Between 2011 and 2014, there were five times as many protests per annum in Africa as there had been in 2000. The majority of these protests were related to deteriorating economic conditions, poor service delivery, inadequate wages, and economic inequality. These protests, which we term "valence protests," do not fit easily into typical narratives about contentious behavior: they are neither social movements, nor revolutionary, nor a manifestation of organized laborinstead, many of these protests are a collective expression of a valence issue of which the government is well aware. We argue for a different conceptual framework for valence protests and contend that they are a way for politically engaged citizens to express their political preferences when voting is insufficient. Using Round 5 Afrobarometer data, we find empirical support for this claim. We also find that citizens more readily communicate political preferences through protest in countries governed by dominant parties. 1 This is not to say that incumbents know precisely what voters want. Even in developed democracies such as the US, incumbents are not always aware of what voters want, hence the use of polling. Rather, we argue that while African regimes are low information contexts generally (Posner 2005, Gottlieb 2016), governments throughout Africa are aware, for example, that education and health need improvement, that jobs are needed, and that people rely on a variety of price subsidies. This is to say that governments are generally aware that many key sectors need improvement.

Since the 1980s, Pentecostal and other born again Christian movements have become increasingly prominent in the public spheres of many sub-Saharan African states. A dearth of reliable survey data has constrained investigation of the potential influence of these religious movements on political attitudes and participation. This article analyzes original survey data from Zambia, a majority-Christian nation. These data, from a stratified random sample of 1,500 Zambians, indicate that Pentecostals do in fact share partisan preferences and report higher levels of political interest and participation than other Christians. They are less likely, however, to contact elected officials—a finding that accords with ethnographic accounts of Pentecostal pastors as political interlocutors for their politically mobilized congregations. We further contextualize and explore the external validity of our findings using cross-national survey data collected by the Pew Forum (2010, N = 9,500). We conclude by underscoring the value of further survey research on religion and politics in the region.

A growing body of policy feedback work demonstrates that citizens' experiences with public policy influence the way they participate in politics. Most of this work takes place in advanced industrial democracies, but the nuances of policy design influencing participation in advanced democracies are often irrelevant for those in low‐capacity democracies. This study extends the policy feedback framework to address how policies might “feed back” differently in low‐capacity countries with uneven basic service delivery. In low‐capacity democracies, the most salient distinction is between those who have access to basic state‐provided services and those who do not. Using original data collected in Zambia, it demonstrates that those who have even marginal access to state services have higher levels of political engagement and political participation than those without access, indicating that imperfect extension of services may help boost democratic citizenship in developing countries.

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