This chapter stresses several important features related to the society and polity of Benin.The country has a long history of regional trade facilitated by direct access to the sea, which has fostered entrepreneurial talent. Also, there is considerable ethnic fragmentation and multiple factions compete and may enter into shifting alliances. Consequently, political power does not belong to one group at the definite expense of the other groups. However, the fact that the contending factions tend to take a ‘winner-takes-all’ approach to power has the effect of raising the stakes of elections and promoting particularised privileges instead of policies aimed at the country’s long-term economic development. In addition, the political system is dominated by Big Men or oligarchs who have accumulated big fortunes and tend to see state power as an instrument to advance their economic interests. Because they succeed each other rather frequently in power, great political instability is created that further undermines long-term national development.

One motivation for this volume is to question the way that academic models of the political process depict preference aggregation and public policy formation. More significantly, this analysis has implications for democratic political institutions. There is an illusion, promoted by the political elite, that democratic oversight of government can control its power and direct it toward the public interest, but the powerless cannot control the powerful, even if the powerless far outnumber the powerful. The ability of constitutional constraints to limit government power and direct it toward the interests of the masses is also questionable, because those constraints must be enforced. If public policy is designed and implemented by the political elite, ultimately the power of government can be controlled only by a system of checks and balances that enables some of the elite to control the power of others. Democratic institutions can play a role in determining who holds political power, and constitutional constraints can play a role if there are institutional mechanisms to enforce them, but without a system of checks and balances that enables some elites to control the power of others, democracy and constitutional constraints are ineffective.

This chapter summarizes the book’s findings and discusses extensions of the argument. I outline the within-case and cross-case comparisons apparent in the four metropolitan areas covered in the previous chapters. I then briefly analyze to what extent the argument can apply to the regulation of drug markets in other Latin American metropolitan areas. I end the book with a series of theoretical and policy implications as well as potential research questions on the relationship between the state and illicit markets.

This chapter deploys the book’s theoretical framework, which connects political competition, police autonomy and informal regulation of illicit markets. While the electoral costs of police corruption and violence can motivate politicians to reduce police autonomy, political fragmentation and turnover condition whether and how they can achieve this objective. Fragmentation may obstruct policy implementation but also inhibit politicians from centralizing police rent extraction, while turnover impedes sustaining policies that reduce police autonomy over time. Police autonomy will shape how the police regulate drug markets. With greater autonomy police broker particularistic negotiations with, or engage in unbridled violence, or particularistic confrontation, against dealers and traffickers. When politicians reduce police autonomy through politicization, they capture rents from criminal activities and produce coordinated protection rackets, defined by high corruption but also lower violence on both sides. Finally, professionalized police forces regulate drug trafficking through coordinated coexistence regimes, brokering informal agreements that limit violence by both police and criminals.

In spite of their scope and significance, the challenges faced by mainstream parties on the right of the political spectrum continue to garner far less attention than those encountered by their mainstream left rivals and those posed by parties of the far right. This chapter discusses those challenges. It begins by trying to bring some conceptual clarity and to offer working definitions of both the mainstream right and the far right in Western Europe. It then outlines our argument that mainstream right parties in Western Europe experience a tension between, on the one hand, adapting to segments of the electorate that express the liberal and progressive values of the so-called ‘silent revolution’ and, on the other hand, representing voters who sympathize with the arguably authoritarian and nativist ideas associated with the so-called ‘silent counter-revolution’. This tension, we argue, presents mainstream right parties with particular policy and political challenges when it comes to European integration, immigration, moral issues and welfare. Having introduced the topic, and our take on it, the chapter ends by presenting a short summary of each of the contributions to come.

Chapter 4 examines the second macro-political factor in Rwanda’s path to genocide: democratization. Political liberalization simultaneously posed a threat to Rwanda’s incumbent elite and created a new political opportunity for challenger elites. The chapter shows how Rwanda’s move to liberalize – in line with the trend across Africa in the early 1990s – collided with its civil war with calamitous effect. The unfortunate coincidence of these two processes pushed Rwanda towards ethnic confrontation. The chapter explores how their interaction exposed a dark side to three processes commonly associated with political liberalization: pluralism, competition, and participation. Pluralization led to the expression of a broad spectrum of political interests and ideologies in Rwanda including the re-emergence of an ethnicist ideology. The chapter shows that this ideology had only marginal support initially. Moderation was ascendant at first and political parties sought cross-ethnic support. However, as the threat posed by the war escalated, this changed. The internal political competition created by multipartyism interacted with this external military contestation. In the face of weak constraints domestically and internationally, ethnic extremism gradually moved from the background to the foreground of Rwandan politics and society. Liberalization also increased political participation and a new class of challenger elites emerged at the local level, a radical sub-set of which would become mobilizing agents during the genocide.

Because the cases of Buenos Aires Province and Colombia eventually resulted in ambitious structural police reforms, Chapter 7 presents a detailed sequential analysis of the events that brought about reform in each instance, leveraging changes over time in societal preferences and the strength of the political opposition. The sequential analyses presented in this chapter elucidate the factors that shape politicians’ incentives when choosing between continuity and reform, demonstrating how those incentives changed in response to short-term shifts in societal preferences and political competition. The accounts of Buenos Aires Province and Colombia complement one another well, demonstrating that neither of these conditions is sufficient to bring about reform on its own. In each case, we observe an explicit decision by the executive to maintain the status quo when faced with the convergence of societal preferences (Buenos Aires Province) or a robust political opposition (Colombia) on its own. After both conditions were present, however, the two executives chose to enact comprehensive structural reforms just months after opting for the status quo. By analyzing politicians’ choices before and after the joint occurrence of these conditions, we obtain a greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying institutional persistence and change among police forces.

In Chapter 8, we examine how scale affects contestation, defined as the degree of electoral competition in a political community. We begin by offering a theoretical account of the impact of scale on contestation. This account operates differently at polity and district levels, prompting us to construct separate theoretical accounts. For polities, we surmise that size alters incentives for leaders and masses, both of whom have greater need for an institutionalized mechanism of resolving conflict. In districts, we argue that scale influences contestation through mechanical effects, the supply of challengers, and the degree of social diversity. Next, we introduce our data and a variety of empirical tests, including cross-national and cross-district analyses based on the largest-party index. In addition, we provide an analysis of suffrage reforms and turnover, understood as a change in party control for a particular office. Although the topic has not been extensively researched, most studies that examine the relation – including our own results presented in this chapter – find a positive association between community size and contestation. A short conclusion summarizes the results.

This chapter concentrates on individuals and their actions during the pre-independence electoral struggle. It narrates the move towards convincement in political opinions and the hardening of political blocs in the borderland, particularly in the opposition of nationalist propagandists and their local chief over the question of rightful authority. Nationalists countered the chief’s violent attitude towards dissent with stubbornness and the frank declaration of their political truth. After noting the shifts in political speech surrounding the tainted local elections in 1960, the chapter then examines a full-scale insurrection that followed, as nationalists in the borderland attacked their political opponents and rejected both colonial and chiefly authority. It observes the prevalence of the word ‘advice’ as a euphemism for political violence, and examines the rapid success and swift repression of the rebellion. It argues for a consideration of the conception of authority as given by the subject, and considers the ‘citizen-making’ violence of political dogma. It ends with a coda on the assassination of Prime Minister-elect Prince Rwagasore and the transition to independence.