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Why have some churches in Africa engaged in advocacy for stronger liberal democratic institutions while others have not? Faith in Democracy explores this question, emphasizing the benefits of liberal democratic protections for some churches. The book explains how churches' historic investments create different autocratic risk exposure, as states can more easily regulate certain activities - including social service provision - than others. In situations where churches have invested in schools as part of their evangelization activities, which create high autocratic risk, churches have incentives to defend liberal democratic institutions to protect their control over them. This theory also explains how church fiscal dependence on the state interacts with education provision to change incentives for advocacy. Empirically, the book demonstrates when churches engage in democratic activism, drawing on church-level data from across the continent, and the effects of church activism, drawing on micro-level evidence from Zambia, Tanzania and Ghana.
List of contents
Part I. Theory: 1. Church interests in liberal democracy; 2. Liberal democracy as an institutional guarantee of church interests; 3. The politics of church education in Sub-Saharan Africa; Part II. Testing the Main Hypotheses: 4. Evidence on church democratic activism in Africa: the effect of church schools and autocratic risk exposure; 5. Evidence on Catholic democratic activism in Africa: the effect of church school dependence on state subsidies; Part III. Testing Underlying Assumptions; 6. Church activism and support for liberal democratic institutions: evidence from Zambia and Tanzania; 7. Tracing liberal democracy's influence on educational policy: evidence from Zambia, Ghana, and beyond; Part IV. Extensions and Implications: 8. Church school legacies for citizenship: evidence from Zambia and Tanzania; 9. Reconsidering churches, education, and democracy in the contemporary world; Appendices; Appendix A. List of interviews; Appendix B. Data sets; Appendix C. Additional table Chapter 7; Appendix D. Additional tables Chapter 8.
About the author
Kate Baldwin is Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale University. She is the author of The Paradox of Traditional Chiefs in Democratic Africa (2016), which was awarded the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize.
