Agenda Dynamics in Young Democracies: Findings from Ghana and South Africa

• In Event: The Dynamics of Agenda Setting in Policymaking

Abstract

Research on agenda dynamics has found that government's attention to problems is punctuated in nature. This finding holds for Western democratic countries (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Jones et al. 2009; Breunig 2006), as well as authoritarian and hybrid regimes (Baumgartner et al. 2017; Sebok et al. 2019). Scholars have argued that policy punctuations are an indication of how governments respond to information (Jones and Baumgartner 2005; Workman et al. 2009). They argue that the degree to which a political system can accurately respond to signals or information about problems will likely depend on four general factors. These include incentives or inducements that encourage politicians to respond to problems, the ability of the system to collect and process information about problems, the level of resistance to change (institutional friction), and centralization of power. The degree to which these factors exist in a state will determine the level of punctuation that characterizes public policies (Jones et al. 2019; Baumgartner et al. 2017) In democracies, the mix of these elements produces moderate punctuations which indicates a system that is adaptive to the changing nature of problems in the environment (Baumgartner, Foucault, and François 2006; Baumgartner et al. 2009; Breunig 2006). In autocracies, the mix of these factors produces severe punctuations which indicate a system that is maladaptive and does not respond to problems promptly (Lam and Chang 2015; Kwan and Zhao 2016). I extend this line of inquiry to the young democracies of Ghana and South Africa, a context that has received little attention in studies of policy change. I argue that young democracies in Africa are institutionally different from both authoritarian and developed democratic regimes. Democratic regimes in Africa have been characterized by neopatrimonialism which I argue weakens democratic institutions making them less adaptive and responsive to policy problems relative to Western democracies. I will examine the extent to which government attention in Ghana and South Africa is punctuated and the extent to which those punctuations differ or are alike to those found in advanced democracies on the one hand and autocratic regimes on the other hand. I will measure government attention using budget data and parliamentary hearings. I will compile budget data for Ghana (2008-2020), and South Africa (1993-2020). I further collect and topic code 14,890 parliamentary hearings according to the Comparative Agenda's Project (CAP) codebook for both countries. I will analyze the nature of government attention to problems using the stochastic processes approach which utilizes frequency distributions to study the nature of government attention over time. This research will broaden our understanding of the effects of institutional variations on government attention and more importantly the extent to which democracies in Africa are adaptive and responsive to problems in the environment. It will also set a foundation for further studies of border public policy dynamics in young African democracies.

Author

• Christiana Bugri, West Virginia University