Experiments in African Politics

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel explores new frontiers in experimental research across sub-Saharan Africa. These papers range across the continent and include interventions in Tunisia, Senegal, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Uganda, and Malawi. Taken together, these papers shed light on both the growing variety of experimental research in African politics as well as its importance to studying important questions around democratic governance.

Broadly, this panel explores two themes. The first theme is the variety of experimental interventions being tested across the African continent. The first paper uses randomized training sessions in entrepreneurship to understand how political connections affect success in business. The second paper uses a survey experiment to unpack how elites navigate the trade-offs inherent in distributing crisis aid. The third paper uses a field experiment with election observers in Malawi to account for vote fraud. The fourth paper melds a natural experiment on customary elites and local politics with a field conjoint experiment and illustrates how customary institutions constrain efforts to formalize property rights. Finally, the fifth paper uses a lab-in-the-field experiment to explore refugee-host relations in Uganda and show that participation in mixed refugee-host economic groups affects trust. The wide variety of these interventions attests to both the quality and diversity in recent experimental research on the African continent. These papers also show how experimental methods can be applied to test both policy relevant interventions and fundamental questions in political science—often at the same time. Furthermore, our focus on experiments in the Africa allows to expand the discussion of the ethics and methodology of experiments to the Global South, which often present different benefits and challenges from experiments in the West.

The second theme that this panel explores is how individuals behave under institutions which exhibit various levels of democracy. One of the reasons that African politics is a fertile field is the heterogeneity of substate institutions—some of which are democratic, others of which are not. The first and second papers explore the consequences of when democratic retrenchment fails. Specifically, the first explores the deadweight losses caused by non-democratic forces within governments which feel free to interfere in the economy while the second shows how lack of democratic entrenchment within local leads to rent-seeking in aid distribution. The third paper directly interrogates the methods through which democracies may or may not be retrenched. The fourth and fifth papers explore the need to renovate and re-imagine the local communities which affect the daily lived experiences of Africans: the fourth paper by exploring the role of customary chiefs in landholding, and the fifth by exploring how economic interest groups shape refugee-host relations.

With these five papers, our panel aims to showcase and discuss how innovative experimental methods are used to examine and illuminate the micro-foundations of how democracy and institutions interact in various African countries.

Sub Unit

• Division 53: African Politics

Individual Presentations

• The Political Nature of Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries - Robert Kubinec, University of South Carolina; Abhit Bhandari, Vanderbilt University; Sekou Jabateh, New York University; Hamza Mighri

• Understanding the Role of Local Leaders in Crisis Response: Evidence from Mali - Jessica Gottlieb, University of Houston; Jaimie Bleck, University of Notre Dame; Katrina Kosec, IFPRI; Jordan Kyle, International Food Policy Research Institute

• Chiefs, Perceived Authority, and Land Titles: Evidence from Cote d’Ivoire - Matthew Karol Ribar, Stanford University

• Maybe in My Backyard: Dynamics of Refugee-Host Cooperation - Rebecca Wai, University of Michigan

Chair

• Donghyun Danny Choi Brown University

Discussants

• Janet I. Lewis George Washington University

• Allison Namias Grossman Tulane University