Afro-civil liberties in botswana (original) (raw)
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EIGHT YEARS OF MULTIPARTY DEMOCRACY IN MOZAMBIQUE: THE PUBLIC'S VIEW
2000
Since its emergence from a brutal, 17-year civil war, Mozambique's process of political reform has faced a number of challenges. The first has been to empower ordinary Mozambicans by allowing them to participate in a democratic system and enabling them to voice their demands to the state and hold it accountable. The second has been to rebuild a state with the capacity to respond to citizen demands effectively. And given the long history of violent division, a third challenge has been to build a state that enjoys broad legitimacy -a legitimacy that spans the bitter partisan divides of the past, enabling the formation of a strong, authoritative state with the ability to enforce the rule of law, but also the discipline to rule through transparent procedures.
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 develop indicators based on public attitude data for all eight dimensions of democracy. Substantively, this mass perspective on the Quality of Democracy gives us insight into what Africans themselves want out of democracy, and how they prioritise its various components. As we explore the places where citizen and expert evaluations diverge, we conclude that both individual and expert assessments of the quality of democracy deserve to be carefully interrogated. We cannot conclude that either experts or ordinary citizens provide the ‘true’ or ‘correct’ assessment, but rather that both perspectives are essential to fully understanding today’s democratic experience, and the shape of the democratic future, on the continent.
Efficacy for fighting corruption: Evidence from 36 African countries
Afrobarometer is a pan-African, non-partisan research network that conducts public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, economic conditions, and related issues across more than 30 countries in Africa. Afrobarometer conducts face-to-face interviews in the language of the respondent's choice with nationally representative samples, which yield country-level results with a margin of sampling error of +/-2% (for a sample of 2,400) or +/-3% (for a sample of 1,200) at a 95% confidence level.
Democratic dividend The road to quality education in Africa
Afrobarometer Policy Paper, 2020
Key findings ▪ On average across 34 countries, one in five African adults (20%) have no formal education, 28% attended primary school, 37% attended secondary school, and 15% attended institutions of higher learning. ▪ Over the past two decades, the proportion of the adult population with no formal education has shown a slow but consistent decrease, while the share of those with secondary or post-secondary education has risen. Gains over time are also reflected in much higher rates of secondary and post-secondary education among younger respondents than among their elders. o But countries vary widely in educational attainment. While almost all Gabonese and Mauritians have been to school, about two-thirds of citizens in Niger (68%), Burkina Faso (64%), and Mali (64%) have had no formal education. ▪ Nine out of 10 Africans (91%) said that boys and girls have equal opportunities to get an education. But gender gaps in educational attainment persist. Women are more likely than men to lack formal schooling (23% vs. 17%) and less likely to have secondary or post-secondary education (47% vs. 57%). And while 17 countries have eliminated the gender gap in formal education among the youngest cohort, large differences remain in Mali (a 27-percentage-point gap), Niger (23 points), Burkina Faso (17 points), and Benin (13 points). ▪ On average, a slim majority (54%) of Africans said their governments were doing a good job of meeting educational needs. But assessments varied widely by country, with approval levels ranging from eight out of 10 citizens in eSwatini and Ghana to fewer than two out of 10 in Morocco and Gabon. o Urban residents, poor respondents, and more-educated citizens were less satisfied with their government’s performance on education. ▪ Citizens who believed they could access budget information about their schools and could have teachers held accountable were more likely to give government positive performance reviews than those who were less confident of school transparency and accountability. In short, education outcomes matter in performance evaluations, but so do the processes through which education services are delivered. ▪ Africans who saw their country as a well-functioning democracy were significantly more likely to approve of the government’s performance on education. The more years a country has been an electoral democracy, the more likely it is that its citizens are satisfied with the delivery of public education services.
Mozambicans' views of democracy and political reform: a comparative perspective
2002
Mozambique's first democratic multiparty election in 1994 was a national watershed, bringing an end to 17 years of political conflict, instability and civil war, and closing a chapter of over a century of authoritarian rule begun by Portuguese colonization. But what do ordinary Mozambicans think about what has occurred since then? This report presents results from a recent nationally representative attitude survey that assesses the views of the country's citizens toward the democratic experiment and sets them in a regional perspective by comparing them to identical questions from Afrobarometer surveys across Southern Africa. Some of the most important findings include:
Learning about Democracy in Africa: Awareness, Performance, and Experience
American Journal of Political Science, 2007
Conventional views of African politics imply that Africans arrive at political opinions largely on the basis of their positions in the social structure or enduring cultural values. In contrast, we argue that Africans form attitudes to democracy based upon what they learn about what it is and what it does. We test this argument with a unique data set known as Afrobarometer Round 1, which is based on surveys of nationally representative samples of citizens in 12 African countries that have recently undergone political reform. Specifically, we test our learning hypothesis against competing sociological and cultural theories to explain citizens' demand for democracy (legitimation) and the perceived supply of democracy (institutionalization). We provide evidence of learning from three different sources. First, people learn about the content of democracy through cognitive awareness of public affairs. Second, people learn about the consequences of democracy through direct experience of the performance of governments and (to a lesser extent) the economy. Finally, people also draw lessons about democracy from their country's national political legacies.