2 - Coming to Power and Using It

Summary

Chapter 2 presents the general framework we adopt to examine the impact of leadership changes. In Africa, unregulated stays in office by political leaders have coincided with the high personalization of authoritarian power, with the spread of neopatrimonial practices and with a growing disregard for public goods and government performance. We expect that the performance of African leaders should have improved after the adoption of political reforms in the 1990s. Democracy affects how leaders reach and leave power and what they do while they are in office. Electoral concerns induce them to be more mindful of the consequences of their government actions. Moving a step further, however, we hypothesize that also multiparty elections short of democracy may generate an impact on performance–particularly in an African context where mechanisms for selecting leaders and holding them accountable were previously in such short supply. We thus work within the stream in democratization studies that focuses on the socioeconomic consequences of political regimes. The specific perspective that we adopt, however, is one in which leadership change and alternation in power through multiparty elections constitute a key link between politico-institutional arrangements and mechanisms, even when they do not fulfill democratic standards, and performance outcomes