In their day-to-day roles, MPs face a variety of formal and informal institutional pressures to supply public, collective, and private goods. The conventional wisdom is that in most African countries, informal pressures to provide private goods take precedence over public and collective goods provision. The role of the African politician, as depicted in much of the literature on African politics, is about providing small ‘club’ goods to communities and private rewards to supporters, the former by means of formal or informal relations with government ministries and external donors, the latter by means of informal, sometimes illicit, sometimes ethnic, personalized and clientelistic networks.

For many observers, the experiments with multiparty elections since the early 1990s have not changed the fundamental nuts and bolts of African politics. Bratton (1998) argued that Africa quickly returned to neopatrimonial politics while others saw no change at all (Akinrinade 1998), political closure (Joseph 1998), semi-authoritarianism (Carothers 1997), elections without democracy (van de Walle 2002), ‘virtual democracies’ rather than true democratization (Joseph 1997, 1998), or just a return to the usual ‘big man’, neopatrimonial, clientelist, informalized and disordered politics that had always characterized African politics (e.g. Ake 1993, 1996, 2000; Chabal and Daloz 1999; Chege 1996; Mbembe 1995). Africa was returning to ‘an institutional legacy of ‘big man’ rule, and the electoral alternation of leaders was again becoming abnormal’ by all indications (Bratton 1998, 64-5). Bratton’s argument was based on the available data at the time and echoed by scholars like Diamond and Plattner (1999, 19, 32, 169) arguing that second elections were merely ‘transitions without change’ and Cowen and Laakso (2002, 14-5, 23) arguing that the ‘massive voter apathy’ spreading across the continent is undermining the meaningfulness and legitimacy of elections in Africa.

These analyses, however, have little to say about the role of the legislator in Africa. In fact, while there is just emerging a small literature on legislatures (Barkan 2009), studies of legislators and their role in government, in development, as representatives of the citizens and possibly brokers in clientelistic networks, are in an abysmal state. The role of legislators in a de jure democratic system is supplying more genuinely collective and public goods, such as executive oversight, or the scrutiny of legislation, or the making of public policy, or constituency representation and service – in short, the kind of roles with which legislators are most closely associated in the established democracies. Indeed, in the eyes of most Western observers, including donors, part of the problem of African politics is that legislators spend too much time grabbing private rewards, in the form of jobs, contracts, and kick-backs to sustain clientelistic networks, and too little time supplying public goods, or even club goods (e.g. constituency service) to their constituents.

However, the present author’s recent explorative research (Lindberg 2009a, 2009b, 2010; Weghorst & Lindberg 2009), demonstrates that MPs are subject to very strong contradictory pressures to supply both collective and private goods. These pressures take the form, among other things, of powerful informal institutional expectations about the role of the MP, expectations which we do not expect to change drastically overnight. Not enough is known about how effectively MPs manage the different demands of formal and informal institutions, or about the circumstances in which hybrid institutional pressures lead to better development outcomes. Yet, before a cause and effect analysis is possible, one must effectively map out the ‘lie of the land’ with regards to how MPs actually behave in terms of resource allocation. In this regard, we know very little. This purpose of this paper is to advance our knowledge regarding how much of private, collective and public goods MPs actually provide – in the eyes of their constituents.

* This report is one of the outputs of the Africa Power and Politics research project, based at the ODI in London. Readers can access the project website for further outputs. (http://www.institutions-africa.org/page/home)