Neopatrimonialism and Democracy: An Empirical Investigation of Africa's Political Regimes

Abstract

Gothenburg. We performed simulations and other computational tasks using resources provided by the Notre Dame Center for Research Computing (CRC) through the High Performance Computing section and the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden, SNIC 2016/1-382 and 2017/1-68. We specifically acknowledge the assistance of In-Saeng Suh at CRC and Johan Raber at SNIC in facilitating our use of their respective systems. The indices of neopatrimonialism used in this paper will be available for public use in V-Dem's v8 dataset, set to be released in April 2018 at www.v-dem.net. AbstractOne of the most common adjectives used to describe democracy in sub-Saharan Africa is "neopatrimonial." Characterized by strong executives, pervasive clientelism and use of state resources for political legitimation (Bratton and van de Walle 1997), neopatrimonial democracy has been (controversially) associated with a range of (mostly undesirable) social, political and economic outcomes. This paper offers an empirical assessment of neopatrimonialism in Africa's political regimes. We show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, African regimes vary both quantitatively and qualitatively in their embodiment of neopatrimonial rule. Moreover, we find no clear evidence indicating that neopatrimonialism necessarily impedes the advancement or survival of democracy.

The Impact of Neopatrimonialism on Poverty in Contemporary Latin America

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Neopatrimonial Model of Public Administration and its Transformation in the Context of Global Uncertainty

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“…version of patrimonialism, by taking on a more transactional character (Sigman and Lindberg 2017;Erdmann and Engel 2007).…”