In many elections across the world, the regime in power uses violence to influence electoral dynamics and outcomes. What is the effect of such violence on citizens' attitudes to democracy? We argue that the effect of government-perpetrated electoral violence on citizens' democratic commitment will diverge depending on whether the individual supports the ruling or opposition party. While those affiliated with the opposition should become more likely to support democracy in the wake of government violence, we expect those affiliated with the incumbent to support more power concentrated in the hands of the executive. We examine these expectations using cross-national, geo-referenced survey data from the Afrobarometer, alongside event data on electoral violence. We find that while incumbent supporters generally display lower baseline support for democracy in the absence of violence, violent elections do not further erode their democratic commitment. Violence is, however, associated with increased support for democracy amongst opposition supporters.

The arguments that property rights and taxation positively affect development are well established in separate literatures, but the link between property rights and taxation is under-studied. To address this gap, we theorize, in the fiscal contract tradition, that property rights assigned and upheld by the state, as opposed to other political authorities, increase individual assent to taxation. We apply this argument to property rights on land in sub-Saharan-Africa, where the majority of land is governed by traditional authorities. Empirically we examine (1) the link between the state-assinged property rights on land and assent to taxation using individual-level data from Afrobarometer, and (2) the effect of state-led formalization, measured through novel data on state-produced cadastral records, and revenue from taxes on individuals in a panel of 37 sub-Saharan African countries across 35 years. We find support for our argument that there is no taxation without state-assigned property rights.

The process by which people transfer their allegiance from ethnic to national identities is highly topical yet somewhat opaque. This article argues that one of the key determinants of national identification is membership in a ‘core’ ethnic group, or Staatsvolk, and whether or not that group is in power. It uses the example of Uganda as well as Afrobarometer data to show that, when the core ethnic group is in power (as measured by the ethnic identity of the president), members of this group identify more with the nation, but when this group is out of power members identify more with their ethnic group. This finding has important implications for the study of nationalism, ethnicity and African politics.

This study clarifies the meaning of clientelism and documents its extent in sub-Saharan Africa—a region that political scientists and policy makers often view as especially clientelistic. It proposes an understanding of clientelism as personal contact between citizens and politicians in which citizens request selective rather than public goods in exchange for political loyalty. It then suggests that assessments of clientelism in Africa are sensitive to the amount of information about personal contact that surveys provide. Closed-ended Afrobarometer surveys suggest that personal contact is mostly clientelistic, whereas the original open-ended questionnaires employed in an original survey from Niger suggest that the bulk of citizen requests are programmatic. Leveraging detail in Nigeriens’ qualitative accounts of visiting and calling politicians, the highly personalized contact of Nigeriens can be understood as an adaptation to limits on impersonal contact, not a sign that politicians are circumventing formal channels of communication in order to distribute patronage under the table.