Introduction: Subnational Legislative Politics and African Democratic Development

Abstract

Despite significant urbanization, democratization, and economic globalization over the last few decades, Africans still have few direct interactions with national government officials. The president and the politicians in the capital remain far removed, making the relationship between rulers and ruled largely an indirect one. Elections, whether competitive or merely ritualistic, do little to reduce this distance between citizens and government, leaving room for misinterpretation of the people’s preferences or leading to abuse of authority that citizens entrust in the government. ‘A food should not be cooked in Uror and prepared by somebody coming from Juba,’ explains a Nuer villager in South Sudan, Africa’s newest country. ‘These small levels are the eyes; they see and solve the problems out there’ (Cook et al. 2013, 29). Her views are echoed in surveys across 20 countries, where Africans describe local officials as more responsive than national ones by an average margin of 11 points, sometimes by substantially more (Bratton 2010a). At the same time, waves of institutional reforms are multiplying the opportunities for interactions with subnational tiers of government. Tanzania now has nearly 285,000 elected offices and Burkina Faso has some 17,000; in Ethiopia 3.6 million people — an estimated ten percent of all adults — run for office across its five levels of government (Dickovick and Riedl 2010).