Are LGBTQ legislators effective lawmakers? We build on theories that link voter discrimination to legislative effectiveness by arguing that voters’ biases against LGBTQ candidates narrow the candidate pool, leading to the election of only the most experienced and qualified LGBTQ candidates. As a result of this electoral selection effect, we expect that LGBTQ legislators will be more effective lawmakers than their non-LGBTQ counterparts. To test this, we combine data on state legislators’ LGBTQ identification with their State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES). Our findings reveal that LGBTQ legislators are meaningfully more effective than non-LGBTQ legislators. To link our findings to voter discrimination, we leverage over-time variation in discrimination toward LGBTQ individuals. Across four tests, we consistently find that LGBTQ lawmakers elected in high-discrimination environments are more effective than those elected from less discriminatory environments.

Over the past five years, China–Africa engagements have undergone significant changes, mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Padraig Carmody (2021) describes the pandemic’s effect on China’s global engagements as a critical juncture. This is because due to its extended lockdown, China prioritized domestic consumption and sustainability of its economy, buffering it from external pressures. This led to China restructuring its position in the global supply chains, exposing Africa’s dependency on China and other external powers for both financing and manufactured goods. With most African countries’ economies dependent on exports of primary commodities, these shifts in the global supply chain and reorientation of the Chinese economy led to financial depression in Africa, leaving countries unable to finance critical development projects and service their foreign debts.

In the past two decades, China has emerged as Africa’s biggest bilateral trading partner, its top five foreign direct investors, a significant contributor for development finance, and a contractor for infrastructure finance (Oqubay and Lin 2019). The study of how African agents have negotiated with or (re)defined institutions or entities in this relationship and how agents negotiate or utilize existing power structures to maintain or redefine existing settings has witnessed a surge in the past 20 years. The increase in literature on “African agency” offers not only a deeper understanding of the different ways that African actors use their various spaces of engagement to their advantage; it also has allowed researchers to more effectively locate, unpack, and outline such agency (Chipaike and Bischoff 2018; Chipaike and Bischoff 2019; Chipaike and Knowledge 2018; Chiyemura 2020; Corkin 2013; Cheru and Obi 2010; Gadzala 2015; Kragelund and Carmody 2016; Mohan and Lampert 2012; Mann 2023; Odoom 2019; Otele 2016). However, much of this literature categorizes African agency into general categories, such as state, nonstate, elite, and local agency. Although general categories prove useful for an initial understanding, they are limited in explaining the different ways that agency is carried out by different African actors within the state apparatus or among nonstate actors, their modalities, and their impact. Various actors within these large categories of state and nonstate actors exercise agency differently with different motivations, and they use different repertoires of action.

Whether the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is being praised or criticized, the focus often is on the perceptions of it in African countries rather than how it is conceptualized in those countries and by continental entities such as the African Union (AU). As a result, there is no understanding of the collective African conceptualization of the BRI and how that conceptualization shapes the continent’s engagement with China and, in turn, the perceptions of the BRI. By employing the intentionality, instrumentalist, and geopolitical approaches, this study analyzes Africa’s conceptualization of the BRI as a global project through the lens of strategic utility, intentionality, and geopolitical positioning, which can be summarized as “strategic globalism.”

The burgeoning China–Africa debates often fail to consider questions of African agency and, in particular, the role played by non-state actors (NSAs)—such as civil society organizations (CSOs), the media, and local groups—to give greater voice to African agency in Sino–African relations (SRA). Drawing on qualitative methods (i.e., interviews and content analysis), this study examines the relationship and focuses primarily on the case of Ghana to investigate how these NSAs engage, negotiate, influence, and resist Chinese actors’ involvement in Africa. It answers the question: “To what extent do NSAs (i.e., CSOs, the media, and local groups) exert agency in Sino–Ghana relations?”

Western pundits have warned about the risks posed by Chinese companies for exporting surveillance technologies to Africa (Bartlett 2023) due to not only risks in the technology but also the exportation of authoritarian development. Scholars who perceive Chinese technology companies as state instruments that facilitate the state’s agenda to expand authoritarian digital development in Africa support this view (Cheney 2019; Gravett 2020; Khalil 2020; Mozur, Kessel, and Chan 2019). This view is contested by empirical findings arguing that Chinese companies primarily engage in digital capitalism, providing products that meet certain African states’ digital control and heterogenous development needs (Bagwandeen 2019; Gagliardone 2019).

Ethiopia aspired to become Africa’s “light manufacturing hub” and a “lower middle-income country” by 2025 (National Planning Commission 2016, 143, 169). Successive Ethiopian governments launched long-term plans and pursued industrial policies in line with a declared “developmental state” approach inspired by Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese models (Aberg and Becker 2020; Cheru and Oqubay 2019; Clapham 2018; Fourie 2015; Gebreeyesus 2013; Oqubay 2018). The intention was to build on the country’s comparative advantages of cheap land and labor to develop manufacturing with backward linkages to the domestic economy, focus on labor-intensive light manufacturing, build special economic zones (SEZs) to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), and promote exports for global markets to create jobs, enhance skills, expand the private sector, and kickstart wider industrialization.