Over the past quarter century, the spread of democracy has transformed politics in Africa. The transition to multiparty rule has forced incumbents to expand the political coalitions they need to stay in power. Among the many consequences of the shifting institutional bases of power has been the political resurgence of rural Africa. Rural voters have long been neglected and, even worse, exploited for the benefit of urban constituents, but democratization has induced politicians to pay heed to them. The downstream benefits for these communities have been measurable: Primary school fees are lower if not slashed altogether; farm gate prices tend to be more competitive; and roads and health facilities are improved. Rural areas across many countries in Africa remain some of the poorest parts of the world, yet now they at least have a fighting political chance. But are the effects of democratization merely redistributive, or are they bringing about more fundamental changes in the configuration of political authority in rural Africa? In The Paradox of Traditional Chiefs in Democratic Africa, Kate Baldwin argues it is the latter. Written with great lucidity and insight, this compact, well-crafted book tackles the preceding question, and in doing so advances an innovative theoretical model that changes how we think about voting in developing countries.

Baldwin motivates the book by pointing to a striking empirical regularity that speaks to the question of how democratization may be reconfiguring political authority in rural areas. She shows that democratization in Africa has led to the devolution of power to chiefs—unelected traditional leaders whose legitimacy comes from their recognition as customary authorities of a “place-based community” (p. 21). Not only are democratic governments more likely to include constitutional provisions that protect chiefs’ authority; they also tend to increase their power over land tenure.

As the book’s title suggests, however, this is a seeming paradox: Why would elected governments reconfigure political authority in a way that strengthens the hands of a group of actors who are often dismissed as “antidemocratic local despots” (p. 3)? One possibility is that like the party bosses of Tammany Hall, unelected chiefs are effective vote brokers. Embedded in local communities and equipped with the tools of patronage, coercion, and social sanctioning, traditional leaders help politicians solve the agency problems that arise from voter mobilization and vote buying. From this perspective, elected politicians may actually prefer the autocratic nature of these despots because they are cheaper to buy off and monitor than the “democratic masses.”

Although it is often assumed that local electoral politics in Africa follows this “vote-broker model,” as Baldwin notes, there is little systematic evidence to support the claim. Moreover, she questions the tenability of the framework’s core assumptions. Vote-broker models tend to assume that citizens are motivated by petty patronage or social identity. But building on a growing scholarship in comparative politics, Baldwin conceives of citizens as “first and foremost . . . evaluative voters”—and in local elections the key evaluative criterion is which candidate can best deliver local public goods or development projects (pp. 69–70). From this perspective, if traditional chiefs merely operate as “decentralized despots” who whip votes, it is not clear how they help on this key dimension: If anything, they may hurt politicians, as their use of patronage and coercion undermines public goods provision.

It is on this point that Baldwin makes one of the most important contributions of her book—a reappraisal of traditional leaders as political actors in contemporary Africa. (Chapter 2 is an excellent primer on traditional authorities and their continued relevance in Africa.) Such leaders are often regarded as an anachronistic institution that blocks modernization and development and undermines democracy, but, Baldwin suggests, this does not reflect reality. Instead, she illuminates the integral role that traditional leaders play as development actors, especially in the process of “coproduction”—a concept she draws from Elinor Ostrom. With the state too weak to enact top-down development, governments lean heavily on local communities for help. Governments provide some financing and resources, but they rely on the contributions of communities, both financially and in terms of labor (e.g., to help make bricks or dig boreholes). Coproduction will break down, however, unless communities are able to collectively organize and coordinate their efforts with government officials. Baldwin argues that the electoral influence of chiefs comes from their power as development brokers who facilitate coproduction. In playing this role, chiefs are thus critical to government responsiveness to meet the demands of its citizens for the delivery of local public goods. She argues that it is for this reason—not because they increase the efficacy of clientelism or ethnic voting—that democratic governments have readily increased chiefs’ political authority.

Baldwin tests the “development broker model” primarily in Zambia and reports the results across Chapters 6 through 8. The empirical chapters systematically build evidence to support the book’s central argument. Chapter 6, on leveraging chiefs’ deaths as a natural experiment, shows that the absence of a chief leads to a significant decrease in schools built and rehabilitated and boreholes dug. Chapter 7 tests the flip side of coproduction and shows that the stronger the ties between chiefs and members of parliament, the greater the provision of public goods in the form of classrooms built and the better condition of roads. Chapter 8 then assesses the potential electoral implications of coproduction. It shows that citizens are most responsive to a chief’s political endorsement of their MP if they believe that MPs and chiefs are jointly important for local governance. Chapter 9 considers the generalizability of the model beyond Zambia.

Overall, The Paradox of Traditional Chiefs in Democratic Africa represents the best in the Batesian tradition of the study of African politics: a concise but powerful monograph that advances an elegant theoretical framework—drawing heavily on empirical evidence from Zambia nonetheless—that alters how we think about fundamental political processes, not just in Africa but in developing countries more broadly. Consider the study of clientelism on voting. Few research programs have been as active in political science in recent years. Yet Baldwin’s book challenges the underlying assumptions of this research program head-on. The author argues that this literature’s narrow focus on patronage and identity fails to capture the “sophisticated” nature of rural voters and the discerning manner in which they evaluate politicians and pursue their own interests. With regard to the African politics literature, the book speaks to an important debate on the resilience of precolonial institutions after the short but devastating shock of European colonialism. Her analysis, in line with other recent scholarship on the enduring effects of precolonial institutions, calls for a critical reassessment of the degree to which colonialism “divorced” chiefs from their communities (p. 182). Subnational variation on this dimension seems to be of particular significance as Baldwin shows that it is traditional leaders’ embeddedness—the degree to which they live and have an “encompassing interest” in their communities (to use Mancur Olson’s term)—that determines their effectiveness as development brokers.

This study also has important policy implications for aid donors, on which many democratic governments in Africa rely heavily. Donors’ aversion to working with traditional chiefs, whether for ideological, normative, geographical or technological reasons, may hinder aid effectiveness.

There are also reasons to be cautious, however, about the generalizability of the development broker model and the implications that follow from it. First, Baldwin relies heavily on the Zambian case because, as she acknowledges, the organization of political authority around “a fixed number of recognized chiefs,” about which there are “detailed and highly disaggregated data,” facilitates rigorous empirical analysis (pp. 95–96). But the historical and institutional factors that gave rise to this organizational structure make Zambia a most-likely case. That so much of her analysis draws from this case, with only cursory evidence from other countries, leaves open the question of how far the development broker model travels, especially to Francophone Africa. In Chapter 2, she aims to show that chiefs are not irrelevant in former French colonies, but their electoral influence as development brokers is never systematically tested. And the limited cross-national analysis that is presented in Chapter 9 points to the weakness of the power of traditional leaders in former French colonies.

Another important question is how the development broker model works in national elections. Baldwin subsets her analysis to focus primarily on the model’s implications for constituent-level parliamentary elections. She acknowledges that the model is probably less relevant for national-level elections given chiefs’ weaker influence and ties at the top echelon of the state. But how then do presidential candidates mobilize local support? Given the scale of the coalitions that national politicians need to cobble together, such campaigns seem to lend themselves more to the use of patronage and identity politics—where one would expect chiefs to play a key role in voter mobilization. Is this the case? If so, to what degree does this demand drive the devolution of power to chiefs, and what are the consequences for the development broker model? Can chiefs serve as vote brokers and development brokers simultaneously?

Finally, what is the overall impact of chiefs as “development brokers?” The local benefits are clear, as are the effects on state–society relations—it helps to underwrite a positive feedback loop of mutual engagement between local governments and their citizens—but to what degree is this leading to “state building via traditional leaders” (p. 16) and helping to solve the “democratization backwards” problem that plagues countries in Africa (p. 16)? Baldwin advances this claim as one of the main implications of the book’s analysis. Here I am more skeptical. The contributions of the chiefs to state building are limited. They coordinate between politicians and citizens to increase the production of boreholes and schools, but as the empirical analysis shows, they have little influence on large-scale development projects that are ultimately necessary to help these countries escape the weak state trap. More problematic is the discretionary authority that chiefs have over the siting of these projects and the extent to which this may skew local development to disproportionately favor those close to the chief (p. 77).

This raises one of the most important questions for future analysis: What is the effect of the development broker model on local bureaucratic capacity? The answer is not obvious. On the one hand, it seems likely that this mode of development, which relies heavily on personal and ad hoc arrangements between politicians and traditional leaders, subverts the building of a meritocratic and impersonal bureaucracy tasked with impartially providing public goods. At the same time, however, the development broker model does seem to be stimulating greater citizen engagement and elevating expectations of the government’s role in development. Without this bottom-up demand, politicians have little incentive to invest in building bureaucracies that can more efficiently meet citizens’ requests for better public services. But herein lies a new paradox. It is hard to envisage the implementation of such bureaucratic reforms except at the expense of the authority of traditional leaders. If chiefs resist such change—and it is hard to see how they embrace it—this raises the possibility that ultimately the devolution of power to chiefs may hinder as much as aid development in democratic Africa.