Institutions and Democracy in Africa by Cheeseman Nic

Author:Cheeseman, Nic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-01-18T05:00:00+00:00

African Parties in Comparative Perspective

Since 1989, with third wave democratisation (Huntington 1991) taking root, the number of countries holding regular, de jure multiparty elections in sub-Saharan Africa has increased twelvefold. This remarkable transformation from dictatorship to pluralism has allowed political parties not only to proliferate, but also to claim a pivotal role in political processes – the ways in which public policymaking is conducted, governments are formed, state resources are distributed, conflicts are managed and horizontal accountability is achieved. African democracy, if not African politics more broadly, is indeed ‘unthinkable save in terms of African parties’ (Schattschneider 1942: 1).

To the extent that African parties have attracted scholarly attention, two strands of literature can be discerned. First, a small but growing body of research has tried to describe the ‘modal’ African party system, using quantitative methods to determine whether legislative representation is concentrated or dispersed, whether voting patterns are stable or volatile, and whether incumbent rulers are vulnerable or entrenched. Thus, Bogaards (2004: 182) employs a statistical dataset – fifty-nine legislative polls conducted in all eighteen countries to have held at least three consecutive multi-party elections by the end of 2002 – and argues that eight of these polities (Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gabon, Lesotho, Mauritania, Namibia and Zimbabwe) should be classified as single-party dominant.1 Kuenzi and Lambright (2005: 430–431), though primarily concerned with exploring a hypothesised relationship between party system type and political freedom, note that fourteen of the thirty-three countries included in their sample exhibited dominant partyism. Mozaffar and Scarritt (2005) purport to show that single-party dominance, low levels of electoral competition and electoral volatility constitute key features of a ‘typical’ African polity. Van de Walle (2003: 302–303) concludes, after assessing all eighty-seven legislatures for which election results were available, that ‘the modal party system … [comprises] a large dominant party surrounded by a bevy of small, highly volatile parties’.

A second strand of literature, therefore, seeks to explain how and why dominant partyism has become the prevalent form of rule in Africa (Bogaards 2000). On the one hand, structuralists tend to suggest that cleavage structures represent the principal explanatory variable. Thus, Erdmann and Basedau (2007: 18) argue that Africa’s unusually large number of dominant parties can be traced to high levels of ethnic fragmentation, which oblige any political operator seeking executive power to construct a ‘maximum winning coalition’ capable of uniting communities around a single leader. Institutionalists, on the other hand, regard dominant-partyism as derived from legal, regulatory or political frameworks rather than social phenomena. Randall and Svåsand (2002: 36), for example, note how incumbent advantage can often be employed for the purpose of achieving electoral dominance, since ruling parties typically exploit state resources ‘to the full. This enables them to outcompete newer parties that lack a national organisational network, and have limited access to newspaper, other media resources, and party finance’. Political incentives, in other words, flow from the manipulation of institutional frameworks rather than from societal structures.

Africa’s emerging party systems have, therefore, attracted a modicum of academic

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