The Puzzle of African Party Systems (original) (raw)
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Northeast African Studies, 2008
In recent years, a great deal of scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between political institutions and political party development among third wave democratizing states. Although there has been some literature that examines the determinative effects of political institutions (such as electoral systems) on party systems generally in Africa and elsewhere, 1 most of this work has focused almost exclusively on the number of parties rather than the degree to which stable party systems have emerged. Although there has been some work on party systems volatility on Latin America and postcommunist Eastern Europe, 2 there has been relatively little consideration of the relationship between electoral systems and party system volatility in Africa. This is relatively surprising, given that most scholars agree that the development of stable, coherent representative parties that can shape and channel popular references is crucial to successful democratization in the wake of political transition. Moreover, many argue that widespread party system instability militates against successful democratic consolidation. Party system volatility, though less studied than the number of parties in the party system, is arguably just as important. Mainwaring and Scully consider volatility as a key dimension of political institutionalization. 3 When parties come and go quickly, this increases the chances of populists coming to power, subsequently generating high levels of uncertainty for voters, who in turn struggle to make 203 © Michigan State University
2005
This paper thus addresses two primary issues. What is the relationship between the types of electoral systems that have been used to govern initial elections in the democratizing states of Africa and the degree to which party systems volatility has emerged? What other factors impact on the levels of volatility? I examine the above questions using data from 31 African countries. I find that most of the factors often cited as impacting on party systems development do not account for the level of legislative volatility. However, the dominance of the ruling party in the first election following democratic transition does impact the extent of legislative volatility later. Nonetheless these cases are also less likely to lead to democratic or politically stable outcomes
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Dominant party systems are prevalent on the African continent although to date most of the countries are formally democratized and hold regular and rather fair elections. A majority of scholars consider dominant party systems to be inimical for a democratic consolidation. Yet, a minority observes a stabilizing effect of dominant party systems which in turn is considered to be important for democratic consolidation. In this paper, I show that both notions can be wrong and at the same time right: I present evidence that there exist different kinds of dominant party systems which are explained by different structural characteristics of the countries they belong to. I consider the different kinds of dominant party systems to exert different effects on the process of democratic consolidation.
Party Proliferation and Political Contestation in Africa
2020
(CAPE) publishes social science research that examines the intersection of political, social, and economic processes in contemporary Africa. The series is distinguished especially by its focus on the spatial, gendered, and cultural dimensions of these processes, as well as its emphasis on promoting empirically situated research. As consultancydriven work has emerged in the last two decades as the dominant model of knowledge production about African politics and economy, CAPE offers an alternate intellectual space for scholarship that challenges theoretical and empirical orthodoxies and locates political and economic processes within their structural, historical, global, and local contexts. As an interdisciplinary series, CAPE broadens the field of traditional political economy by welcoming contributions from the fields of Anthropology, Development Studies, Geography, Health, Law, Political Science, Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies. The Series Editor and Advisory Board particularly invite submissions focusing on the following thematic areas: urban processes; democracy and citizenship; agrarian structures, food security, and global commodity chains; health, education, and development; environment and climate change; social movements; immigration and African diaspora formations; natural resources, extractive industries, and global economy; media and socio-political processes; development and globalization; and conflict, displacement, and refugees.
Votes, Money and Violence: Political Parties and Elections in Sub-Saharan Africa
Review of African Political Economy, 2009
Both foundations enabled us to invite numerous contributors and discussants from both Europe and Africa. we would also like to thank the contributors to this volume not only for the quality of their papers but also for their patience during what was a rather extended production period. The conference was organised by the Institute of African Affairs of the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA, formerly German Overseas Institute); most of the contributions to this volume are based on early versions of the papers presented at the conference. The editors Hamburg, February 2006 VotEs, MoNEy ANd VIoLENCE and consolidation of democracy. It also seems to justify old reservations about the appropriateness of politics in Africa's multiethnic societies. One explanation for this public scepticism of the value of opposition parties is that they are not really visible in the periods between elections. we have learned from focus group interviews in Ghana and Zambia during 2003 that 'you see political parties only before the elections. Afterwards they disappear again, completely'. Before passing judgement on Africa's political landscape it is healthy to take a sober look at what is happening closer to home. A recent Eurobarometer (2004) survey indicates that only 16 per cent of the people interviewed in Europe trust political parties. The situation in Africa is not, therefore, an unusual one. Perhaps, there is no major reason to feel concerned about it. However, we do not know very much about the political meaning of different levels of trust in different political contexts, that is, in new democracies or hybrid regimes versus consolidated democracies. The collection of articles that make up this volume deals with these two core institutions of democracy: elections and political parties. Seymor Martin lipset's (2000) dictum on the "indispensability of political parties" remains unchallenged. Even African scholars who are critical to what is 'western' accept it. 1 Even beyond liberal democratic ideas, these two aspects of a democracy are important as a focus of research because in Africa there are many hybrid and even authoritarian regimes that attempt to obtain legitimacy via multi-party elections. Surprisingly, however, almost 15 years after the 'wind from the East that is shaking the coconut trees' of Africa (Omar Bongo, Africa, 9 April 1990), there is still little systematic empirical research in this area. while elections have received a fair degree of scholarly attention, this is not true as regards African political parties or party systems. Even the election research is limited, being concentrated on case studies and more often than not linked to the 'technical' issues of election observation. Systematic comparative research about the effects of elections and different election systems on, for example, the quality of the political regime (democratic, hybrid), the development of party systems, civil liberties, or political party organisation is largely missing. Andrew Reynolds' (1999) work is of course an exception, although in some respects it is typical. He (1999: 267) concludes his comparative analysis by stating that proportional representation (PR) electoral systems outperform their plurality-majority alternatives in many performance criteria, especially in
When Do Votes Count? Regime Type, Electoral Conduct, and Political Competition in Africa
Comparative political studies, 2008
The effects of electoral systems have been tested recently in Africa, raising several questions: Are the systematic effects of electoral rules the same across regime types? Does the conduct of elections affect the process of strategic coordination between voters and parties? The literature to date has not considered these issues and also analyzes elections in settings where a crucial set of its assumptions are clearly violated. The authors argue that the mechanism of strategic coordination only operates in democracies that hold free and fair elections, and they exhibit the ways it is violated outside of this domain. They compile a new data set on sub-Saharan African elections and show that the interaction of electoral rules and ethnopolitical cleavages predicts the number of parties only in democratic settings, failing to produce substantive effects in nondemocratic ones.
2004
Do electoral institutions in Africa’s emerging democracies impact the strategic coordination among voters, candidates and parties and shape the structure of party systems independently or are their effects mediated by contextual variables? The paper attempts to answer this question through analysis of systematic data on 99 national legislative elections held under 55 electoral systems in 37 countries. Specifically, it examines how two contextual variables – (1) institutional variables related to presidential elections and (2) patterns of ethnopolitical fragmentation and concentration – mediate the direct effects of electoral institutions on the structure (degree of fragmentation or concentration) of party systems. Regression analysis shows that electoral institutions have negligible independent effects, while contextual variables independently and interactively with each other and with electoral institutions account for the largest amount of variance on the degree of fragmentation o...