Corruption Perceptions and Contentious Politics in Africa: How Different Types of Corruption Have Shaped Africa’s Third Wave of Protest
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Author | Jacob S Lewis |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929920903657 |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929920903657
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(2) 227 –244
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1478929920903657
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Corruption Perceptions
and Contentious Politics in
Africa: How Different Types
of Corruption Have Shaped
Africa’s Third Wave of Protest
Jacob S Lewis
Abstract
Does corruption increase general and anti-government protest? Scholarship has produced
seemingly incompatible results, with some research demonstrating a strong connection between
corruption and the onset of contentious politics and other research finding that heightened
perceptions of corruption decrease activism. This article addresses this puzzle by examining how
different types of corruption condition diverging contentious outcomes. Focusing on two highly
salient forms of corruption in the African context—elite corruption and police corruption—this
article argues that the different consequences, salience, and costs associated with these two forms
help to condition whether citizens rise up or stay home. This argument is tested via two methods.
First, it draws from a survey experiment conducted in five Nigerian states in 2017. The survey
experiment tests whether exposure to different types of corruption affects willingness to join
in protests. Second, it draws from statistical analysis of geo-located perceptions of corruption
and protest across Africa, incorporating checks for both collinearity and endogeneity into the
model. The statistical analysis examines whether heightened perceptions of corruption correlate
with increased counts of general and anti-government protest. The results from both methods
demonstrate that elite corruption is positively correlated with protest, whereas police corruption
is not.
Keywords
Africa, corruption, protest, social movement, collective action, experiment
Accepted: 9 January 2020
Introduction
Over the past 10 years, Africa has experienced an unprecedented rise in contentious poli-
tics that has come to be known as the “third wave of protest.” The third wave has shaken
Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA
Corresponding author:
Jacob S Lewis, Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, Erie, PA 16563, USA.
Email: jlewis1023@gmail.com
903657PSW0010.1177/1478929920903657Political Studies ReviewLewis
research-article2020
Article
228 Political Studies Review 19(2)
governments, ousted corrupt leaders, and has been characterized by a combination of
high-minded calls for accountability as well as “home and hearth” concerns (Branch and
Mampilly, 2015; Mueller, 2018). Protests have centered on many issues, ranging from
poverty, inequality, lack of accountability, and development. Central to many of these
movements have been complaints about government corruption (Sändig, 2015; Smith,
2014). Recent examples in Burkina Faso, South Africa, and Sudan have demonstrated
that corruption can serve as a shared motivation for mass protest movements that oust
elites. On the other hand, recent influential scholarship has found that increased percep-
tions of corruption are correlated with decreased willingness to engage in anti-corruption
activism (Peiffer and Alvarez, 2016). These contradictory findings are puzzling.
This article argues that answering this puzzle requires us to look more closely at the
diverging ways that different types of corruption motivate and condition contentious poli-
tics. Rather than treating all corruption as a uniform dysfunction of the state, it looks at
two particularly prevalent types of corruption in the African context. First, it looks at elite
corruption, including the vast material enrichment and abuses of power that proliferate
across the African context. Second, it shifts its focus to police corruption, including the
petty bribes as well as the more serious abuses associated with them. Both of these forms
of corruption are highly salient in the African context, yet generate different social, eco-
nomic, and political consequences that in turn shape contention. Elite corruption activates
economic and governance grievances, which are widely salient and facilitate recruitment
and resource mobilization. When issue salience is high and threats to security are low, the
benefits of mobilizing outweigh their prospective costs. Police corruption, on the other
hand, carries implicit concerns about safety and security that increase the perceived costs
of mobilization to the point of outweighing the potential benefits. These costs take into
account the expected utility of mobilization and the security concerns associated with
such demonstrations. By disaggregating qualitative types of corruption, this article digs
deeper into the direct and indirect relationships between perceptions of corruption and the
propensity of citizens to take to the streets.
This theory is tested via two distinct methods. First, it is tested with a survey experi-
ment conducted in Nigeria in 2017. Second, it is tested statistically by linking geo-located
perceptions of elite and police corruption to counts of general and anti-government pro-
tests across Africa. Importantly, this allows the model to test how subnational variation in
perceptions of both elite and police corruption conditions contentious politics. The results
from both tests support the hypothesis that different forms of corruption have diverging
effects on contention. The survey experiment shows that respondents treated with elite
corruption are more willing to join a protest than respondents treated with police corrup-
tion. The statistical analysis shows that regions with heightened citizen perceptions of
elite corruption are robustly correlated with contentious political action, resulting in an
increase in general and anti-government protests. Regions with heightened citizen per-
ceptions of police corruption, on the other hand, exhibit no such correlation, and in some
cases reduce the overall number of protests. These findings contribute to the current lit-
erature linking corruption to contention and provide insight into the benefits of under-
standing corruption as a complex political concept rather than a monolith.
This research makes several contributions. First, an experimental analysis provides
crisp, exogenous evidence in support of the theory and demonstrates that exposure to dif-
ferent types of corruption does matter. Second, subnational analysis allows for meaning-
ful within-country variation of both corruption and contention. Most work linking
corruption and contention has been conducted at the country level and has not captured
To continue reading
Request your trial