Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Ghanaian Slums: Constructing Democracy in Unexpected Places

学者和国际媒体通常将贫民窟描述为国家管辖范围之外的无政府城市社区。然而，非洲贫民窟在获得和维持公共服务的能力方面存在很大差异。一些贫民窟能够吸引国家资源来建造厕所，建造下水道，铺设道路，收集垃圾并提供安全保障。其他贫民窟获得资源，但无法维持它们--下水道溢出，道路恶化，警察无法维持秩序。第三种类型的贫民窟努力获得或维持任何公共服务。本论文的中心问题是：尽管类似的情况下，薄弱的正式机构和恶劣的生活条件，为什么一些贫民窟社区能够吸引和维持公共服务，而其他人无法吸引和管理这些相同的服务？通过研究贫民窟社区如何需求，安全，并保持公共服务的变化，本文提供了重要的和被忽视的见解到非洲的地方一级的民主化进程，论文假设，贫民窟的成功取决于三个基本的政治条件-社区领导的类型，社区组织的形式，以及国家法律的承认程度。这些条件促进或阻碍了居民用来追究领导人责任的问责机制的发展。该项目结合了民族志方法、焦点小组和加纳大阿克拉地区的家庭调查。比较人种学个案研究是以贫民窟社区为基础的，这些社区的人口情况相似，但公共服务的获得和维持水平各不相同。这项调查是新颖的，因为它将考虑加纳的所有贫民窟社区，并将包括测试对领导人和非正式机构的信任的嵌入式实验。首先，它有助于对国家和社会的调查。该项目将贫民窟重新定义为政治空间，贫民窟对国家的地位-特别是其法律的承认程度和吸引的国家投资水平-为理解贫民窟之间的差异提供了一个潜在的强有力的公式。其次，本文将民主的研究从国家制度转移到社区层面，非正式制度塑造了政治活动。第三，该项目将公共产品的提供视为一个政治过程，包括需求（来自居民），分配（由政府）和维护（由社区）。第四，本论文推进了发展中国家法治的学术研究，并具有更广泛的影响，因为它有可能影响旨在促进民主、发展和贫民窟改造举措的决策。随着生活在贫民窟的人数接近10亿人，越来越需要将贫民窟视为政治调查的动态空间和分析场所。

Scholars and international media commonly portray slums as ungoverned urban communities outside the reach of the state. Yet African slums reveal considerable variation in their ability to access and maintain public services. Some slums are able to attract state resources to build toilets, construct sewers, pave roads, collect garbage, and provide security. Other slums secure resources but are unable to maintain them--sewers overflow, roads deteriorate, and police do not secure order. A third type of slum struggles to access or maintain any public services. The central question of this dissertation asks: Despite similar contexts of weak formal institutions and poor living conditions, why are some slum communities able to attract and maintain public services while others are unable to attract and manage these same services? By examining the variation in how slum communities demand, secure, and maintain public services, this dissertation provides important and overlooked insights into the process of local-level democratization in Africa.The dissertation hypothesizes that a slum's success depends on three underlying political conditions--the type of community leadership, the form of community organization, and the degree of state legal recognition. These conditions enable or impede the development of accountability mechanisms that residents use to hold their leaders to account.The project combines ethnographic methods, focus groups, and a household survey in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. The comparative ethnographic case studies are based in slum communities with similar population profiles, but with varying levels of public service access and maintenance. The survey is novel because it will consider all slum communities in Ghana and will include embedded experiments that test trust in leaders and informal institutions.The intellectual merit of the project is significant. First, it contributes to investigations of state and society. The project re-conceptualizes slums as political spaces where a slum's position toward the state--specifically its degree of legal recognition and level of state investment that it attracts--provides a potentially powerful formula to understand variation between slums. Second, the dissertation shifts the study of democracy away from national institutions to the community-level where informal institutions shape political activity. Third, the project treats public goods provision as a political process that includes demands (from the residents), distribution (by the government), and maintenance (by the community). Fourth, the dissertation advances scholarship on the rule of law in developing countries.The project also has broader implications because it has the potential to impact policy-making aimed at democracy promotion, development, and slum-upgrading initiatives. As the number of individuals living in slums approaches one billion people, there is an emerging need to treat slums as dynamic spaces and analytic sites for political inquiry.