Abstract:
This paper examines the big questions of African comparative politics. It assesses the interaction of three crucial components in the development of the continent: law, democracy and quality of government. Political regimes of democracy, polity and autocracy are instrumented with income-levels, legal-origins, religious-dominations and press-freedom levels to account for government quality dynamics of corruption-control, government-effectiveness, voice and accountability, political-stability, regulation quality and rule of law. Findings indicate democracy has an edge over autocracy while the later and polity overlap. A democracy that takes into account only the voice of the majority is better in government quality than autocracy, while a democracy that takes into account the voice of the minority (polity) is worse in government quality than autocracy. As a policy implication, democracy once initiated should be accelerated to edge the appeals of authoritarian regimes and reap the benefits of time and level hypotheses.