[Carolyn Logan on the spread of democracy in Africa]
Speaker is Carolyn Logan, Assistant Professor of Political Science, speaking in a studio: The afrobarometer is a survey research project that’s been collecting information on public attitudes towards democracy, governance and economics reforms since 1999. We started in 12 countries, we now in our 4th round of surveys in 20 countries. The project has 3 key objectives the first is to collect good quality information on public attitude in Africa towards democracy and governance something that we haven’t known a lot about up until now. Second is to build capacity among orgs that we work with to both collect and analyze and present good quality survey data and the 3rd is to get this data out into the public arena to contribute to the popular debates in these countries about democracy and policy and governance. What were seeing first of all is that in terms of the simplest measure we have, which is a simple expression of support of democracy that attitude are up. We see higher levels of support for democracy now than we have in the past but we sort of thing of that as a bit of a motherhood and apple pie statement. It's too easy to just say yes I support democracy. So we have bit more sufficecated measure that brings together that bring together a couple of different indicators that we call demand for democracy and it looks both at support for democracy and weather people reject authoritarian alternatives. Demand for democracy is going up. We also have a measure of supply of democracy which looks at how satisfied people are with their democracies and how much democracy they actually they think they are getting from the system. Again we see that supply of democracy is up a bit this time around. So it's an encouraging result to see that on average both demand and supply of democracy are increasing in Africa according to public perceptions. However, that's an average result and when we start looking country by country we in fact see there's a huge amount of diversity across countries. We see some countries were both demand and supply are improving. We think that these regimes are headed in a positive direction and possibly towards consolidation of democracy. On the other hand we see a couple of countries where both demand and supply seem to be staying at very low levels. These countries may be remaining autocracies. But most of the countries we work in still far in between those two extremes. There neither autocracies or democracy they're what we call hybrid regime and they're still in flux we're still seeing lots of change over time in either the demand or supply of democracy or both. MSU was on of three organizations that co-founded the project along with the Center for Democratic Development in Ghana, the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. In round 4 we shifted the management a little bit over to the African partners of the organization and MSU now serves as a support unit for the project along with the University of Capetown.
[Production by G. L. Kohuth, MSU University Relations]