Using political settlements analysis to explain poverty trends in Ethiopia, Malawi, Rwanda and Tanzania

This article uses political settlements analysis to help illuminate trends in poverty reduction in Ethiopia, Malawi, Rwanda and Tanzania. Drawing on data from the ESID Political Settlements Dataset and our own coding, it finds that the predictions of political settlements theory about the relationship between political settlement type and actual poverty reduction are reasonably well supported by the data, with ‘broad-concentrated’ Rwanda performing best and ‘narrow-dispersed’ Ethiopia worst for the period in question. It then supplements this finding with a largely qualitative analytical narrative, illustrating some of the ways in which political settlement type impacted on poverty reduction through the causal mechanisms of elite commitment and state capability. Although our typology does not explain all of the observed phenomena, we argue that, when supplemented by other variables such as ideology, it is a promising explanatory model.