Daniel N. Posner is Total Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and coauthor of Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (2009).
Survey data indicate that Africans support democracy and its formal institutions, but also point to the importance of the informal realm, particularly when formal institutions fail to meet popular expectations.
Malawi is a “hard place” for democracy—its economy struggles and state capacity is weak. So how has it avoided the pitfalls that have doomed so many others?
Longtime president Yoweri Museveni, his ruling party, and his increasingly militarized regime opened 2021 with a grossly unfair election. But time may be on the side of Uganda’s young voters…
