China/Europe and the Changing Global Order seminar series: Democracy, distributive politics, and development finance: evidence from Africa

The Open University and York University present a monthly webinar series featuring graduate students and early career scholars.

Title:

Democracy, Distributive Politics, and Development Finance: Evidence from Africa

Speakers:

Dr Keyi Tang, Boston University Global Development Policy Center

Abstract:

Development agencies allocate billions of dollars annually to sub-Saharan Africa, yet funds may not reach the most vulnerable communities. This research investigates how external accountability through financier conditions, review processes, and internal accountability via recipient political competition affect subnational allocation of development finance in weak institutional contexts. Using geocoded data on Chinese and World Bank projects across 48 African countries (1995-2021), original data on district-level presidential and legislative election results in these countries during the same period, 175 elite interviews in Beijing, Washington D.C., Zambia, Ethiopia and Ghana, and granular data and qualitative case studies on road projects financed by all major development partners in Ethiopia, Zambia and Ghana (1999-2021), this book challenges prevailing assumptions about conditionality and competition. It demonstrates how more stringent conditionality can limit but not eliminate regional favoritism due to principal-agent problems, while greater political competition can exacerbate rather than reduce favoritism in weak institutional settings. The book also shows how domestic interest groups make distributive decisions based on political survival strategies—performative governance in autocracies (Ethiopia), rewarding coethnic/co-partisan strongholds in hybrid regimes (Zambia), swaying swing regions in democracies (Ghana). These findings reveal development finance allocation as shaped by complex interactions between financier preferences, recipient politics, and institutional contexts.

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