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  • Democratic Participation in Rural Tanzania and Zambia: The Impact of Civic Education
  • Nic Cheeseman
Satu Riutta . Democratic Participation in Rural Tanzania and Zambia: The Impact of Civic Education. Boulder, Colo.: First Forum Press, 2009. xiv + 225 pp. Tables. Figures. Appendixes. List of Acronyms. Interviews. Bibliography. Index. Notes. $59.95. Cloth.

Satu Riutta's concise book sets out to evaluate the impact of civic education on the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of rural Africans. The motivation for the book is clear and laudable: if democracy is to work, then voters need to understand how to engage with the political system, both so that their views can be taken into consideration, and also so that they can help prevent abuses of power. As Riutta demonstrates convincingly, the level of political knowledge (broadly understood) of many rural dwellers is relatively limited, [End Page 190] and this continues to be a major cause of concern for prodemocracy activists, NGOs, and donors.

Riutta is to be commended for undertaking important research on a poorly understood topic, and for attempting to shine an academic light on rural voters, a group often ignored at the expense of the urban electorate, which is typically cheaper and easier to study. Democratic Participation is clearly written, with the findings well set out and helpfully summarized in a number of tables. The book offers a wide array of insights, and the broad conclusions are certainly of interest: civic education is no panacea, but it does help promote knowledge of human rights, and it does increase interest in politics. In contrast, the book finds little evidence to suggest that civic education increases efficacy or decreases trust in politicians. It is interesting that Riutta finds civic education to have the most positive effect "on the relatively disadvantaged, in this case women" (140). The perceived success of civic education leads Riutta to the broad policy conclusion that civic education programs merit continuing donor support.

Sadly, the reliability of these findings is seriously called into doubt by a number of problems with the basic research design. To start with, the decision to compare Mtwara in Tanzania and Luapula in Zambia is never justified satisfactorily. As Riutta notes, because Mtwara is mainly Muslim while Luapula is mainly Christian, it becomes impossible to know whether variations between the two cases (in terms of the effectiveness of civic education) are the result of religious beliefs or other national variations. Any comparison between the cases is also obscured by the timing of the surveys: the Zambian survey was conducted seven and a half months before an election (when party political activity was most likely low), while the Tanzaniann survey was held just one and a half months before the polls (when campaigning was likely to have been significant, and hence the political awareness of respondents was likely to be highest). Given this difference, one wonders why a cross-national comparison was selected. Although the inclusion of Zambia raises some interesting questions, a study of several different regions within Tanzania would have made more sense.

A second problem relates to the sample size. Partly because the survey was split across two countries, the number of respondents per country is relatively low—at just 140. Given that the Afrobarometer contains similar questions to the survey instrument used by Riutta, and that its nationally representative samples already include considerably more responses from rural dwellers than Riutta was able to reach, there might have been a clear advantage in simply working from the Afrobarometer data. While Riutta's attempt to create a new data-set in order to contribute to the available resources on rural political attitudes and behavior is worthy, the questionable sampling method used to locate the 280 respondents surveyed for the book unfortunately calls into question the whole research project. While we are told that the study "proceeded to select a representative sample of [End Page 191] respondents" (193), it later transpires that "specific respondents . . . were selected by sub-village elders according to certain criteria given to them in advance" (193). So instead of the "industry standard" survey design that prioritizes random selection based on a carefully constructed sampling frame, the book's findings are based on surveys...

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