4 - State Capacity and Accountability in Low-Income States

Summary

In Africa and other low-income regions, the modal result of the interplay between incumbents and opposition has been the resilience of very imperfect democracies or electoral autocracies, and not a broad trend of backsliding. This represents a puzzle, since low-income states with few long-standing democratic traditions have been generally viewed as the most vulnerable to autocratization. This chapter offers some tentative hypotheses for this apparent stability, focusing on the relationship between state capacity and democracy, and disaggregating them into their different components. Institutions of vertical accountability can generally exist (or in some cases flourish) with limited state capacity. These include formal political participation, such as elections and voting, which is often incentivized and subsidized by the international community, or citizen and civil society actions that are made possible by freedom of association and freedom of the press, which do not rely on state capacity. On the other hand, the consolidation of political institutions that advance horizontal accountability will be constrained by deficient state capacity. Judicial independence and legislative power as well as other independent checks on the executive branch of government will typically be more undermined by low capacity than the incumbent regime itself.