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

这项调查确定、探索并解释了非洲新兴民主国家公民不断演变的政治和经济偏好。在20世纪80年代末和90年代初的改革运动中，非洲精英们对政治和经济自由的承诺有多坚定？自由化倡议在普通民众中受欢迎程度如何？除了这些实证问题（目前尚无相关信息）之外，还有具有广泛理论意义的问题。支持政治民主和支持市场经济之间有什么关系吗？对改革的态度是否体现在政治和经济行为上？这里的利害攸关的是一种政治和经济文化的出现，这种文化可以帮助脆弱的民主资本主义政权生存下来，并从长远来看，巩固下来。该合作调查采用比较设计，通过三个国家的全国概率抽样调查，从大众和精英行为者中获取个人层面的数据。数据由每个调查人员与贝宁和加纳的一个伙伴研究机构密切合作收集和分析。这些国家在殖民经历、文化和民族特征、最近的经济历史和禀赋以及制度经验方面存在显著差异。因此，撒哈拉以南非洲为社会科学家提供了丰富多样的环境，以比较评估对民主资本主义支持的解释。

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.