Most of the attention on Africa-China relations has centred on China's economic activities. What remains unclear is the role of partisanship in shaping public perceptions of China in African countries. Since the Chinese government builds a favourable relationship with an incumbent party, incumbent party supporters tend to have positive views towards China whereas opposition party supporters perceive China more critically. This study conducts multilevel mixed-effects regression analyses of public opinion across 33 African countries, and finds that opposition party supporters are indeed more critical of China. While opposition parties are motivated by their office-seeking interests, they also hold an incumbent party accountable. This study sheds light on the agency of political parties and their supporters in African countries and the mode (instead of volume) of China's bilateral engagement.

Understanding why citizens are willing to finance public goods is central to development and state capacity. Taxation can contribute to the common good, yet particularly in developing contexts, citizens may not benefit – or contribute – equally from such resources or across their lifetimes. How do taxpayers link solidarity to the practice of paying taxes? Taxation makes solidarity visible, but taxation practices also produce and shape solidarity. To enable further scrutiny of the perceived linkages between taxation, ideas around redistribution, and solidarity we develop a framework of imagined solidarity, which differentiates between affective and calculative solidarity on the one hand, and personal and generalised solidarity on the other hand. Using data from focus groups with formal sector workers in Namibia, we illustrate how taxpayers link solidarity to the practice of paying taxes along these dimensions; demonstrating the usefulness of this framework for the further study of fiscal interconnectedness, also beyond Namibia.

Are residents of developing countries willing to support economic development despite environmental damage and conflict risks? To examine this question, we conducted a survey experiment in Turkana County, home to an economically and politically marginalised pastoral community in Kenya but newly impacted by a large-scale infrastructure development project, namely, the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) corridor project, which will generate economic development at the expense of significant environmental degradation and intensified conflict risks. We found that the majority of our respondents in Turkana support LAPSSET regardless of the expected environmental damages and conflict risks. Although concerns about unequal distribution of economic opportunities and cross-border ethnic conflicts decreased support for LAPSSET, the decreases in support were substantively small and only found conditionally based on certain sub-groups. Our results align with earlier literature findings that residents of developing countries are willing to tolerate negative consequences while prioritising economic development.