Democratic governments sometimes use violence against their people, yet little is known about the electoral consequences of these events. Studying South Africa’s Marikana massacre, we document how a new opposition party formed as a direct result of violence, quantify significant electoral losses for the incumbent, and show that those losses were driven by voters switching from the incumbent to the new party. Three lessons emerge. First, incumbents who preside over state violence may be held electorally accountable by voters. Second, such accountability seemingly depends on the existence of credible opposition parties that can serve as a vector for disaffected voters. Where such parties do not exist, violence may create political cleavages that facilitate the formalization of opposition movements. Third, immediate proximity to violence is correlated with holding incumbents accountable.

A consistent finding in industrialized democracies is that having a daughter shapes parents’ attitudes and behaviors in gender-egalitarian ways. We test whether this finding travels to a young middle-income democracy where women’s rights are more tenuous: South Africa. Using a dataset of over 7,500 respondents with information on family structure, we find no discernible effect on attitudes about women’s rights or on partisan identification. We speculate that our null findings relate to opportunity: daughter effects are more likely when parents perceive economic, social, and political opportunities for women. When women’s customary status and de facto opportunities are low, as in South Africa, having a daughter may have no effect on parents’ political behavior. Our results demonstrate the virtues of diversifying case selection in political behavior beyond economically wealthy democracies.

Various theories of democratic governance posit that citizens should vote for incumbent politicians when they provide good service, and vote for the opposition when service delivery is poor. But does electoral accountability work as theorized, especially in developing country contexts? Studying Southern African democracies, where infrastructural investment in basic services has expanded widely but not universally, we contribute a new empirical answer to this question. Analyzing the relationship between service provision and voting, we find a surprising negative relationship: improvements in service provision predict decreases in support for dominant party incumbents. Though stronger in areas where opposition parties control local government, the negative relationship persists even in those areas where local government is run by the nationally dominant party. Survey data provide suggestive evidence that citizen concerns about corruption and ratcheting preferences for service delivery may be driving citizen attitudes and behaviors. Voters may thus be responsive to service delivery, but perhaps in ways that are more nuanced than extant theories previously recognized.

Does democratization increase economic output? Answers to this question are inconsistent partly due to the challenges of examining the causal forces behind political and economic phenomena that occur at the national level. We employ a new empirical approach, the synthetic control method, to study the economic effects of democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1975–2008. This method yields case-specific causal estimates, which show that political reform associated with the “third wave” of democracy had highly heterogeneous, yet often substantively important effects in Africa. In some countries democratization adversely affected economic output while in others it exerted an analogous positive effect.