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The material and political bases of lived poverty in Africa: Insights from the Afrobarometer
May 2008
Robert Mattes
Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR), University of Cape Town
Abstract
The Afrobarometer has developed an experiential measure of lived poverty (how frequently people go without basic necessities during the course of a year) that measures a portion of the central core of the concept of poverty not captured by existing objective or subjective measures. Empirically, the measure has strong individual level construct validity and reliability within any cross national round of
surveys. Yet it also displays inconsistent levels of external validity as a measure of aggregate level poverty when compared to other objective, material measures of poverty or well being. Surprisingly, however, we find that lived poverty is very strongly related to country level measures of political freedom. This finding simultaneously supports Sen's (1999) arguments about development as freedom,
corroborates Halperin et al’s (2005) arguments about the “democracy advantage” in development, and increases our confidence that we are indeed measuring the experiential core of poverty.
Introduction
The Afrobarometer’s central concern has been to describe and explain Africans’ understanding of and commitment to political and economic reform. Given the prominence of scholarly hypotheses about the central impact of poverty and destitution on the prospects of democratization and liberalization, it was vital that the Afrobarometer contained a valid, reliable and efficient measure of poverty with
which to test these propositions. Thus, we developed the Lived Poverty Index (LPI) in order to produce an individual level measure of poverty that was both valid and reliable, but that could also be easily administered without questioning about household income, assets, expenditure or access to services.
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