This chapter explains how liberal democratic institutions provide a solution to the problem that rulers cannot otherwise credibly commit to forgoing the introduction of regulations that increase state control over church activities. In particular, churches have greater autocratic risk when they have historically invested in activities, such as church schools, that the state has high capacity to regulate. As a result, churches with significant education systems have greater incentive to speak out in support of liberal democratic institutions, although this incentive is mitigated when their schools are fiscally dependent on the government to operate.

This chapter discusses the implications of the book for understanding democracy and democratic activism beyond churches in sub-Saharan Africa. It emphasizes that some churches employ coalitional strategies to advance their interests, and, in such cases, their attitudes toward liberal democracy are contingent on whether doing so will advance or hinder the power of their preferred parties. It also shows that some churches rely on liberal democracy as an institutional guarantee of their interests, suggesting that my argument applies to churches beyond Africa. It concludes by explaining how the theory can be applied to other types of actors in other regions of the world.

This chapter demonstrates that churches have often engaged in activism for liberal democratic institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, and yet existing scholarship provides little guidance in explaining why churches sometimes engage in this type of activism while others do not. It sketches out an argument for why some churches have an interest in liberal democratic institutions because they protect them from rulers unilaterally introducing regulations that reduce their control of key church activities. It argues that church schools have particular risk of regulation by rulers, giving churches that run greater number of schools particular incentives to support liberal democratic institutions. It also argues that this risk is mitigated when churches are highly dependent on the state for financing activities.

Chapter 2 presents the bounded accountability theory of incumbency bias and its main empirical predictions and outlines the core empirical strategy for testing the theory across the country–office cases. After offering a conceptualization and typology of incumbency bias, the chapter explains how the nature of the information environment encourages retrospective voting and leads to the emergence of incumbency bias. Based on this general mechanism, the chapter predicts that the alignment of policy scope and fiscal institutions explains why some democracies exhibit incumbency advantage while others display an incumbency disadvantage, and demonstrates how exogenous shocks may lead to within-country changes in incumbency bias. The chapter also derives predictions about why there are differences between personal and party incumbency bias. It concludes by developing a novel estimation framework that extends the close-election regression discontinuity design to measure incumbency bias in different political systems and document variation in direction and type within them.

Politicians in all democracies have goods to distribute, and they employ different modes of distribution to deliver them. They can offer voters goods in the hope those goods turn into votes. Alternatively, they can try to make the distribution of a good conditional on how someone votes. The latter mode is clientelism. I point out that the literature on clientelism has been preoccupied with the idea that politicians form clientelistic relationships with individuals. This has led to an intense scholarly focus on how politicians can consummate such vote buying deals to their satisfaction, given that the secret ballot prevents them from observing how people vote. I argue that under a certain configuration of political institutions, it makes sense for politicians to form clientelistic relationships with groups of voters. To do so, a politician’s electoral district must be divisible into groups of voters, at which electoral support is observable and to which resources are targetable. I take four longstanding questions of interest in the clientelism literature, concerning brokers, economic development, democratic integrity, and club goods and explain how the theory of group-based clientelism opens up new lines of inquiry in each.

The concluding chapter identifies three broad contributions of the book: explaining the choices made by states about language; offering explicit historical institutionalist accounts of the politics of language by centering the analysis on the state and using notions of legacies, critical juncture, path dependency, layering, conversion, and drift, among others; and, the further development, leveraging, and testing of the concept of state traditions as a theoretical and analytical focus for explaining language policy. The chapter also synthesizes the important points coming out of the case studies drawn from a multiplicity of contexts, namely that processes of state-making and state-building are central in forging the state traditions that steer linguistic policies towards specific developmental paths; that the specific nature and configuration of political institutions within a state, not only at founding but also as it evolves over time when adjusting to changing societal dynamics and circumstances, heavily condition the choices states make about language; and that political ideas and norms are central to state traditions since they tend to structure both political and policy development by conditioning the choices of political actors, pushing societies into specific paths of linguistic choices at the expense of others.

Does regional inequality give rise to political cleavages in African countries? If so, why and how? At what scale of politics? How do regional difference and inequality shape national politics and policy? The theory of regional politics advanced here is drawn from comparative politics theories of regional tensions that arise in the course of state-building and national economic integration. These are accentuated when socioeconomic inequality and territorial institutions align. This book argues that regional economic differentiation and spatial inequalities, in interaction with strongly territorial state institutions, shape politics and policy in African countries as they do in countries in other parts of the world. National economic integration and state-building activate subnational interests and fuel political tensions over the integration of subnational regions into the national polity and the national market. Regional economic and political heterogeneity and cross-regional inequalities shape both preferences and the relative bargaining power of subnational collectivities. These forces combine to produce persistent regional cleavage structures in national politics. Empirical support is drawn from electoral data from 44 elections across 12 countries, historical maps, and nighttime luminosity, household survey, and crop production data.

This chapter collects the historical threads about the economic growth of the two Iberian nations. From a disappointing nineteenth century, during which they fell behind the rest of Europe, and the conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century, the two nations quickly caught up from the 1950s. Growth was mostly extensive and pulled by physical capital accumulation, with small contributions from human capital or productivity. The Iberian divergence from its European peers has often been blamed on natural endowments, modest domestic markets and savings, as well as on second-nature geography (market access). However, this volume shows that all of these were endogenous to the growth itself, which requires looking for deeper explanations. Institutions and the political equilibria that underpin them loom large here. After a century of fragile liberal monarchies and radical republican regimes, the two nations stood out for their long authoritarian regimes. Inward-looking economic policies promoted by the dictators favoured domestic incumbents but harmed the growth potential of the two countries. Only their gradual reopening from the 1950s unleashed this potential. Nevertheless, the gains from growth have not been equally distributed and convergence stalled in the new millennium, with the adoption of the Euro.

The Islamic Republic relies on a number of distinct but related institutional clusters to maintain power. This include the institutional means through which the state politically incorporates social groups into its orbit; institutional mechanisms of control; a number of “veto players”; those institutions that help maintain the system; the deep state; intra-elite competition; and, patronage and clientelism.

This chapter describes the relationships between domestic political institutions and war. Moving beyond older debates comparing democracies and autocracies, it presents a conceptual structure for differentiating among different types of autocracies. Autocracies vary as either being personalist or non-personalist, and also as being led by either military officers or civilians. Personalist regimes are less constrained by domestic audience costs, and military leaders are more likely to embrace the effectiveness and legitimacy of using force. The likely onset and outcome of conflicts vary across autocracy types. The chapter explores other ideas linking domestic politics and war, including the diversionary theory of war, coup-proofing (when autocrats take steps to reduce their risk of being overthrown in a military coup d’état), and the marketplace of ideas (when foreign policy issues can be freely debated in government and society). The chapter applies many of these ideas to a quantitative study on what kinds of political systems are more likely to win their interstate wars, and a case study of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.