Robert Mattes
Biographic Data
| ID | 158179 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Mattes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Mattes |
| SIGNATURE | MATTES R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0567-9385 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 765 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Conceptualizing and Measuring Support for Democracy: A New Approach
Much of what we know about public support for democracy is based on survey questions about “democracy,” a term that varies in meaning across countries and likely prompts uncritically supportive responses. This paper proposes a new approach to measuring support for democracy. We develop a battery of 17 survey questions that cover all eight components of liberal democracy as defined by the V-Dem project. We then ask respondents from 19 national sam…
African Legislators: Unrepresentative Power Elites
African legislators both resemble and differ from the societies they claim to represent in important ways. Based on a unique survey of representative samples of parliamentarians in 17 countries, we find that legislatures are representative of national publics in terms of ethnicity and religion. At the same time, compared to ordinary African citizens, African MPs possess far higher levels of education and are far more likely to be older, male and …
It takes two to toyi-toyi: One party dominance and opposition party failure in South Africa’s 2019 national election
Why do dominant parties continue to win elections despite significant governance failures? Scholars of one party democracies tend to locate explanations at the macro-level: manipulation of rules, control over state media, or selective distribution of benefits to supporters. Other scholars emphasize ethnic or religious identities which trump consideration of policy and performance. We employ a multinomial regression model of voter decisions in Sou…
Party structures and organization building in Africa
Political parties are a vital element in the quality of representative democracy, playing a crucial role in mobilization, competition, governance, and accountability. Despite their importance, however, we currently know relatively little about how political parties in Africa are organized, with most evidence restricted to journalistic accounts or country-specific scholarly accounts. This symposium, which comes out of a conference on political par…
Party footprints in Africa: Measuring local party presence across the continent
The conventional view of Africa’s political parties holds that they are organizationally weak, with little presence at the grass roots. Yet, few studies are based on systematically collected data about more than a handful of parties or countries at any given point. In this paper, we attempt to remedy this situation, by focusing on one crucial aspect of party organization – the local presence that enables political parties to engage with and mobil…
A Lost Decade for Third-Wave Democracies
By comparing results based on expert and popular surveys, this article finds that popular support for democracy was dwindling even in the decade before expert surveys (such as Freedom in the World and V-Dem) began to show the reality of democratic retreat. Decreasing support for democracy is tied to low satisfaction with how democracy works in practice, and it contributes to the rise of populist leaders who concentrate power in the executive bran…
In Whose Interest? Gender and Mass–Elite Priority Congruence in Sub-Saharan Africa
Do men and women representatives hold different legislative priorities? Do these priorities align with citizens who share their gender? Whereas substantive representation theorists suggest legislators’ priorities should align with their cogender constituents, Downsian-based theories suggest no role for gender. We test these differing expectations through a new originally collected survey data set of more than 800 parliamentarians and data from mo…
Social and Political Trust in Developing Countries
From a modernization perspective, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America—two of the poorest regions in the world—conform to one another in that citizens of both regions express very low levels of horizontal, generalized interpersonal trust. Indeed, these two regions are among the least trusting societies in the world. Both are low in terms of “bridging” trust, and both also have high degrees of particularized “bonding” trust. However, these regions…
Legislatures and Democratic Development in Africa
Afrobarometer data collected three decades after Joel Barkan's pioneering survey of rural Kenyans confirm his insights that voters stress MPs' linkage roles in terms of representation (carrying views upward to the capital) and constituency service (bringing goods downward from national government) over their institutional roles (lawmaking and oversight). And, contrary to conventional wisdom, they prefer collective goods for the constituency over …
Does the Quality of Elections Affect the Consolidation of Democracy?
Voting and Democratic Citizenship in Africa
Systematic, Quantitative Political Science in South Africa: The Road Less Travelled
While it has clearly been a minority tendency within the discipline, there is a significant tradition of systematic, quantitative research on South African society, politics, and democracy that has contributed a great deal to our understanding of these issues. Yet much of this research has actually been carried out by South African psychologists and sociologists, not political scientists. And amongst the political scientists, a great deal of the …
Democratising the Measurement of Democratic Quality: Public Attitude Data and the Evaluation of African Political Regimes
Diamond and Morlino (2005) propose a quality of democracy framework that includes eight dimensions, but they restrict use of opinion data to measuring only one of these: ‘responsiveness’. However, we argue that citizen experiences and evaluations are essential pieces of data that may also enable us to capture valid ‘insider’ measures of procedural and substantive dimensions that may be missed by expert judges and macro-level indicators. We develo…
The ‘Born Frees: The Prospects for Generational Change in Post‐apartheidSouth Africa
South Africa's 1996 Constitution ushered in a democratic regime that brought new freedoms and rights and greatly expanded opportunities for political participation. In 1998, South Africa also implemented a new school curriculum intended, among other things, to promote democratic and other constitutional values. At the same time, South Africa has undergone rapid demographic change as growing proportions of young people enter the electorate with no…
Politics and Policy Outcomes on Children Affected by HIV/Aids in Africa
Global agencies working for children affected by AIDS have recently reported some progress (UNAIDS 2008). Year by year, more HIV-positive pregnant women receive medication to avoid infecting their unborn babies, increasing numbers of children in late stages of HIV infection receive antiretroviral treatment (ART), and a higher proportion of affected children enjoy some form of social protection and schooling. However, while all this is good news, …
Learning about Democracy in Africa: Awareness, Performance, and Experience
Conventional views of African politics imply that Africans' political opinions are based either on enduring cultural values or their positions in the social structure. In contrast, we argue that Africans form attitudes to democracy based upon what they learn about what it is and does. This learning hypothesis is tested against competing cultural, institutional, and structural theories to explain citizens' demand for democracy (legitimation) and t…
Public opinion, democracy, and market reform in Africa
This book is a ground-breaking exploration of public opinion in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on the Afrobarometer, a comprehensive cross-national survey research project, it reveals what ordinary Africans think of democracy and market reform, subjects about which almost nothing is otherwise known."--Jacket
Afrobarometer: Round 2.5 Survey of South Africa, 2004
The Afrobarometer project was designed to assess attitudes toward democracy, markets, and civil society in several sub-Saharan African nations, and to track the evolution of such attitudes in those nations over time. This particular survey was concerned with the attitudes and opinions of the citizens of South Africa. Respondents gave their opinions of the performance of South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki and elected officials in local and natio…
Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in Africa
This book is a fascinating exploration of public opinion in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on the Afrobarometer, a comprehensive cross-national survey research project, it reveals what ordinary Africans think about democracy and market reform, subjects on which almost nothing is otherwise known. The authors find that support for democracy in Africa is wide but shallow and that Africans feel trapped between state and market. Beyond multiparty elections…
Popular attitudes toward the South African electoral system
This article is based on a survey of popular attitudes towards the pure list system that is South Africa’s proportional representation electoral system. While the reported findings are broadly positive there are some notable exceptions, located disproportionately among racial minorities and also among sizable numbers of black respondents. Pure proportional representation is unlikely to produce the values that the respondents say they most want fr…
Support for Economic Reform? Popular Attitudes in Southern Africa
South Africa: Democracy Without the People
Perhaps more than any other democratizing country, South Africa generates widely differing assessments of the present state and likely future prospects of its democracy. If one takes the long view--comparing South Africa today to where it was just 12 years ago--it is difficult not to be enthusiastic about its accomplishments and its future. South Africa successfully emerged from the shadow of apparently irreconcilable conflict and unavoidable rac…
Africa's Triple Transition: Popular perspectives
Sub-Saharan Africa has witnessed the end of foreign colonial rule, the rise and fall of autocratic political regimes, and the disappearance of statist command economies. The challenges were to turn populations into coherent nations owing allegiance to the state; to democratise the state structures that govern these populations; and to liberalise the rules that regulate economic transactions. An important source to assess these prospects are the v…
How People View Democracy: Africans' Surprising Universalism
Although Africa is a latecomer to democratization, Africans overwhelmingly support democracy, and their conception of democracy is surprisingly liberal
Opposition Parties and the Voters in South Africa's General Election of 1999
Variance in partisan choice among South African voters can be predicted on the basis of what is known about the way voters see economic trends, evaluate government performance, perceive political parties, and rate party leaders. However, in this analysis it is demonstrated that factors related to racial divisions shape and filter how voters perceive political performance, and to some extent lead different voters to emphasize different performance…
Learning about Democracy in Africa: Awareness, Performance, and Experience
Conventional views of African politics imply that Africans' political opinions are based either on enduring cultural values or their positions in the social structure. In contrast, we argue that Africans form attitudes to democracy based upon what they learn about what it is and does. This learning hypothesis is tested against competing cultural, institutional, and structural theories to explain citizens' demand for democracy (legitimation) and t…
Support for Democracy in Africa: Intrinsic or Instrumental
Comparative analysis of original survey data from Ghana, Zambia and South Africa is used here to assess the attitudes of African citizens towards democracy. Is democracy valued intrinsically (as an end in itself) or instrumentally (for example, as a means to improving material living standards)? We find as much popular support for democracy in Africa as in other Third Wave regions but less satisfaction with the performance of elected governments.…
In Whose Interest? Gender and Mass–Elite Priority Congruence in Sub-Saharan Africa
Do men and women representatives hold different legislative priorities? Do these priorities align with citizens who share their gender? Whereas substantive representation theorists suggest legislators’ priorities should align with their cogender constituents, Downsian-based theories suggest no role for gender. We test these differing expectations through a new originally collected survey data set of more than 800 parliamentarians and data from mo…
South Africa: Democracy Without the People
Perhaps more than any other democratizing country, South Africa generates widely differing assessments of the present state and likely future prospects of its democracy. If one takes the long view--comparing South Africa today to where it was just 12 years ago--it is difficult not to be enthusiastic about its accomplishments and its future. South Africa successfully emerged from the shadow of apparently irreconcilable conflict and unavoidable rac…
Public opinion, democracy, and market reform in Africa
This book is a ground-breaking exploration of public opinion in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on the Afrobarometer, a comprehensive cross-national survey research project, it reveals what ordinary Africans think of democracy and market reform, subjects about which almost nothing is otherwise known."--Jacket
The ‘Born Frees: The Prospects for Generational Change in Post‐apartheidSouth Africa
South Africa's 1996 Constitution ushered in a democratic regime that brought new freedoms and rights and greatly expanded opportunities for political participation. In 1998, South Africa also implemented a new school curriculum intended, among other things, to promote democratic and other constitutional values. At the same time, South Africa has undergone rapid demographic change as growing proportions of young people enter the electorate with no…
How People View Democracy: Africans' Surprising Universalism
Although Africa is a latecomer to democratization, Africans overwhelmingly support democracy, and their conception of democracy is surprisingly liberal
Opposition Parties and the Voters in South Africa's General Election of 1999
Variance in partisan choice among South African voters can be predicted on the basis of what is known about the way voters see economic trends, evaluate government performance, perceive political parties, and rate party leaders. However, in this analysis it is demonstrated that factors related to racial divisions shape and filter how voters perceive political performance, and to some extent lead different voters to emphasize different performance…
Conceptualizing and Measuring Support for Democracy: A New Approach
Much of what we know about public support for democracy is based on survey questions about “democracy,” a term that varies in meaning across countries and likely prompts uncritically supportive responses. This paper proposes a new approach to measuring support for democracy. We develop a battery of 17 survey questions that cover all eight components of liberal democracy as defined by the V-Dem project. We then ask respondents from 19 national sam…
Consolidation and Public Opinion in South Africa
Consolidation and Public Opinion in South Africa Robert Mattes (bio) and Hermann Thiel (bio) As recently as January 1990, almost all observers would have agreed that the odds were stacked heavily against a successful transition to democracy in South Africa. In the aftermath of the “miracle election” of April 1994, however, the odds might appear, at first glance, to favor a successful consolidation of South African democracy. For the overwhelming …
Judgement and choice in the 1999 South African election
In this article, we set out the basic points of the theoretical \nframework of voter choice that underlie the Opinion '99 research project. In \ncontrast to prevailing theories that have characterized voter choice in South \nAfrica as an ethnic or racial census, this approach emphasizes the role of how \nvoters learn about government performance and the alternatives offered by \nopposition parties. We then deduce a very simplified model that cons…
A Lost Decade for Third-Wave Democracies
By comparing results based on expert and popular surveys, this article finds that popular support for democracy was dwindling even in the decade before expert surveys (such as Freedom in the World and V-Dem) began to show the reality of democratic retreat. Decreasing support for democracy is tied to low satisfaction with how democracy works in practice, and it contributes to the rise of populist leaders who concentrate power in the executive bran…
Legislatures and Democratic Development in Africa
Afrobarometer data collected three decades after Joel Barkan's pioneering survey of rural Kenyans confirm his insights that voters stress MPs' linkage roles in terms of representation (carrying views upward to the capital) and constituency service (bringing goods downward from national government) over their institutional roles (lawmaking and oversight). And, contrary to conventional wisdom, they prefer collective goods for the constituency over …
Popular attitudes toward the South African electoral system
This article is based on a survey of popular attitudes towards the pure list system that is South Africa’s proportional representation electoral system. While the reported findings are broadly positive there are some notable exceptions, located disproportionately among racial minorities and also among sizable numbers of black respondents. Pure proportional representation is unlikely to produce the values that the respondents say they most want fr…
Support for Economic Reform? Popular Attitudes in Southern Africa
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Migration from Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe to South Africa
David A. McDonald, Lovemore Zinyama, John Gay, Fion de Vletter, Robert Mattes, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Migration from Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe to South Africa, The International Migration Review, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 813-841
Party footprints in Africa: Measuring local party presence across the continent
The conventional view of Africa’s political parties holds that they are organizationally weak, with little presence at the grass roots. Yet, few studies are based on systematically collected data about more than a handful of parties or countries at any given point. In this paper, we attempt to remedy this situation, by focusing on one crucial aspect of party organization – the local presence that enables political parties to engage with and mobil…
It takes two to toyi-toyi: One party dominance and opposition party failure in South Africa’s 2019 national election
Why do dominant parties continue to win elections despite significant governance failures? Scholars of one party democracies tend to locate explanations at the macro-level: manipulation of rules, control over state media, or selective distribution of benefits to supporters. Other scholars emphasize ethnic or religious identities which trump consideration of policy and performance. We employ a multinomial regression model of voter decisions in Sou…
Democratising the Measurement of Democratic Quality: Public Attitude Data and the Evaluation of African Political Regimes
Diamond and Morlino (2005) propose a quality of democracy framework that includes eight dimensions, but they restrict use of opinion data to measuring only one of these: ‘responsiveness’. However, we argue that citizen experiences and evaluations are essential pieces of data that may also enable us to capture valid ‘insider’ measures of procedural and substantive dimensions that may be missed by expert judges and macro-level indicators. We develo…
Party structures and organization building in Africa
Political parties are a vital element in the quality of representative democracy, playing a crucial role in mobilization, competition, governance, and accountability. Despite their importance, however, we currently know relatively little about how political parties in Africa are organized, with most evidence restricted to journalistic accounts or country-specific scholarly accounts. This symposium, which comes out of a conference on political par…
The Emerging Party System in the New South Africa
This report presents evidence from a recent national post-election study concerning South Africa's prospects for developing into either a truly competitive multi-party system or the one-party-dominant system characteristic of so many other emerging democracies. Focusing on long-term party identification, the evidence indicates that the African National Congress (ANC) not only commands an overwhelming, but also intense, share of partisan loyalty. …
Systematic, Quantitative Political Science in South Africa: The Road Less Travelled
While it has clearly been a minority tendency within the discipline, there is a significant tradition of systematic, quantitative research on South African society, politics, and democracy that has contributed a great deal to our understanding of these issues. Yet much of this research has actually been carried out by South African psychologists and sociologists, not political scientists. And amongst the political scientists, a great deal of the …
Personal Versus Collective Quality of Life And South Africans' Evaluations of Democratic Government
Politics and Policy Outcomes on Children Affected by HIV/Aids in Africa
Global agencies working for children affected by AIDS have recently reported some progress (UNAIDS 2008). Year by year, more HIV-positive pregnant women receive medication to avoid infecting their unborn babies, increasing numbers of children in late stages of HIV infection receive antiretroviral treatment (ART), and a higher proportion of affected children enjoy some form of social protection and schooling. However, while all this is good news, …
Beyond “government and opposition: An independent South African legislature
The debate about appropriate democratic national institutions in South Africa has focused on the electoral system and the executive but has failed to address the benefits and drawbacks of differing types of legislatures. Yet a properly designed legislature which is truly politically independent offers several important advantages for constitutional democracy in South African. However, in order to appreciate these benefits we need to make a fundam…
Beyond “government and opposition: An independent South African legislature
The debate about appropriate democratic national institutions in South Africa has focused on the electoral system and the executive but has failed to address the benefits and drawbacks of differing types of legislatures. Yet a properly designed legislature which is truly politically independent offers several important advantages for constitutional democracy in South African. However, in order to appreciate these benefits we need to make a fundam…
The Emerging Party System in the New South Africa
This report presents evidence from a recent national post-election study concerning South Africa's prospects for developing into either a truly competitive multi-party system or the one-party-dominant system characteristic of so many other emerging democracies. Focusing on long-term party identification, the evidence indicates that the African National Congress (ANC) not only commands an overwhelming, but also intense, share of partisan loyalty. …
Personal Versus Collective Quality of Life And South Africans' Evaluations of Democratic Government
Consolidation and Public Opinion in South Africa
Consolidation and Public Opinion in South Africa Robert Mattes (bio) and Hermann Thiel (bio) As recently as January 1990, almost all observers would have agreed that the odds were stacked heavily against a successful transition to democracy in South Africa. In the aftermath of the “miracle election” of April 1994, however, the odds might appear, at first glance, to favor a successful consolidation of South African democracy. For the overwhelming …
Judgement and choice in the 1999 South African election
In this article, we set out the basic points of the theoretical \nframework of voter choice that underlie the Opinion '99 research project. In \ncontrast to prevailing theories that have characterized voter choice in South \nAfrica as an ethnic or racial census, this approach emphasizes the role of how \nvoters learn about government performance and the alternatives offered by \nopposition parties. We then deduce a very simplified model that cons…
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Migration from Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe to South Africa
David A. McDonald, Lovemore Zinyama, John Gay, Fion de Vletter, Robert Mattes, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Migration from Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe to South Africa, The International Migration Review, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 813-841
Africa's Triple Transition: Popular perspectives
Sub-Saharan Africa has witnessed the end of foreign colonial rule, the rise and fall of autocratic political regimes, and the disappearance of statist command economies. The challenges were to turn populations into coherent nations owing allegiance to the state; to democratise the state structures that govern these populations; and to liberalise the rules that regulate economic transactions. An important source to assess these prospects are the v…
How People View Democracy: Africans' Surprising Universalism
Although Africa is a latecomer to democratization, Africans overwhelmingly support democracy, and their conception of democracy is surprisingly liberal
Opposition Parties and the Voters in South Africa's General Election of 1999
Variance in partisan choice among South African voters can be predicted on the basis of what is known about the way voters see economic trends, evaluate government performance, perceive political parties, and rate party leaders. However, in this analysis it is demonstrated that factors related to racial divisions shape and filter how voters perceive political performance, and to some extent lead different voters to emphasize different performance…
Support for Democracy in Africa: Intrinsic or Instrumental
Comparative analysis of original survey data from Ghana, Zambia and South Africa is used here to assess the attitudes of African citizens towards democracy. Is democracy valued intrinsically (as an end in itself) or instrumentally (for example, as a means to improving material living standards)? We find as much popular support for democracy in Africa as in other Third Wave regions but less satisfaction with the performance of elected governments.…
South Africa: Democracy Without the People
Perhaps more than any other democratizing country, South Africa generates widely differing assessments of the present state and likely future prospects of its democracy. If one takes the long view--comparing South Africa today to where it was just 12 years ago--it is difficult not to be enthusiastic about its accomplishments and its future. South Africa successfully emerged from the shadow of apparently irreconcilable conflict and unavoidable rac…
Support for Economic Reform? Popular Attitudes in Southern Africa
Afrobarometer: Round 2.5 Survey of South Africa, 2004
The Afrobarometer project was designed to assess attitudes toward democracy, markets, and civil society in several sub-Saharan African nations, and to track the evolution of such attitudes in those nations over time. This particular survey was concerned with the attitudes and opinions of the citizens of South Africa. Respondents gave their opinions of the performance of South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki and elected officials in local and natio…
Public Opinion, Democracy, and Market Reform in Africa
This book is a fascinating exploration of public opinion in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on the Afrobarometer, a comprehensive cross-national survey research project, it reveals what ordinary Africans think about democracy and market reform, subjects on which almost nothing is otherwise known. The authors find that support for democracy in Africa is wide but shallow and that Africans feel trapped between state and market. Beyond multiparty elections…
Popular attitudes toward the South African electoral system
This article is based on a survey of popular attitudes towards the pure list system that is South Africa’s proportional representation electoral system. While the reported findings are broadly positive there are some notable exceptions, located disproportionately among racial minorities and also among sizable numbers of black respondents. Pure proportional representation is unlikely to produce the values that the respondents say they most want fr…
Public opinion, democracy, and market reform in Africa
This book is a ground-breaking exploration of public opinion in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on the Afrobarometer, a comprehensive cross-national survey research project, it reveals what ordinary Africans think of democracy and market reform, subjects about which almost nothing is otherwise known."--Jacket
Learning about Democracy in Africa: Awareness, Performance, and Experience
Conventional views of African politics imply that Africans' political opinions are based either on enduring cultural values or their positions in the social structure. In contrast, we argue that Africans form attitudes to democracy based upon what they learn about what it is and does. This learning hypothesis is tested against competing cultural, institutional, and structural theories to explain citizens' demand for democracy (legitimation) and t…
Politics and Policy Outcomes on Children Affected by HIV/Aids in Africa
Global agencies working for children affected by AIDS have recently reported some progress (UNAIDS 2008). Year by year, more HIV-positive pregnant women receive medication to avoid infecting their unborn babies, increasing numbers of children in late stages of HIV infection receive antiretroviral treatment (ART), and a higher proportion of affected children enjoy some form of social protection and schooling. However, while all this is good news, …
Democratising the Measurement of Democratic Quality: Public Attitude Data and the Evaluation of African Political Regimes
Diamond and Morlino (2005) propose a quality of democracy framework that includes eight dimensions, but they restrict use of opinion data to measuring only one of these: ‘responsiveness’. However, we argue that citizen experiences and evaluations are essential pieces of data that may also enable us to capture valid ‘insider’ measures of procedural and substantive dimensions that may be missed by expert judges and macro-level indicators. We develo…
The ‘Born Frees: The Prospects for Generational Change in Post‐apartheidSouth Africa
South Africa's 1996 Constitution ushered in a democratic regime that brought new freedoms and rights and greatly expanded opportunities for political participation. In 1998, South Africa also implemented a new school curriculum intended, among other things, to promote democratic and other constitutional values. At the same time, South Africa has undergone rapid demographic change as growing proportions of young people enter the electorate with no…
Does the Quality of Elections Affect the Consolidation of Democracy?
Voting and Democratic Citizenship in Africa
Systematic, Quantitative Political Science in South Africa: The Road Less Travelled
While it has clearly been a minority tendency within the discipline, there is a significant tradition of systematic, quantitative research on South African society, politics, and democracy that has contributed a great deal to our understanding of these issues. Yet much of this research has actually been carried out by South African psychologists and sociologists, not political scientists. And amongst the political scientists, a great deal of the …
Legislatures and Democratic Development in Africa
Afrobarometer data collected three decades after Joel Barkan's pioneering survey of rural Kenyans confirm his insights that voters stress MPs' linkage roles in terms of representation (carrying views upward to the capital) and constituency service (bringing goods downward from national government) over their institutional roles (lawmaking and oversight). And, contrary to conventional wisdom, they prefer collective goods for the constituency over …
Social and Political Trust in Developing Countries
From a modernization perspective, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America—two of the poorest regions in the world—conform to one another in that citizens of both regions express very low levels of horizontal, generalized interpersonal trust. Indeed, these two regions are among the least trusting societies in the world. Both are low in terms of “bridging” trust, and both also have high degrees of particularized “bonding” trust. However, these regions…
Political science (31 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (26 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Political economy (22 works) · Democracy (21 works) · Law (21 works) · Economics (16 works) · Development economics (12 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (10 works)