Governing for the Common Good: How NGO Workers Who Become Legislators Govern

• In Event: New Insights on NGOs in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

How has the expansion of the NGO sector in Africa changed the performance of legislatures in African democracies? While NGOs can certainly push governments to change from the outside through advocacy and lobbying of government or through development work and service delivery in parallel with government, we consider how the NGO sector’s rise has transformed democracy and development from the inside, as a substantial and increasing number of NGO workers actually run for and win elective office. Indeed, some 18 percent of national-level African legislators now have NGO experience, marking the highest share of any world region.

These “NGO-legislators” have taken their place in parliaments historically dominated by legislators from family dynasties and the socioeconomic elite, who can use their connections to enter office through traditional “pipeline” careers in business and the upper echelons of the civil service. The advent of NGO-legislators has thus changed the composition of African legislatures—notably improving the descriptive representation of women and weakening the overrepresentation of class elites—but we further argue that NGO-legislators bring distinctive values and know-how with them from the NGO sector that impact their substantive actions in office. This includes a greater commitment to pursuing good governance and representing the poor and marginalized groups, high levels of expertise about welfare and development issues and about public policy more generally, and a strong set of speaking, writing, arguing, negotiating, advocacy, and financial management skills.

In this paper we examine the impact of NGO-legislators across 15 African countries and through an in-depth case study of Kenya. The cross-national African analysis relies on an original dataset of thousands of legislators’ biographical information and legislative behavior, while the Kenyan analysis employs a mixed-method empirical strategy that draws from an original survey of the backgrounds and attitudes of 549 nomination-seekers and candidates in the 2017 general election and qualitative interviews with sitting NGO-legislators and NGO workers. We find that NGO-legislators are more likely than legislators from more traditional pipeline careers to support, sponsor, and vote for anti-corruption and economic development legislation and to oppose and vote against anti-NGO legislation, even when it means organizing across party lines and in opposition to the executive branch. We further find that NGO-legislators who come from development NGOs are more likely to prioritize constituency service and that NGO-legislators who come from advocacy NGOs are more likely to prioritize executive oversight, though as a group they take the responsibility of representation more seriously than their counterparts from traditional pipeline careers and they are more likely to view poor and marginalized groups as the people they are representing. They also perform better than their parliamentary peers insofar as they participate more actively in legislative sessions, make more contributions to debate and lawmaking, and make greater efforts to hold executive officials to account for past failures. Still, we find that many NGO-legislators are conflicted activists who make different tradeoffs in their attempts to balance the principled commitments they bring with them from the outside against the requirements of surviving and thriving as a political insider. The end result is nonetheless that NGO-legislators govern differently in some notable ways, with positive implications for legislative performance and, more broadly, for democracy, development, and civil society.

Author

• Karisa Tritz Cloward, Southern Methodist University