Browsing by Author "Mughogho, Dangalira"

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    The limited impacts of formal education on democratic citizenship in Africa
    (2009) Mattes, Robert; Mughogho, Dangalira
    Africa is the poorest and most underdeveloped continent in the world.? Among many political and social consequences, poverty and the lack of infrastructure place significant limitations on the cognitive skills of ordinary Africans, and thus their ability to act as full democratic citizens.? Along with limited access to news media, the extremely low levels of formal education found in many African countries strike at the very core of the skills and information that enable citizens to assess social, economic and political developments, learn the rules of government, form opinions about political performance, and care about the survival of democracy. On the basis of the systematic socio-political surveys that have been conducted in Africa thus far, only a minority of Africans can be called committed democrats (Bratton, Mattes & Gyimah-Boadi, 2005). Yet poorly performing leaders, governments and political regimes are often accorded surprisingly high levels of positive evaluations and high levels of trust by their citizens. These two factors often co-occur in a particularly corrosive form of "uncritical citizenship" whereby citizens exhibit higher levels of satisfaction with the quality of governance and the performance of democracy than actually demand to live in a democracy (Chaligha, Mattes, Bratton & Davids, 2002; Mattes & Shenga, 2007).? Uncritical citizenship stands in direct contrast to Pippa Norris's (1999) concept of the "critical citizen" who supports the ideals of democracy yet is likely to identify shortcomings in their representative institutions, elected leaders, and the policies they pursue.
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    The role of public opinion in Africa's third term bids
    (2011) Mughogho, Dangalira
    In this paper we show that public opinion variables have predictable effects on the outcomes of the third term bids that have occurred in the post-transition period in Africa. We focus on three public opinion variables that we believe to be critical in explaining variation across these outcomes: popular opposition to authoritarian rule, presidential popularity, and popular trust in the president.