Nicolas van de Walle

Valence Issues in African Elections Navigating Uncertainty and the Weight of the Past

Previous analyses of African politics have mistaken parties’ dearth of position taking on issues as an absence of substantive electoral debate. The authors demonstrate that political parties tackle substantive issues during African elections, but generally voice them through valence appeals rather than by staking out distinct positions. The authors theorize that uncertainty, coupled with the single-party heritage and the elite dominance of African electoral politics, leads parties to employ valence discourse in their national election campaigns. With evidence from 950 newspaper articles during seven election cycles in African countries, the authors show that politicians predominantly use valence discourse when discussing political issues in the period approaching elections. They find tentative evidence that opposition actors are more likely to take positions than incumbents, and that civil society is more likely to raise position issues than political parties. This contribution aims to enrich the debate on electoral issues in Africa, but also draw greater attention to the potential impact of valence discourse on party systems in a comparative context.

Parties and Issues in Francophone West Africa: Towards a Theory of Non-Mobilization

This contribution proposes a general framework to explain why political parties fail to mobilize citizens along substantive issues in West Africa. We argue that many political issues exist, which could potentially mobilize African voters, but that most political parties struggle to capture these issues. Due to the youth of the electoral process and inexperience of opposition parties, as well as the shared profile of the political elite, candidates and parties struggle to differentiate and establish themselves as credible ‘issue-owners’. When parties discuss issues, they focus on establishing their own competence in an issue-area, rather than claiming ownership of ideological space. Drawing on patterns we observed in six Francophone countries, we offer a typology of issues, as valence or unclaimed, to predict the likelihood that opposition parties engage with them in their electoral campaigns.

The political economy of fertilizer subsidy programs in Africa: Evidence from Zambia

Abstract Fertilizer subsidy programs have re‐emerged as popular policy tools in sub‐Saharan Africa. Despite a burgeoning body of literature on program impacts, the political economy of the programs remains poorly understood. In particular, there is a dearth of empirical evidence to support or refute the conventional wisdoms that governments systematically target subsidized inputs to certain areas based on past voting patterns and that fertilizer subsidies win votes. This article discusses the theoretical links between government targeting of subsidized fertilizer and voter behavior, then uses panel data from Zambia to empirically test these conventional wisdoms. Results suggest that Zambias Movement for Multi‐Party Democracy governments targeted more subsidized fertilizer to households in areas where it had strong support in the previous presidential election. However, contrary to conventional wisdom, marginal changes in the scale or coverage of the fertilizer subsidy program had no statistically significant effect on the share or number of votes won by incumbent presidents.

All Bad Things Do Not Go Together: A Comment on Echeverri-Gent

John Echeverri-Gents ( 2009 ) fine article in this symposium makes a compelling case for a greater focus on the study of inequality by political scientists. A topic we have too often neglected, its dynamics go to the core of our disciplinary concerns and we clearly should have more to offer to its understanding. APSA is to be commended for supporting the work of the Task Force on Difference, Inequality, and Developing Societies (2008), which Echeverri-Gent led, and which, in large part, informs his article in these pages. It should generate a renewed focus by political scientists on international inequality and on the role of domestic inequality in the development process.

Chabal and Political Science

Patrick Chabal has written a broad overview of African politics and African social relations. There is a lot in his book I agree with, and a lot I find interesting. My comments will focus on the books critique of the discipline of political science, since the book directs a stinging critique at my chosen discipline and, to a lesser extent, at contemporary economics. In his critique, Chabal appears to want to define what Africanist area studies should be about in the future, and I want to offer a discussion of his claims, because I do not agree with his view of either the discipline of political science or what it can offer Africanist area studies.Patrick Chabal has written a broad overview of African politics and African social relations. There is a lot in his book I agree with, and a lot I find interesting. My comments will focus on the books critique of the discipline of political science, since the book directs a stinging critique at my chosen discipline and, to a lesser extent, at contemporary economics. In his critique, Chabal appears to want to define what Africanist area studies should be about in the future, and I want to offer a discussion of his claims, because I do not agree with his view of either the discipline of political science or what it can offer Africanist area studies.

The Party Paradox: a Comment Nicolas van de Walle (Cornell) February 20, 2018

ABSTRACT This article analyzes several stylized facts and implications concerning intra-party violence developed in the other articles of this special issue on intra-party violence in African electoral systems. It then turns more specifically to the implications of intra-party violence for democratic consolidation in the region, and argues that paradoxically, though parties are centrally important to democratic politics, the degree to which they are internally inclusive and participatory may not have much importance, or may indeed undermine democracy. Though they are perhaps the key actor on the path to a consolidated democracy, they tend to work best when they themselves are not internally democratic.This article analyzes several stylized facts and implications concerning intra-party violence developed in the other articles of this special issue on intra-party violence in African electoral systems. It then turns more specifically to the implications of intra-party violence for democratic consolidation in the region, and argues that paradoxically, though parties are centrally important to democratic politics, the degree to which they are internally inclusive and participatory may not have much importance, or may indeed undermine democracy. Though they are perhaps the key actor on the path to a consolidated democracy, they tend to work best when they themselves are not internally democratic.

Revisiting Economic Growth in Africa

In recent years economists have debated the reasons that sub-Saharan Africas economic growth record was substantially worse than in any other developing region during the second half of the twentieth century. In this book Benno Ndulu and his colleagues have provided a sophisticated and complex answer to this question, focusing on the interplay between the regions geographical endowments and the policies pursued by African governments. The two-volume publication and CD-ROM results from a multiyear project sponsored by the Nairobi-based African Economic Research Consortium, which brought together several dozen scholars and included detailed case studies of some twenty-six African economies. In its unrivaled breadth and in the impressive empirical evidence it offers to support a comprehensive explanation for Africas postcolonial economic crisis, it deserves wide readership, despite its high retail price. The projects case studies are assembled in the second volume and the CD-ROM that comes with the books. Although the overall content is difficult to summarize in such a short review, the quality is generally high. Nonetheless, not all the case studies are equally compelling, and too many read like World Bank reports, reporting a lot of aggregate macroeconomic statistics and paying perfunctory attention to social sector dynamics or institutional issues—an issue to which I return below.

The Health of Nations: Infectious Disease, Environmental Change, and Their Effects on National Security and Development (review)

bers of that group would grow and oourish even though some would pay higher costs. With sufacient out-migration from time to time, individuals who were hardwired to recognize others and adopt norms would multiply. This scenario would explain the origin of “altruistic inclinations,” for which current models of indeanitely repeated games cannot account. Field explains that currently accepted evolutionary models explain the continuance of some level of cooperation once it has begun; when the mystery of origins is solved, maintenance is no longer a theoretical challenge. This book also provides a good introduction to recent work in evolutionary psychology stimulated by the work of Tooby and Cosmides as well as to work about biases and heuristics in the mold of Kahneman and Tversky.3 Given the award of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics to Vernon L. Smith (who has been a pioneer in the aeld of experimental economics reviewed in this book) and to Kahneman (who has challenged many of the underpinnings of the rational-choice model), scholars in all of the social sciences would be well advised to read this book carefully.4

Agenda for Africa's economic renewal

Ten experts from Africa, Europe, and the United States look beyond structural adjustment and identify the strategic elements that are needed to engineer Africas economic recovery in the coming years in this important book.