Book Project focusing on Nigeria
Dictators, Democrats, and Government Performance for African Development
(book manuscript)
Developing countries face the urgent challenge of identifying the factors that impact government performance. Dictatorship, ethnic diversity, and low government revenues have all been blamed for the failure to provide social services or to create the conditions for economic growth. My book manuscript argues instead that the underlying structure of policy making hinders development. Using insights from “veto player” theory, I count the number of individual and collective policy actors with the political leverage to prevent policy changes and extract concessions. By conceptually organizing government based on centers of power rather than degrees of political freedom, the theory transcends the blunt distinction between democracy and authoritarianism characteristic of research on government performance.
To measure government performance I distinguish between two types of policy outputs with different theoretical properties. One set of policies includes fiscal discipline and judicial performance. They are typically considered public goods because it is costly to exclude any citizens from consuming their benefits. The other set of policies resembles private goods because their consumption allows for excludability and rivalry. I measure these targetable, more “particularistic” polices with data on energy provision and school construction.
My statistical tests show that the number of veto players predicts government performance between 1960 and 2007. My results specifically demonstrate that regimes with more veto players have higher inflation, budget deficits, and have difficulty managing money supply. These regimes also deliver higher overall levels of particularistic goods. These results hold after controlling for democracy, economic growth, oil revenues, and the level of foreign debt. Unlike countries such as Liberia, Rwanda, or Tanzania, foreign aid has played a very minor role. Finally, since the number of Nigeria’s ethnic groups does not change over time, we cannot explain government performance through the mere existence of diversity.
Left: Interviewing General Yakubu Gowon, dictator from 1966-75.
While the debate over regime type is certainly not dead, my findings suggest that it does lure us into analytical quagmires about the importance of elections, the limits of formal institutions, and the presumed compatibilities of capitalism and political freedom. Veto player theory offers an innovative solution by shifting our attention to political leverage and the logic of policy coalitions. The application of this theory to African cases reveals how the political units within many countries create shifting standards of inclusion. This complicates the ability to appease diverse political constituencies in the policy making process. This insight also exposes a tension implicit in the veto player literature: a more representative policy processes may increase the overall delivery of particularistic policies, but it may face bargaining problems which impede the delivery of nationally-oriented policies.
Right: Interviewing Hon. Emeka Ihedioa, then current Majority Whip, People’s Democratic Party, who is currently the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Please send me an email if you would like to see a sample chapter.