Social Contracts in Sub-Saharan Africa : Concepts and Measurements

In 2019, an Independent Evaluation Group review on the growing use of social contracts terminology by the World Bank concluded that social contract diagnostics are useful analytical innovations with relevant operational implications, particularly in situations of transition and social unrest. But it also found that the World Bank had no formal, conceptual framework or shared understanding of social contracts, leading to uneven quality of use. This paper proposes a framework and quantitative measures to describe social contracts. First, the paper presents a literature review on social contract theory and its applications in development. Second, it proposes a conceptual framework based on three core aspects of social contracts: (i) the citizen-state bargain, (ii) social outcomes that form the contents of the social contract, and (iii) resilience of the social contract in terms of how citizens’ expectations are being met. Third, an empirical measurement strategy is described to quantify these aspects through six dimensions and 14 subdimensions using available indicators from multiple sources. An empirical analysis then successfully tests some of the framework’s predictions and finds indicative evidence for an operationally interesting result: that state capacity without civil capacity is often not sufficient to generate thicker and more inclusive social contracts, and that these better outcomes lead to less misalignment with expectations and to less social unrest. Fourth, the quantitative measures are used to present three comparative maps for the general characterization of social contracts at the cross-country level.