Did Aid Promote Democracy in Africa? Critiquing Gibson, Hoffman, and Jablonski.

SUB-Saharan Africa; AFRICA

This paper critiques the study of Gibson, Hoffman, and Jablonski (2015) on the relationship between technical assistance and patronage spending in sub-Saharan Africa after the Cold War. It identifies errors in the authors' methods, including severe collinearity, exclusion of available data, undue use of the logarithm transformation, and missing values in key variables. After making the necessary corrections, the paper finds that technical assistance was positively and significantly related to political concession, as originally claimed by the authors, but negatively and insignificantly associated with the proxies for political patronage. This suggests that while technical assistance may have promoted political concession, it cannot be confidently held that it reduced patronage spending in the region post-Cold War. This raises concerns as the authors' conclusion in this regard is central to the belief, in both literature and aid projects, that technical assistance from donors and institutions contributed to reducing political patronage in sub-Saharan Africa post-Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Politeia (02568845) is the property of Unisa Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)