 Good afternoon. So it's a real privilege to offer some comments and reflections on this annual lecture as a way to kick off our collective discussions. Not only of course does the lecture advance a thought provoking and sometimes challenging argument, but it also brings together a number of diverse strands from our work at UNU wider over the last decade. And this makes it I think a very appropriate annual lecture at this conference as we take stock of what we've learned and think about what comes next. So Ernest's lecture begins with the question, has democracy failed African economies? Does democracy lead to the right economic choices for Africa? Can democracy lead to policies that support structural transformation? And I think that these questions like many of the most pressing questions in development today are at the intersection of economics and political science. And so I am very pleased as a political scientist to offer some comments and I'll focus on these questions in particular. So I have four brief points which draw both on the presentation this afternoon and also on the longer underlying working paper. I think as you'll see in some sense, some of these points are sort of a reinterpretation of Ernest's arguments, but from a political science perspective. And I hope that I can in this way stir some discussion a bit. The first point is to underscore that the question of whether democracy leads to the right economic choices or to socially optimal policy choices more broadly is certainly not one specific to Africa. So indeed Ernest recognizes this in considering related literatures in his working paper. I think for instance of Samuel Huntington's 1968 book, Political Order and Changing Societies as one example. Still I think it's worth underscoring this point and the broader relevance of the central questions posed in the lecture. Policy time to electoral cycles is a challenge around the world and there's evidence that voters across a wide variety of contexts don't necessarily vote in their own economic interests short term or long term. There's been a big discussion of the latter point in US politics in recent years. So think for instance, maybe some of you have read Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter with Kansas? So it was published in 2004. It was a New York Times bestseller. And his starting point is that conservatives in the United States support economic policies that don't benefit the majority of the people in the state of Kansas. And yet the state is one of the most conservative in the Union. The book of course then presents an argument for why this is so. That said, my second point is that it may very well be that the question of whether democracy leads to the right economic choices is more pronounced or more problematic for Africa than for some other parts of the world. There are a number of possible reasons why this might be. So Ernest's lecture has I think largely highlighted what we might call the formal functioning of democratic institutions in economic policymaking. For instance, the fact that elected officials governed by electoral cycles adopt short term approaches. That structural reforms which require a long term perspective are difficult to sell to impatient electorates. And that there are weaknesses in the legislative oversight of budgets in many countries. I think we might also consider here other aspects of formal electoral and policymaking processes in democracies and why Africa's experience on average may differ from that of some other regions. For instance, we expect political parties to play a role in aggregating, influencing and representing the interests of ordinary voters. Thus they could play a role in supporting and selling long term structural reform. However, more personalistic parties with weak programmatic platforms would be less likely to play this role. And we see parties like this in many countries and certainly in a number of African countries. We might also think for instance about citizen engagement and the challenges posed by poverty in many African countries. Poverty and the factors that go along with low levels of economic development, so high rates of illiteracy, lower levels of education and the challenges in access to information, affect citizens' means and ability to monitor and evaluate the performance of their elected representatives and to hold their elected leaders to account. In other words, poverty affects the full or the ideal practice of democratic citizenship, which has implications for the quality of economic policymaking. While we can expect such challenges to be persistent for African democracies, we do have some means to begin to address them. I'm thinking for instance of capacity building efforts for political parties and civil society groups, parliamentary strengthening programs, media training, public information campaigns, and generally devoting resources to improving education for all. My third point, however, concerns some additional reasons why countries that are formally democracies might not be making the right economic choices in African countries. So Ernest is very careful, especially in the paper, in talking about democracy. But I think it's important to remember that we should be really careful in talking about democracy. All countries in which political leaders are selected through nominally free and fair elections are commonly labeled democracies by many and certainly by many academics. But we can also distinguish among democracies, so electoral democracies only meet minimal electoral criteria. Electoral democracies are not liberal democracies, where citizens also enjoy deeper safeguards of civil rights and political liberties, the rule of law, separation of powers, and so on. The concept of electoral or competitive authoritarianism is also worthy of note here. So it describes political regimes where the formal institutions of democracy, in other words regular multi-party elections, go along with authoritarian governance. And recent literature suggests that electoral authoritarianism is a useful way to think about political regimes in a number of African countries. This suggests that it may not be the formal institutions of democracy, of voting, electoral cycles, and so forth, that are most important in understanding economic policymaking in many African countries, but rather the role of authoritarian political elites. Authoritarian political elites are winners under current systems, and so they have little interest in real structural transformation, much less in policies that support more inclusive economic growth. And how to transform such systems is a really big challenge. My fourth and final point relates to the underlying expectations often held about democracy, expectations that Ernest is challenging in the lecture. While liberal democratic governance is a worthwhile goal in itself, should we really expect it to be a means to development? Should we advocate for it as a means to development? A large body of classic research, as the paper points out, suggests that in fact the relationship works the other way, that development supports democracy. Thinking about some of the sort of good governance agenda expectations for democracy, what precisely are the mechanisms through which we expect democracy to work to support development and better economic policymaking? When we think about such precise mechanisms, is it really electoral democracy that plays a driving role? Or is it rather more efficient and effective government institutions or more capable states? Is it necessarily accountability through the ballot box that makes all the difference? Or is it more social accountability, which might be supported by non electoral institutions and practices like town hall meetings or community scorecards? In conclusion, I think some might argue based on the points raised in this lecture that the lofty goals of democracy should be sacrificed for development, which is best pursued they might argue by strong developmental states. But Ernest doesn't make this argument and neither would I. He concludes rather that the problem isn't necessarily democracy, it's what he calls in the paper the new politics. And I think a good place then to end my comments is the famous quote often attributed to Winston Churchill, democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms. Thank you.