Do All Bad Things Go Together? Autocratization and Social Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

While most sub-Saharan African countries transitioned to multiparty electoral politics in the late twentieth century, the region has been severely affected by contemporary autocratization trends during the past twenty-five years. Scholarship on African politics has examined the spread, modalities, and determinants of these autocratization trends, but relatively little attention has been paid to their policy consequences, particularly regarding social policy and government attention to citizens’ living conditions. This gap is significant because, first, despite recent improvements, many African countries still struggle to guarantee adequate living standards for their citizens. Second, research suggests that Africa’s socioeconomic advances over the past two decades were facilitated by the political reforms of the 1990s, which made governments more responsive to people’s needs through electoral competition and alternation. The implications of political changes moving in the opposite direction therefore merit examination. Third, Africa offers a particularly rich context for studying autocratization’s social policy consequences because the continent exhibits diverse forms of autocratization, ranging from coups that bring military officers to power and eliminate all the pretence of democracy, to term limit manipulations that enable de facto life presidencies without formally suppressing elections. Notably, both coups and term limits manipulations have often been justified by claims that elected rulers failed to address citizens’ needs or that governmental continuity is necessary for completing reforms. Against this backdrop, this research analyzes whether and how autocratization has systematically influenced social policy in sub-Saharan Africa over the past twenty-five years by comparing countries cross-sectionally, diachronically, and across different autocratization forms, particularly military coups versus term limit manipulation.