Working Paper 189
Beyond Performance Legitimacy: Procedural Legitimacy and Discontent in China
Dr Mayling Birney
Conventional wisdom maintains that the Chinese Communist Party is upheld by performance-based legitimacy. Yet what about procedural legitimacy? Analyzing national survey data on China, this study finds that governance procedures affect the legitimacy of subnational levels of governing, if not necessarily that of the national level. Good governance contributes to trust in local leaders, while corruption not only detracts from trust in local and regional leaders, it increases the public’s willingness to protest. This reality was not well-incorporated into the core legitimacy-building approach adopted during the Hu-Wen era. Despite low priority and constrained governance reforms, the main legitimation strategy in the Hu-Wen era remained focused on performance—as growth and equity—even as the public valued procedural legitimacy. While performance legitimacy and traditional legitimacy are also shown to be important phenomena, this study highlights why these are fragile bases for legitimacy, especially considering rising modernization forces and economic slowdown.
- Legitimacy
- Trust
- Governance
- Corruption
- Protest
- Election
- Modernization
- China
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Working Paper 188
The Politics of Ethnic Identity in Sub-Saharan Africa
Dr Elliott Green
Recent literature on ethnic favouritism suggests that Presidents tend to target co-ethnics with patronage, especially in non-democracies. Coupled with evidence on the role of incentives in driving ethnic identity change, I propose that a change in the ethnic identity of presidents in non-democracies should lead to ethnic switching among citizens towards the new ruling ethnic group. Using Demographic and Health Survey data from thirteen African countries, I show that change in the ethnic identity of the President leads to a shift of women identifying with the new ruling ethnic group of around 1.5% of the population in non-democracies, or on average 10% of the President’s ethnic group. This relationship is robust to the use of a variety of control variables and different specifications as well as the use of qualitative case study evidence from Ghana and Guinea; I also suggest it may be an underestimate due to data limitations.
- Africa
- Ethnicity
- Ethnic Identity
- Democratization
- Ethno-Regional Favouritism
- DHS Data
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Working Paper 187
Anything But Safe
Problems with the Protection of Civilians in so-called “safe zones”
Professor David Keen
There is something rather magical in the idea of a ‘safe zone’ - almost as if by declaring an area to be safe one can make it so. Yet it would be more accurate to suggest that ‘safe zones’ are extremely fragile and depend for their existence on the complex and shifting goals of in-country actors and international actors. The history of ‘safe areas’ in Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Sudan shows some of the severe limitations in the ‘safety’ that has been offered – reflecting the complex agendas of national and international actors who may perpetrate or tolerate large-scale abuse despite – and often under the cover of – an officially declared ‘safe area’.
- Safe zone
- Safe area
- Protection
- Civilians
- Civil war
- Humanitarian space
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Working Paper 186
Shifting Visions of Property under Competing Political Regimes:Changing Uses of Côte d'Ivoire's 1998 Land Law
Professor Catherine Boone
Land law reform through registration and titling is often viewed as a technocratic, good-governance step toward building market economies and depoliticizing land transactions. In actual practice, however, land registration and titling programs can be highly partisan, bitterly contentious, and carried forward by political logics that diverge strongly from the market-enhancing vision. This paper uses evidence from Côte d'Ivoire to support and develop this claim. In Côte d'Ivoire after 1990, multiple, opposing political logics drove land law reform as it was pursued by successive governments representing rival coalitions of the national electorate. Between the mid-1990s and 2016, different logics -- alternatively privileging user rights, the ethnic land rights of autochthones, and finally a state-building logic -- prevailed in succession as national government crafted and then sought to implement the 1998 land law. The case underscores the extent to which deeply political questions are implicated in land registration and titling policies.
- Land law
- Côte d'Ivoire
- Governance
- Democracy
- Property rights
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Working Paper 185
"Community Land" in Kenya: Policy Making, Social Mobilization, and Struggle Over Legal Entitlement
Francesca Di Matteo
Stemming from colonial legacy, independent Kenya failed to recognize customary interests in land as possessing force as statutory derived rights. This lies at the heart of the so-called “land question” in Kenya. Moreover, issues related to land rights are perceived as the root causes of conflicts occurring in the 1990s and 2000s. As a result of a crisis recovery process, the 2010 Constitution has embodied the fundaments of land reforms; it has acknowledged “communities” as legally entitled to hold land. The present paper studies decision-making processes via a socio-anthropological approach showing how it contributes to understanding the issues at stake in the reform of Kenya's land tenure system, and the politics surrounding the design of new legislation around “community land”. Through the analysis of interlocking of scales of governance, the paper documents the manner in which local actors participate in, interpret, divert, or exploit policy debates undergoing at the national level.
- Community
- Land reform
- Kenya
- Policy process
- Actors agency
- Land politics
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Working Paper 184
JUST LIKE BOLIVIA Structural Change and Political Disintegration in the West
Prof. Jean-Paul Faguet
The rise of outsider, populist, and nativist politicians across the West is no coincidence, nor a “sign of the times”. It is symptomatic of political party systems disintegrating from the bottom up, as structural changes in the economy and society unmoor them from the major social cleavages that defined political contestation throughout the twentieth century. Predicting how the process will unfold is difficult. But we can open an analytical window into the future by examining the experience of Bolivia, where politics was much less institutionalized than the West, allowing disintegration and realignment to happen much earlier and faster. A first lesson is that left/worker vs. right/capital politics is probably doomed in societies where industrial workers as a self-conscious group have dwindled to a small fraction of the workforce. What will replace it? The current front-runner is the politics of identity, anchored in social cleavages of ethnicity, religion, language, and place. This is a danger not just for affected societies, but for democracy as an ideal, as identity politics revolves much more than class politics around exclusionary categories and zero-sum games. In the UK and Europe, realignment would likely be triggered by Brexit, and the (partial) collapse of the Eurozone. Lastly, while Evo Morales is an experienced politician with deep roots in the social organizations that now define Bolivian politics, Donald Trump is a self-created, top-down, ultimately directionless triumph of social media. Morales transformed Bolivia. Trump will likely destroy much but build little.
- Political parties
- Party system collapse
- Social cleavages
- Identity politics
- Political realignment
- Bolivia
- the West
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Working Paper 183
On the 'Holy Poor': from the Hebrew Bible to the literature of developing countries, 1945 -
David Aberbach
The notion of the ‘holy poor’ ceased to figure significantly in the literature of most developed countries after World War II but continues to resonate in countries where poverty is widespread and the Church has grown. This paper explores 1. the origins of the ‘holy poor’ in the Hebrew Bible, and its consequent betrayals and survivals; 2. the discrepancy between the image of the poor in English Poor Law and English literature from Shakespeare to Orwell; and 3. the continuing relevance of Scripture to literature on the poor in post-1945 developing countries, in Nigeria (Achebe), South Africa (Coetzee), Egypt (Mahfouz), and Brazil (Lispector).
- Poverty
- English Poor Law
- Nigeria
- South Africa
- Egypt
- Brazil
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Working Paper 182
The Political Economy of Import Substitution in the 21st Century: The Challenge of Recapturing the Domestic Market in Rwanda
Pritish Behuria
Import substitution has been marginalised from development policy discourse since the 1970s. This paper examines the Rwandan government’s recent attempt at reintroducing industrial policy with some attention devoted to ‘recapturing the domestic market’ – a term used to replace the ignominy associated with ‘import substitution.’ The paper examines two cases – cement and textiles – where such policies have been recently established in Rwanda.
- Import substitution
- Industrial Policy
- Rwanda
- Political economy
- Textiles
- Cement
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Working Paper 181
The Paradox of Land Reform, Inequality and Development in Colombia*
Prof. Jean-Paul Faguet, Fabio Sanchez and Marta-Juanita Villaveces
Over two centuries, Colombia transferred vast quantities of land, equivalent to the entire UK landmass, mainly to landless peasants. And yet Colombia retains one of the highest concentrations of land ownership in the world. Why? We show that land reform’s effects are highly bimodal. Most of Colombia’s 1100+ municipalities lack a landed elite. Here, rural properties grew larger, land inequality and dispersion fell, and development indicators improved. But in municipalities where such an elite does exist and landholding is highly concentrated, such positive effects are counteracted, resulting in smaller rural properties, greater dispersion, and lower levels of development. We show that all of these effects – positive and negative – flow through local policy, which elites distort to benefit themselves. Our evidence implies that land reform’s second-order effects, on the distribution of local power, are more important than its first-order effects on the distribution of land.
*A follow up Corrigendum was published in 2022 (link below)
- Land reform
- Inequality
- Development
- Latifundia
- Poverty
- Colombia
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Working Paper 180
REVOLUTION FROM BELOW: The Rise of Local Politics and the Fall of Bolivia's Party Systems
Prof. Jean-Paul Faguet
For 50 years Bolivia’s political party system was a surprisingly robust component of an otherwise fragile democracy. How did a gas pipeline dispute spark a revolution that overturned the political system, destroyed existing political parties, and re-cast the relationship between state and society? I examine how the arrival of local government shifted the nation’s politics from a typical 20th century, left-right axis of competition deeply unsuited to a society like Bolivia, to an ethnic and cultural axis more closely aligned with its major social cleavage. This shift made elite parties redundant, and transformed the country’s politics by facilitating the rise of structurally distinct political organizations, and a new indigenous political class. Decentralization was the trigger – not the cause – that made Bolivia’s latent cleavage political, sparking revolution from below. I suggest a folk theorem of identitarian cleavage, and outline a mechanism linking deep social cleavage to sudden political change.
- Cleavage theory
- Political parties
- Elite politics
- Decentralisation
- Latin America
- Bolivia
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