africa

Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
in urban and rural areas. Other observers suggest that poorer people in Africa do
not understand what democracy is; that democracy is a foreign, Western concept
that is not widely shared, especially among the non-educated. Here again, the
data from 2011 Afrobarometer surveys indicate that individuals with university degrees
and those with only primary school educations have nearly identical levels
of support for democracy.
Still others think of poverty as a threat to democracy in Africa. However, this is also
not true, as support for the rule of law and rejection of violence among Africans is
consistently strong irrespective of socioeconomic status. These results are consistent
with recent research by Acemoglu and others (2008), indicating that modernization
theories do not work around the world, and that contrary to popular belief
there is no correlation between income and democracy in Africa and elsewhere.
11.2 Origins of democratic values in Africa
Many political scientists have mentioned civil societies and democratic values as
key determinants of democracy; however, it is obvious that civil society’s strength
and democratic values are endogenous. In a paper that I wrote with Omar Garcia
Ponce, a graduate student from NYU (Wantchekon and Garcia Ponce, 2014), we
show that democratic values in Africa can be traced back to the legacy of different
independence movements. Countries that experienced rural social movements,
like Cameroon and Zimbabwe, tend to be autocratic or highly unstable democracies.
Those that experienced urban social movements, like Ghana, Senegal,
and Tanzania, tend to be stable democracies. We checked for causality using instrumental
variable techniques, finding that one potential chain of causality is the
strength of civil society following the Independence movement. Thus, we see that
the big divide in Africa is not between the rich and poor countries, but rather between
those that attained Independence through urban protests and those that
achieved Independence via rural rebellion.
Figure 11.1 shows that countries that experienced rural insurgency tend to have
had lower levels of democracy since Independence, and that this gap has increased
drastically since the Cold War. This result holds whether we use the Polity
or the Freedom House measure of democracy. This surprising finding indicates
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