Free Movement and Trade in Africa: Do Policies Reflect Constituent Attitudes?

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries & Foreign Policy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foreign Policy

Abstract

"People power is rising" in Africa (Marks, Chenoweth and Okeke, 2019) with citizens increasingly making their voices heard, e.g., via elections, mass mobilization, demonstration, lobbying, activism, civil unrest, or rioting. The US National Intelligence Council predicted in 2018 that "Sub-Saharan Africa is entering a period of heightened competition between governments and their citizens", with citizens demanding greater accountability and responsiveness from their leaders. Even as today’s political elites resist and reverse gains in democratization observed over the last decades (Cheeseman and Smith, 2019), governments face a growing backlash when policies do not account for people’s needs and desires. Government accountability is therefore one of the central issues of contestation in contemporary African politics.

While these trends have received much attention with regard to domestic policies, social scientists have paid scant attention to the role of constituent preferences and demands for foreign policy issues. There is no systematic evidence on whether African governments take constituent demands into consideration in foreign policy making. This paper begins to close this gap by investigating to what extent constituent attitudes are reflected in their governments’ policies in two issues areas: cross-border freedom of movement and trade protectionism. In both issues areas, African states have in recent years moved decisively towards liberalization. In early 2018, the African Union (AU) has adopted the Agreement Establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and the Protocol to the Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community Relating to Free Movement of Persons, Right of Residence and Right of Establishment (AfFM).

We develop theoretical expectations about the conditions under which governments institute foreign policies that are more aligned with constituent wishes. These focus on a) electoral institutions, b) freedom of speech and political competition, c) non-taxation-based sources of government revenue, such as foreign aid and natural resource income, d) private non-government transfers, i.e. remittances. We leverage policy relevant questions from round 8 of the Afrobarometer, combined with data on visa policies, external tariffs, and signatory status for both the AfCFTA and AfFM (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, 2020), to develop measures of policy distance for freedom of movement and trade policies. Based on these, we empirically analyze to which extent our theorized mechanisms are reflected in the empirical record. Counter to normative expectations about the role of democracy for representation and accountability, we find that free trade policy in democracies is frequently more open than what constituents prefer. In autocracies, governments' policies and citizen preferences are more aligned on trade. For freedom of movement, as expected we find better policy matches in countries with low remittances.

Authors

• Florian G. Kern, Department of Government

• Martin C. Steinwand, University of Essex

• Samira Diebire, University of Essex