The study of the politics of sub-Saharan Africa (henceforth “Africa”) has blossomed in the last few decades. Dramatic changes not only in the number of texts but also in their orientation have enriched our collective understanding of the political processes that shape economic and political change. The books reviewed here present a diverse set of approaches to some of the core questions around democracy and changes in economic welfare (“development” being the term used in these texts) on the continent. The three books are very different from each other, varying both in substance and method, another testament to the breadth and diversity of the subfield.

Robin Harding’s Rural Democracy is a breath of fresh air in the study of distributive politics on the continent. In an area dominated by theoretical frameworks that center ethnic politics and clientelism, Harding presents a thesis focused instead on the intersection of programmatic politics and political geography. This represents a much-needed “normalization” of African distributive politics: the policies that politicians choose matter, and the ways in which they matter are driven in part by political geography and political institutions. Scholars of distributive politics, economic development, and political economy will find Harding’s book a worthwhile and instructive read.

Harding makes two central claims. First, there is a meaningful and consistent divide between urban and rural voters in democratic sub-Saharan Africa. Rural voters are much more likely to support elected incumbents than their urban counterparts. Second, competitive democratic elections make incumbent politicians highly responsive to the interests of the rural electoral base. This has implications both for what incumbents do in office and how they behave on the campaign trail. Intriguingly, Harding argues that these incentives do not necessarily result in an urban–rural partisan divide between parties, but rather that multiple parties focus most of their attention on courting the rural vote, largely ignoring urban voters.

The variety and breadth of evidence presented in the book are impressive, offering something for everyone, both in terms of the tools used and the balance between external and internal validity. The empirical techniques include broad but well-motivated cross-national descriptive analyses of Afrobarometer (chapter 3) and Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data (chapter 4), more narrow credible causal analyses of Ghanaian service delivery using unique and original data (chapter 5), and deep historical analyses of primary archival documents from Botswana (chapter 6). Through these chapters Harding tells a coherent story about the dynamic evolution of African democratic politics, in which incumbent politicians sought to court the rural base and rural voters responded with electoral support.

There are two areas in which the book may disappoint some readers. The first is that the text, in its totality, is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. The beauty of the work is that it makes a series of important and novel observations about the logic of democratic politics in modern Africa. But the author attempts to package this within a conventional “puzzle, theorize, test” structure that feels somewhat stretched. Neither the empirical puzzle (that rural voters in Africa are disproportionately pro-incumbent) nor the theoretical advance (that democratic elections provide incentives for politicians to show rural bias) can be meaningfully distinguished from the empirical evidence presented. This is no bad thing—in the end the book is primarily an empirical work advancing our understanding of the contours of competitive democracies in Africa. But the attempts to have its structure fit an academic norm feel somewhat unwieldy and disjointed.

The second mild disappointment with the book is that electoral systems appear to receive less attention than they perhaps merit. African polities use a variety of institutional arrangements for aggregating votes into political power. The logics of those arrangements should imply variation in the importance of rural interests in allocating power, yet Harding’s argument appears to be that the advent of competitive democracy uniformly replaced the urban core with the rural periphery as the priority for African politicians. One might anticipate that electoral systems would be a key moderating variable—serving to translate geography into power—and yet they seem to play little role in Harding’s analyses.

Kathleen Klaus’s Political Violence in Kenya is a very different book, and one that more comfortably hews to the conventional political science structure of “puzzle, theory, test.” The work seeks to explain a simple empirical observation: the extensive local variation in the presence of election violence, which is seemingly unexplained by conventional accounts. The book extends a growing body of work on election violence in Africa, much of which was unsurprisingly spurred by the terrible violence in the run-up to and wake of the 2007 Kenyan election. The book also contributes to our understanding of the role of land politics in shaping local political variation on the continent. Similar to Harding’s text, Klaus places political geography at the center of her explanatory framework; it is exciting to see new work making geography a key point of focus in the study of the continent. Scholars interested in these themes will likely find the book particularly edifying.

Klaus develops a theory that positions election violence as the product of a “joint process” that involves both ordinary people and political elites. That joint process, it is argued, is in large part one of creating land narratives: those stories and logics people use to structure their relationship to land. Klaus argues that variation in these land narratives, some of which are “contentious” and some of which are not, is driven by underlying intergroup inequality in access to and control of land. When contentious land narratives emerge—be they focused on “injustice” or “insecurity”—and intergroup inequality is high, elites may be able to organize election violence within a community, especially when those elites serve as land patrons. This is a creative, insightful, and provocative theory that emphasizes the importance of the colonial and post-independence eras in structuring both inequality and community narratives on the continent.

To test this theory, Klaus relies on two primary sources of original evidence, along with a deep understanding of the historical origins of Kenyan land politics, impressively marshaled in chapter 3. The first source of evidence is a series of structured but open-ended interviews conducted with 230 residents of Kenyan agricultural communities in which the state has significant control over the allocation of property rights. The second data source is an original survey of 750 people in four Kenyan counties. These data are used in a variety of ways: for community-level most-similar case comparisons (chapters 4, 5, and 7), as the basis of process tracing (chapter 6), and for individual-level regression analyses (chapter 8). This methodological pluralism is as admirable as it is impressive, and it presents a clear and comprehensive body of evidence for readers to evaluate.

In part because the book is extraordinarily rich, some readers may find it hard to penetrate. The text takes a while to hit its stride; the first two chapters are particularly dense, presenting the grand theory (which is complex and conditional) and introducing readers to a range of methodological details that may be opaque to some. Fortunately, the text is very well written, and the visual and tabular presentations of the argument and the corresponding tests presented in chapter 2 greatly help simplify what is a somewhat daunting opening.

Some readers will also take issue with the strength of Klaus’s claims and whether they are fully met with sufficiently strong evidence. The book places land narratives at the heart of election violence, both in Kenya and beyond. This is a bold, at times almost totalizing, theoretical framework. But the evidence on which the book relies is necessarily limited: as Klaus notes, variation in the key explanatory variables is deeply historical, and the credibility of the most-similar case designs presented is questionable, given the number of explanatory variables at play. Most challenging may be chapter 8; some will argue that the data there are stretched to test hypotheses about the effects of violence, a task to which the information is not particularly well suited.

Giovanni Carbone and Alessandro Pellegata’s Political Leadership in Africa is a very different book from the first two, representing a much broader work of “macro” comparative politics. The authors’ task is to introduce readers to a new dataset that measures leadership change in Africa. Their core conceit is that leadership matters: who holds power and how they achieve their position, at minimum, shape our understanding of regime variation but likely also affect numerous social and economic outcomes. Thus, argue Carbone and Pellegata, political scientists should focus their attention on both measuring political leadership and assessing its effects.

The authors begin with an insightful observation: in political science, the study of African politics is one of the few subfields to center individual leadership as an important topic of study, mostly because of the personalistic and one-party regimes that dominated the post-independence period. Yet since the wave of democratization that swept across the continent in the 1990s, far more attention has been paid to the causes and consequences of regime change than to leadership transitions. The book thus seeks to provide a corrective, presenting the Africa Leadership Change (ALC) dataset that measures leadership change in Africa from 1960 to 2018, both whether it occurs and if so how (via elections, coups, or some other mechanism). Chapter 3 is a particularly useful introduction to the logic of the ALC dataset, providing a very intuitive visual schema of variation in the key measure of leadership change and a discussion of the contrasts between the new data and existing options for comparative scholars.

Beyond motivating and introducing the dataset, the authors provide two broad sets of empirical analyses. The first set are fundamentally descriptive, charting trends in African leadership over the past 60 years. Chapter 4 is an extensive exploration of variation in both regime and leadership types on the continent, with a clear focus on the divergent patterns that exist in the pre- and post-1990 periods. Those interested in trends in African macro politics over the last 60 years will find this a particularly illuminating chapter; it is a welcome update to most texts on post-independence macro politics in Africa that typically end in the 1990s. The diverse visualizations in this chapter are particularly interesting and merit close study.

Chapters 5 and 6 investigate more deeply two of the core observations made in chapter 4: the decline in the number of coups over time and the correlation between term limits and democratic stability. Chapter 5 explores coups as a mechanism of leadership change, demonstrating both geographical and temporal variation in their occurrence. The authors explore what exactly these events are, why they seem to be more prevalent in West and Central Africa and before 1990, and what their effects have been. Chapter 6 does the same, but in relation to term limits.

In the second broad set of analyses, the authors turn to an investigation of the effects of leadership transitions on economic growth (chapter 7) and social welfare (chapter 8), as well as the effects of different types of leaders—identified in their dataset as transients, autocrats, hegemons, and democrats—on economic growth, social welfare, and democratic durability (chapter 9). The analyses here are typically time-series cross-sectional regressions with a variety of theoretically motivated control variables. In general, the authors find evidence that political leadership matters and that leaders who hold power based on winning a multiparty election are better at providing for their people. These insights may shed light on extant debates about the effect of democratization events on social and economic welfare on the continent.

Critics will likely note that the central strength of the book—its breadth—is also its primary weakness. Contra Harding’s and Klaus’s books, which have more specific geographic reach, Carbone and Pellegata study 60 years of history for each of 49 African states. As such, despite their admirable attention to historical detail, their theoretical claims and measurement strategies are almost by definition more systematic and general, and thus easier to find exceptions to. Likewise, their empirical tests are low resolution, with the unit of analysis being the country-year. The methodological difficulties of such cross-national statistical analyses are well known and will certainly cause some skeptics to question the strength of the findings presented in chapters 7–9. Yet, even if one views the tests of cause and effect in a skeptical light, the descriptive contributions certainly should not be missed.