowed for the emergence of powerful local insiders who may challenge national elites going forward. Overall, the first chapter of devolution reflected existing political dynamics in Kenya more than it changed them, although challenges to the resilience of national elites are clear.

Meritocratic administration and democratic stability

This paper presents a hypothesis for understanding democratic stability based on the distinction between politicized and meritocratic bureaucracies. We argue that in a politicized administration, the professional careers of large numbers of government officials depend directly upon which party wins the elections. This increases the likelihood that the government will take opportunistic actions aimed at surviving in office at any cost; that is, benefiting core supporters at the expense of other groups. In turn, this may foster pre-emptive actions from the opposition, such as military coups. Conversely, in democracies with meritocratic administrations, incumbents are credibly constrained from undertaking partial policies because their hands are tied in terms of managing the staff policy of the state apparatus. Consequently, countries with meritocratic bureaucracies have greater prospects for democratic stability. Empirically, we illustrate the mechanisms with two well-documented cases of democratic transitions that enshrined a politicized administration – Spain (1876–1936) and Venezuela (1958–1998) – and one transition that kept a meritocratic bureaucracy, Spain (1975–).

Institutions as Incentives for Civic Action: Bureaucratic Structures, Civil Society, and Disruptive Protests

This paper examines the link between political control of government bureaucracies and citizens’ likelihood to stage disruptive protests. A public administration heavily controlled by politicians, and staffed to a large extent with political appointees, allows politicians to intervene in policy implementation and favor some groups over others in terms of access to public services. Such a system may induce citizens or civic associations to resort to disruptive actions to express demands and demonstrate political relevance, and thereby secure access to public goods. The effects are hypothesized to be more pronounced where civil society is stronger. We test the arguments empirically on data from 19 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the findings are consistent with the hypotheses.

The Real Lessons of the Interwar Years

Several observers have recently invoked interwar political developments to make the case that even established democracies are fragile and vulnerable to breakdown. However, the real lesson of the interwar period is that even crises as devastating as the Great Depression and the political success of totalitarian movements did little to undermine the stability of established democratic systems. Only in new and fragile democracies did the economic, political, and social dislocations of the 1920s and 1930s tear apart the democratic fabric. Although long established democracies in Western Europe and North America may today be facing a perilous situation, the interwar experience does not lend support to the argument that they are fragile.

Political Control of Bureaucracies as an Incentive for Party Behavior

Clientelism, the practice of wooing voters with particularistic payoffs rather than programmatic policies, is a scourge of many contemporary democracies, and may substantially undercut the will and capacity of political elites to address broad societal issues such as inequality or underdevelopment. Recent years have seen renewed interest in exploring clientelism as a social and political phenomenon (e.g., Stokes et al., 2013), as well as understanding the factors that might induce, propel or prevent parties from transitioning to more programmatic approaches to contests in the electoral arena (Keefer, 2007; Weitz-Shapiro, 2012). The bulk of this latter strand of research explores the economic conditions that constitute more, or less, fertile soil for clientelism (Hicken, 2011; Weitz-Shapiro, 2012). This chapter draws on research from the field of public administration (e.g., Peters and Pierre, 2004; Dahlstrom et al., 2012; Grindle, 2012), and argues that the institutional framework structuring the interface between input (policy making) and output (policy implementing) institutions in the political system is a crucial component in political parties’ choices of whether to attract voters via clientelistic or via programmatic linkage strategies. In doing so, this chapter seeks to contribute to the investigation of the interdependent and mutually reinforcing relationship between specific institutional arrangements on the one hand, and parties’ choices of linkage strategies with voters on the other (Geddes, 1994; Shefter, 1994).