Do China’s Belt and Road Initiative Projects Boost Incumbent Electoral Success? An Examination of Electoral Effects in Three African Countries Open Access
Moran, Gabriel (Spring 2020)
Abstract
Why do the leaders of developing countries choose to participate in China’s Belt and Road Initiative? Despite widespread concerns over the potential Chinese coercion of developing countries through “debt-trap diplomacy,” developing countries across the globe still enthusiastically pursue BRI financing. This paper evaluates the claim that BRI projects increase the electoral support of incumbent national leaders in recipient countries. Using fixed-effects multivariate regression, this paper utilizes electoral district returns from presidential elections in Kenya, Nigeria, and Seychelles before and after receiving BRI investment. Additional robustness tests were conducted to control for capital bias and country slope differences. Our research finds that BRI and World Bank aid projects have no statistically significant effect on subnational election returns for incumbent African leaders.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………..….1
Literature Review……………………………………………………………………………….………....6
Theory……………………………………………………………………………………………………….11
Data and Methods………………………………………………………………………………………..13
Table 1…………………………………………………………………………………………………..….15
Results………………………………………………………………………………………………………25
Discussion……………………………………………………………………………………………….…28
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………...32
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………....34
Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………………………...40
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Primary PDF
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Do China’s Belt and Road Initiative Projects Boost Incumbent Electoral Success? An Examination of Electoral Effects in Three African Countries () | 2020-04-25 12:36:28 -0400 |
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Supplemental Files
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BRI and WB Project Dataset (Project Data) | 2020-04-14 12:06:01 -0400 |
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R Dataset (Model Dataset) | 2020-04-14 12:06:05 -0400 |
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R Code (R Coding with explanation of procedure) | 2020-04-25 12:36:33 -0400 |
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