Seeing beyond Clientelism: An Experiment on Constituent Consultation in Nigeria

• In Event: Promoting Peace and Democratic Stability in Divided African Societies

Abstract

Democracies around the globe, concerned with backsliding, have tried various innovations to augment representative institutions. For the most part, these innovations have been studied on a case basis and with an absence of emphasis on their adaptability to different contexts. Most glaringly, no one has studied whether such innovations might help young democracies develop, rather than merely helping established democracies avoid backsliding. We redress this gap by adapting an innovation that has proven fruitful in established democracies to study it in one of the world’s largest emerging democracies, Nigeria. We conduct a Deliberative Town Hall field experiment pairing two members of the National Assembly with random samples of their constituents to discuss infrastructure policy. We conjecture that inertia around personalist and clientelist politics in Nigeria stems from an absence of institutional channels through which politicians and constituents can interact in a manner that recognizes people as citizens of a democratic community. We find evidence that Deliberative Town Halls provide a channel through which alternative, norm-guided citizen-politician relations can develop. Specifically, participating in structured, non-clientelist interactions with elected representatives boosts respondents' sense of civic engagement, attachment to democratic norms, and preference for cooperative behaviors across ethnic divides from elected officials. We develop a framework to suggest such psychological changes represent an important step towards engendering a longer-term move away from particularistic identities, ethnic parochialism, and clientelism, and toward greater citizenship and programmatic politics.

Author

• Marco Castradori, Princeton University