Nic Cheeseman
@fromagehomme. For more on Nic Cheeseman go to https://profcheeseman.wordpress.com/, and for more on democracy in Africa go to www.democracyinafrica.org.
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I joined the African Studies Centre and the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Oxford in 2007-8, having previously been a Junior Research Fellow at New College. My training is in political science, and my time is split equally between the Department of Politics and International Relations and the African Studies Centre.
For the African Studies MSc I convene the first term of the Core Course on Themes in African History and Social Sciences, and offer an option on Democracy in Africa. I also lecture on comparative method and the use of surveys in Africa, and supervise students working on contemporary politics. I was awarded a Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. Last year I was the Director of the African Studies Centre, but this year I am on research leave.
My work falls into the field of comparative politics with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa and processes of democratization. More specifically, I look at a range of questions such as whether populism is an effective strategy of political mobilization in Africa, how paying tax changes citizens’ attitudes towards democracy and corruption, and the conditions under which ruling parties lose power.
In 2008, my doctoral thesis, ‘The Rise and Fall of Civil Authoritarianism in Africa’, won the Arthur McDougall Dissertation Prize of the Political Studies Association of the UK for the best dissertation on elections, electoral systems or representation. Since then I have published a number of articles and book chapters, and two co-edited collections: Our Turn To Eat (2010), which covers the politics of Kenya since independence, and The Handbook of African Politics (2013). My first monograph, Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures and the Struggle for Political Reform will be published in late 2014 by Cambridge University Press. A second monograph, How to Rig An Election, is currently under contract with Yale.
At present, I am on research leave as part of a four year project that investigates the dynamics of executive-legislative relations in Africa, Latin America and the former Soviet Union. The first article from the project, entitled “Rethinking the Presidentialism Debate: Conceptualizing Coalitional Politics in Cross-regional perspective” [co-authored with Paul Chaisty and Tim Power] won the GIGA prize for the best paper published in Comparative Area Studies, 2013-4. The research is funded by a grant of £700,000 by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant Reference: RES-062-23-2892).
I also hold two other ESRC grants for research into the history and conduct of elections in Africa, and am part of an international team of researchers investigating the relationship between Media, Conflict and Democratization, supported by funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research. For more information see the Department of Politics and International Relations website.
When not teaching or researching I spend much of my time explaining the implications of my work to policy makers, including the Cabinet Office, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Department for International Development of the UK government, the Instituto Rio Branco of the Brazilian government, the Lagos State Government, the Pan African Parliament, and the World Bank. I am a member of the advisory board of the UNICEF Chair on Communication Research (Africa) and an advisor to, and writer for, Kofi Annan’s African Progress Panel.
Since the summer of 2011 I have been Joint Editor of African Affairs, the ♯1 journal in both African Studies and Area Studies. Most recently, I have been writing a bi-weekly column for the Sunday Nation, a Kenyan newspaper. These pieces and many more blogs can be found on a website I founded, www.democracyinafrica.org, which is dedicated to creating an online community of people that are interested in, and care about, the state of democracy in Africa. Please join us!
Address: Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
**
I joined the African Studies Centre and the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Oxford in 2007-8, having previously been a Junior Research Fellow at New College. My training is in political science, and my time is split equally between the Department of Politics and International Relations and the African Studies Centre.
For the African Studies MSc I convene the first term of the Core Course on Themes in African History and Social Sciences, and offer an option on Democracy in Africa. I also lecture on comparative method and the use of surveys in Africa, and supervise students working on contemporary politics. I was awarded a Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. Last year I was the Director of the African Studies Centre, but this year I am on research leave.
My work falls into the field of comparative politics with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa and processes of democratization. More specifically, I look at a range of questions such as whether populism is an effective strategy of political mobilization in Africa, how paying tax changes citizens’ attitudes towards democracy and corruption, and the conditions under which ruling parties lose power.
In 2008, my doctoral thesis, ‘The Rise and Fall of Civil Authoritarianism in Africa’, won the Arthur McDougall Dissertation Prize of the Political Studies Association of the UK for the best dissertation on elections, electoral systems or representation. Since then I have published a number of articles and book chapters, and two co-edited collections: Our Turn To Eat (2010), which covers the politics of Kenya since independence, and The Handbook of African Politics (2013). My first monograph, Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures and the Struggle for Political Reform will be published in late 2014 by Cambridge University Press. A second monograph, How to Rig An Election, is currently under contract with Yale.
At present, I am on research leave as part of a four year project that investigates the dynamics of executive-legislative relations in Africa, Latin America and the former Soviet Union. The first article from the project, entitled “Rethinking the Presidentialism Debate: Conceptualizing Coalitional Politics in Cross-regional perspective” [co-authored with Paul Chaisty and Tim Power] won the GIGA prize for the best paper published in Comparative Area Studies, 2013-4. The research is funded by a grant of £700,000 by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant Reference: RES-062-23-2892).
I also hold two other ESRC grants for research into the history and conduct of elections in Africa, and am part of an international team of researchers investigating the relationship between Media, Conflict and Democratization, supported by funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research. For more information see the Department of Politics and International Relations website.
When not teaching or researching I spend much of my time explaining the implications of my work to policy makers, including the Cabinet Office, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Department for International Development of the UK government, the Instituto Rio Branco of the Brazilian government, the Lagos State Government, the Pan African Parliament, and the World Bank. I am a member of the advisory board of the UNICEF Chair on Communication Research (Africa) and an advisor to, and writer for, Kofi Annan’s African Progress Panel.
Since the summer of 2011 I have been Joint Editor of African Affairs, the ♯1 journal in both African Studies and Area Studies. Most recently, I have been writing a bi-weekly column for the Sunday Nation, a Kenyan newspaper. These pieces and many more blogs can be found on a website I founded, www.democracyinafrica.org, which is dedicated to creating an online community of people that are interested in, and care about, the state of democracy in Africa. Please join us!
Address: Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
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been limited systematic research into their efficacy. There is growing concern that anticorruption
awareness-raising efforts may be backfiring; instead of encouraging citizens to resist corruption,
they may be nudging them to “go with the corrupt grain.” This study offers a first test of the effect of
anticorruption messaging on ordinary people’s behavior. A household-level field experiment, conducted
with a representative sample in Lagos, Nigeria, is used to test whether exposure to five different messages
about (anti)corruption influence the outcome of a “bribery game.”We find that exposure to anticorruption
messages largely fails to discourage the decision to bribe, and in some cases it makes individuals more
willing to pay a bribe. Importantly, we also find that the effect of anticorruption messaging is conditioned
by an individual’s preexisting perceptions regarding the prevalence of corruption.
been limited systematic research into their efficacy. There is growing concern that anticorruption
awareness-raising efforts may be backfiring; instead of encouraging citizens to resist corruption,
they may be nudging them to “go with the corrupt grain.” This study offers a first test of the effect of
anticorruption messaging on ordinary people’s behavior. A household-level field experiment, conducted
with a representative sample in Lagos, Nigeria, is used to test whether exposure to five different messages
about (anti)corruption influence the outcome of a “bribery game.”We find that exposure to anticorruption
messages largely fails to discourage the decision to bribe, and in some cases it makes individuals more
willing to pay a bribe. Importantly, we also find that the effect of anticorruption messaging is conditioned
by an individual’s preexisting perceptions regarding the prevalence of corruption.
Citizens report alarmingly low levels of trust in their governments in places as varied as Spain, Tunisia, Peru, Poland and Australia. Partly as a result, many democracy assistance organisations, including the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), support programmes that aim to foster political trust. Sometimes this goal is explicit, but often it is implicit in programme designs and theories of change. For example, in Kyrgyzstan, WFD “invests in the development of MPs, councillors and officials, as well as improving engagement between citizens, institutions and decision-makers to improve trust in governance.” In Tunisia, the Netherlands Institute for Multi-party Democracy has supported the Tunisian School of Politics as a means of building trust in the political process.
A thorough understanding of the effects of political trust, and how it can be built, is essential to combat the rise of populism and anti-system parties, and would be valuable for democracy assistance more broadly. Despite this, political trust remains poorly understood.
This paper reviews existing research on political trust, explaining why it is important, what we know about it, and – perhaps most importantly – what we don’t. It argues that if practitioners, such as the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, are to foster greater levels of political trust, research into that phenomenon needs to become more innovative. Researchers will need to employ a great variety of methodologies, study a broader range of cases and ask more action-oriented questions to identify what institutional actors – such as parliaments – can do to earn the public’s trust.