Everyday Shortages, Performance Perceptions, and Accountability in Africa

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

Abstract

The availability of accurate information on government performance is a cornerstone for ensuring that elected officials can be held accountable by citizens. In the context of low-income democracies, scholars have expressed skepticism about the ability of citizens to monitor government performance. Constraints related to transparency, media access, and education make it difficult to assess how governments handle their responsibilities. However, this paper suggests that citizens may have a better sense of government performance than the literature suggests. Looking at African multi-party systems, the work highlights an often overlooked mechanism of information acquisition. I argue that people infer performance evaluations from the consequences of political management in their everyday lives. In low-income settings, government performance often has immediate effects on the supply of essential goods such as food, water, or health care. The exposure to fluctuations in the supply of such goods provides vulnerable people with relevant information on government performance. To test the argument, I study links between individual shortages in basic necessities and performance perceptions using cross-national Afrobarometer survey data and multi-level modeling. The results show that exposure to shortages has a robust negative effect on performance ratings. In-depth country observations illustrate that even members of highly biased ethnic and partisan groups tend to express dissatisfaction with their allies in power amid shortages in basic necessities. The results indicate that daily experiences of poverty directly inform African citizens’ evaluations of the government and override pre-existing group loyalties, thereby challenging the common image that the poorest are the least informed citizens in developmental democracies.

Author

• Simon Primus, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU)