Foreign Aid, Clientelism and Democratic Consolidation in Sub-Saharan Africa in the post-transition period

Abstract

This study aims to understand the impact of foreign aid on democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa in the post-transition period. There is disagreement amongst political scientists about the role of development aid in the democratization of fledgling democracies. It seems that the existing literature on the relationship between foreign aid and democracy has not paid enough attention to political clientelism and its pernicious effects on democratic consolidation in comparative perspective. Politicians in recipient countries have discretion as to how aid is allocated to induce maximum political support from voters. Incumbents offer public investment to local political elites in return for votes. Thus, I put incumbents clientelistic strategy as the key mediating variable between foreign aid and democratic consolidation. I employ a mixed-methods approach to investigate this relationship, including using theoretical models, quantitative analyses, and historical substantive country-specific approach. The donor-incumbent sequential game and incumbents aid allocation strategy model generates four main hypotheses: (1) foreign aid hampers democratic development in general

(2) economic aid strengthens political incumbents support

(3) democracy aid has no significant impact on political incumbents support

and (4) when the amount of aid gradually decreases, politicians will allocate less and less aid to influence certain leaders than influence uncertain leaders. In order to empirically investigate hypotheses, I use a two-stage least square analysis (2SLS) approach to take account of the potential for endogeneity. Specifically, it is possible that foreign aid donors may reward recipient countries with more aid where they expect less prevalence of political clientelism

if this is the case there would be a higher likelihood of economic development and democratization. As a result of using this approach, I find that foreign aid as a whole might harm democratic consolidation in Sub-Saharan African countries. More specifically, economic aid may increase the likelihood of incumbents political success whereas democracy aid affects the system in the opposite direction. In summary, I argue that clientelism might be the key variable which links development aid and slow democratic consolidation. To reveal causal mechanism, I investigate a specific country case: Senegal in Western Africa. In this section, I shed light on the mechanism by which foreign aid influences the extent to which incumbents can maintain political support from voters. In Senegal, incumbent politicians mobilize voters through local political elites. The tradition of clientelistic practices in Senegal dates back to the French colonial era. Politicians provide development projects to local religious leaders in return for the votes. Thus it was inevitable that the ruling party lost political support when the amount of aid gradually decreased during the 1990s. More specifically, they changed aid allocation strategy to maintain a certain level of vote, minimizing involved electoral risk. However it led to the withdrawal of political support from influence certain leaders and the victory of the opposition party in the presidential election in 2000.