Book
Parties, Political Finance and Governance in Africa:
Extracting Money and Shaping States in Benin and Ghana
One of the major challenges for the advancement of democratic governance is that ruling
parties regularly extract money from the state to fund their electoral campaigns and gain political
advantages over their opponents. But how, and with what consequences, do party leaders control
and access state funds to finance their political operations? This book explains how incumbent
leaders extract money from the state in different ways depending on the political party institutions
that surround them. Different modes of extraction, in turn, shape patterns of state politicization and,
more broadly, the ability of state institutions to effectively implement public policies.
Journal Articles
"Varieties of Connections, Varieties of Corruption: Evidence from Bureaucrats in Five Countries" (with Adam Harris, Jan Meyer Sahling, Kim Sass Mikkelsen, Christian Schuster, and Brigitte Seim) Governance, early view..
"Do Bureaucrats Contribute to the Resource Curse? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in New Oil States" (with Adam Harris, Jan Meyer Sahling, Kim Sass Mikkelsen and Christian Schuster). 2022 Journal of Development Studies 58(4): 639-655,
"Which Jobs for Which Boys? Party Finance and the Politics of State Job Distribution in Africa." 2022. Comparative Political Studies 55(3): 351-385.
"Leviathan's Latent Dimensions: Measuring State Capacity for Comparative Political Research" (with Jonathan Hanson). 2021. Journal of Politics 83(4).
"Understanding the Mechanisms of International Influence in an Era of Great Power Competition" (with Emily Meierding). 2021. Journal of Global Security Studies 6(4).
"Oiling the Bureaucracy: Political Spending, Bureaucrats and the Resource Curse" (with Adam Harris, Jan Meyer-Sahling, Christian Schuster and Kim Sass Mikkelsen). 2020. World Development 127, 104745.
"Information, Accountability and Public Sector Programme Success: A Conjoint Experiment Among Bureaucrats in Africa" (with Adam Harris and Brigitte Seim). 2020. Development Policy Review 38(5): 594-612.
"Democracy for All: Conceptualizing and Measuring Egalitarian Democracy" (with Staffan I. Lindberg). 2019. Political Science Research and Methods 7(3): 595-612.
"State of the World 2017: Autocratization and Exclusion?" (with Anna Lührmann et al). 2018. Democratization 25(8): 1321-1340.
Chapters in Edited Volumes
"Election Security and Democratic Civil Military Relations in Ghana" 2021. Handbook of Civil Military Relations. Thomas Bruneau, Carolyn Halladay and Cris Matei, eds. Routledge Press.
"Neopatrimonialism and Democracy" (with Staffan I. Lindberg). 2019. Handbook of Democratization in Africa. Gabrielle Lynch and Peter VonDoepp, eds. Routledge Press.
Under Review
“The Organizational Determinants of Honesty in the Public Service” (with Jan Meyer Sahling Kim Sass Mikkelsen, Christian Schuster and Brigitte Seim)
Datasets
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Dataset v6, v7, v8, v9, v10, v11, v12 (with Michael Coppedge et. al)
State Capacity Dataset v1 (with Jonathan Hanson)
Policy Papers and Analysis
"How Ghana's Economic Crisis is Reshaping its Democracy" (with George Bob-Milliar), Washington Post Monkey Cage Blog, December 1, 2022.
"The West African Autocratization Tracker" (with Koffi Adaba, Olugbemiga Samuel Afolabi, Komi Amewunou, Alassane Beye, Expedit Ologu, Romaric Samson), Open Society Initiative for West Africa, September 2021.
"The relevance of social policies for democracy: preventing autocratisation through synergies between SDG 10 and SDG 16" (with Julia Leininger and Anna Lührmann). Discussion Paper, No. 7/2019, German Development Institute (DIE), 2019.
Understanding U.S. Influence & Levers of Power in African Countries. Report prepared for U.S. Africa Command (with Emily Meierding, Dean Allen, Eric Beebe, Andrew Bergman, Brian Dunn, Jason Hotalen, Eric Hovey, John Mahaney, Michael Skarda, Norman Wilson, Matthew Yan). Naval Postgraduate School, December 2019.
“Will ‘Ghana First’ Protests Threaten a U.S. Military Agreement?” Washington Post Monkey Cage Blog, April 3, 2018
“Civil service management practices for a more motivated, committed and ethical public service in Ghana” (with Valeriya Mechkova, Christian Schuster, Jan Meyer Sahling and Kim Sass Mikkelsen). Report prepared for the Ghana Public Services Commission, January 2018
Other Academic Publications
Book Review: States in the Developing World edited by Miguel Centeno, Atul Kohli, Deborah Yashar with Dinsha Mistree. 2018. Perspectives on Politics 16(3): 866-868.
“New Perspectives on States and Regimes” Newsletter of the APSA-Comparative Democratization Section, Winter 2017
“Rethinking Brokers in Distributive Politics” Newsletter of the African Politics Conference Group, February 2015 (with Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai)