Analysing Political Settlements and Development in Four Countries

Abstract This chapter shows how the approach can be used to analyse the comparative politics of development. Specifically, four countries are selected that over the past two decades provide good representations of the different quadrants of the authors’ typology, and the links between their typological variables and economic and social development are traced. Specifically, Ghana is discussed as a broad-dispersed settlement; Guinea as a narrow-dispersed settlement; Cambodia as a narrow-concentrated settlement; and Rwanda as a broad-concentrated settlement. The relationship between political settlement type, elite commitment, state effectiveness, and development outcomes in three policy areas are explored: economic growth, maternal mortality reduction, and quality education, effectively making twelve cases. Of these twelve, eight conform to the predictions of the authors’ typological theory, and four conform partially. In the chapter’s final section the idea of the ‘policy domain’, a meso-level field of power relations which interacts with the political settlement and within which actors promote competing policy agendas, is invoked to further explain the chapter’s findings.