Hungering for Governance. The Role of Quality of Government in Access to Food.

Abstract

Over the last years, political science scholars have increasingly questioned the role of democracy in producing human welfare and public goods provision, as many democracies tend to fail in these aspects. In attempts to track down the causes behind these failures, scholars have lifted the issue of bad governance as a central factor. When investigating how to improve human well being, the political science research community have mostly paid attention to what can been referred to as the input side of the political system – namely access to power, while the output side of the system – exercise of power, to a large extent has been overlooked. As a consequence, it has been argued that if focus is shifted from representative democracy to measures of Quality of Government (QoG) or state capacity the picture of what politics can do for human well being will change dramatically.

Similar arguments are present also within food security literature, where scholars are increasingly questioning democracy as a determinant of food security and instead turning their attention to strong institutions and the role of governments. The objective of this study is to empirically contribute to the yet mainly theoretical debate on the role of democracy and Quality of Government in human welfare with a food security focus. This is done by examining the role of democracy and QoG, measured as perception of corruption, on access to food. In addition, corruption is challenged as a determinant of food security by more traditional explanation within previous literature.

The results of the study indicate that democracy does not have an effect on access to food, but corruption does. The only competing explanation that proved to play a significant role in access to food was poverty, while factors such as GDP, population and trade did not. Hence, the results of this study suggest that food security is indeed a governance issue – and more specifically a governance output issue.