This final chapter revisits this book's argument and findings and discusses its implications for a number of important social scientific and policy debates. This book's findings are obviously germane to discussions about the role of traditional leaders in contemporary politics, but they have implications well beyond this particular debate. I begin by summarizing what this book has shown and – equally importantly – has not shown before describing the implications of this book for our understanding of traditional leaders, clientelism, state building, and local-level democracy in Africa and beyond.

Revisiting the Argument

To begin, it is worth revisiting what the argument claims and what it does not claim. I have argued that unelected traditional leaders improve the responsiveness of national-level democratic governments in Africa. In explaining why this is so, I do not romanticize the role of chiefs. It is precisely the fact that these leaders are unelected “mini-monarchs” that creates a crucial paradox. The methods by which traditional leaders are selected are fundamentally undemocratic, they typically rule for life, and citizens have little ability to sanction them. Furthermore, traditional leaders are often bestowed powers that would otherwise be granted to elected local governments.

As a result, I am skeptical of claims that chiefs are inherently the authentic representatives of their communities. The chieftaincy is not “democracy in its purest form,” as is sometimes claimed by its supporters. There is no guarantee that leaders of small tight-knit communities will share their communities' norms, values, and interests, as communitarian scholars sometimes maintain.

But traditional leaders have a personal interest in the provision of local public goods in their communities insofar as they are locally embedded. Chiefs who live full time in their chiefdoms and depend in significant part on other community members for material support have an encompassing interest in the local economies. Like Mancur Olson's “stationary bandits,” if the local economy improves, their own well-being will improve. Social sanctions from other community members also may motivate locally embedded chiefs. But their incentives to help deliver local development are not inherent; they are contingent on them perceiving their own fate to be intimately connected with the economic and social well-being of their broader chiefdom.

In addition to having an interest in the provision of local public goods, traditional leaders have a unique ability to organize community contributions to these projects.