Collaborative Research: Attitudes to Democratic Capitalism: A Comparative Study of Support for Political and Economic Reform in Africa

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This investigation identifies, explores, and explains the evolving political and economic preferences of citizens in new African democracies. How committed are African elites to the political and economic freedoms introduced by reform movements in the late 1980s and early 1990s? How popular are liberalization initiatives among ordinary citizens? Beyond these empirical questions, for which currently there is little information, lie issues of broad theoretical import. Are there relationships between support for political democracy and support for a market economy? Are attitudes to reform manifest in political and economic behavior? At stake here is the emergence of a political and economic culture that can help a fragile regime of democratic capitalism to survive and, over the long run, to consolidate. Designed comparatively, this collaborative investigation elicits individual-level data from both mass and elite actors by means of national probability sample surveys in three countries. Data are gathered and analyzed by the investigators each working closely with a partner research institution in Benin and Ghana. These countries differ significantly in terms of their colonial experiences, cultural and ethnic characteristics, recent economic history and endowments, and institutional experiences. Thus, sub-Saharan Africa offers social scientists a rich diversity of settings in which to comparatively evaluate explanations of support for democratic capitalism.