Do China’s Belt and Road Initiative Projects Boost Incumbent Electoral Success? An Examination of Electoral Effects in Three African Countries Public

Moran, Gabriel (Spring 2020)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/rx913q85v?locale=fr
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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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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

Supplemental Files

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Actions
BRI and WB Project Dataset (Project Data) 2020-04-14 12:06:01 -0400
R Dataset (Model Dataset) 2020-04-14 12:06:05 -0400
R Code (R Coding with explanation of procedure) 2020-04-25 12:36:33 -0400