africa

Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
Figure 5.3: Average Polity2 Score for Sub-Saharan Africa
Source: McMillan and Harttgen (2014): Author’s calculations using data from the Polity IV Project and
the World Bank’s WDI dataset for different Sub-Samples of African countries, depending on the initial
year the dataset started for countries in each set.
Notes: The graph shows a weighted average of the Polity2 score (weighted by population) in the Polity
IV dataset. The Polity2 score is the revised combined polity score, which is the result of subtracting the
“autoc” score from the “democ” score.
Solid bright lines are population-weighted averages of the individual country scores for each cohort: the
1960 cohort (red), 1965 cohort (yellow), 1975 cohort (green), and the 1990 cohort (blue).
Countries included are: Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde,
Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo Brazzaville, Congo Kinshasa, Cote d’Ivoire, Equatorial
Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia,
Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal,
Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Swaziland, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda,
Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
A third relatively endogenous factor has been the emergence of an African middle
class. According to the AfDB, the size of the middle class has grown from around
220 million to 350 million in 2010. A recent analysis of the emerging African middle
class concludes that “this new middle class has strong positive potential for the
region. It has the capacity to increase domestic consumption; contribute to private
sector growth and entrepreneurialism; boost demand for better governance and
public services; improve gender equality; and raise standards of living, allowing
many people to exit from poverty” (Ncube and Lufumba, 2014). Historically, there
has been a close interrelationship between the rise of a middle class and improved
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