Electoral Authoritarianism and Multi-Party Politics
The wave of democratization that swept through sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s brought about substantial political change (Lindberg 2006; Bratton and van de Walle 1997). Within a decade of independence, all but a small handful of African states had evolved into military and police dictatorships. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Botswana and Mauritius were the only countries in the region to hold regular competitive multi-party elections, and incumbent governments lost power only in the latter. The other African states generally either suspended all political party activity, or promoted a single party, closely tied to the state. Elections were neither regularly convened nor competitive. Most allowed only a single party to compete and constituted little more than participatory rituals. This all changed with the wave of democratization in the early 1990s, and by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, most sub-Saharan African countries had held multiple multi-party elections. Most now formally recognize the legitimacy of various political and civil rights, even if the exercise of competitive politics often falls far short of democratic ideals, and even if the same rights constitutions promised on paper are rarely practised with much conviction or consistency. Between 1989 and 2010, some 43 different African countries held 164 multi-party legislative elections and 132 presidential elections. Although incumbents won most of these elections, they did result in a significant number of power alternations, and opposition parties enjoyed ample representation in a range of legislatures.
In other words, multi-party politics has become the norm in the region over the course of the last two decades (see Lindberg, this volume). This chapter attempts to make sense of this period by focusing on the nature of party competition in the region and its relationship with the quality of democracy that is being practiced. The evidence suggests that party competition in Africa continues to be marked by the dominance of the incumbent party, and that most of the countries in the region are better understood as electoral autocracies than democracies, even if it would be wrong to underestimate the democratic progress that has been made. The chapter suggests that political parties play a critical role in the consolidation of democracy, so a lot can be learned by assessing their role in Africa today. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the continuing importance of political clientelism in the region, incumbent parties dominate politics, usually thanks to the discretionary utilization of state resources for political ends. The modal party system in the region combines a dominant party in power with a large number of relatively small and weak opposition parties. Nonetheless, a process of institutionalization has begun, and the strength of opposition parties is positively correlated with both the level of democracy and the duration of democratic politics. The chapter starts with a description of Africa’s range of regimes today. It then examines the dominant form of political regime in the region, electoral autocracy. The next section then analyses the impact of electoral authoritarianism on the kinds of party systems emerging in the region. A concluding section offers some tentative predictions for the future.
Africa’s Range of Regimes
The generalization of multi-party politics in the region disguises the considerable variation in the level of democracy actually being practised. The 2010 Freedom House scores help underscore the political variation present today on the continent. Freedom House rates nine countries in Africa as ‘free’ in 2010, followed by 23 as ‘partly free’ and 16 as ‘not free’ (see Table 18.1). The overwhelming majority of these states convene regular elections, but in fact, only the nine countries in the ‘free’ category appear to be in the process of consolidating fairly robust democratic institutions, with genuine checks and balances, a free press and a reasonably independent judiciary.
Free |
Partly free |
Not free |
Cape Verde (1,1) |
Lesotho (3,3) |
Angola (6,5) |
Ghana (1,2) |
Senegal (3,3) |
Congo-B (6,5) |
Mauritius (1,2) |
Sierra Leone (3.3) |
Côte d’Ivoire (6,5) |
Benin (2,2) |
Comoros (3,4) |
Gabon (6,5) |
Namibia (2,2) |
Liberia (3,4) |
Mauritania (6,5) |
São Tomé & Príncipe (2,2) |
Malawi (3,4) |
Rwanda (6,5) |
South Africa (2,2) |
Mozambique (4,3 |
Cameroon (6,6) |
Botswana (3,2) |
Tanzania (4,3) |
Congo-K (6,6) |
Mali (2,3) |
Zambia (3,4) |
Swaziland (7,5) |
Burkina Faso (5,3) |
Zimbabwe (6,6) |
|
Guinea Bissau (4,4) |
Chad (7,6) |
|
Kenya (4,4) |
Guinea (7,6) |
|
Burundi (4,5) |
Equatorial Guinea (7,7) |
|
Niger (5,4) |
Eritrea (7,7) |
|
Nigeria (5,4) |
Somalia (7,7) |
|
Togo (5,4) |
Sudan (7,7) |
|
Uganda (5,4) |
||
CAR (5,5) |
||
Djibouti (5,5) |
||
Ethiopia (5,5) |
||
Gambia (5,5) |
||
Madagascar (6,4) |
Source: Freedom House, www.freedomhouse.org.
Note: Numbers in parentheses are the 2010 Freedom House scores for political rights and civil liberties, respectively, where 1 indicates the most free or democratic and 7 the most repressive.
Virtually all African states continue to be characterized by presidentialism, in the sense that the formal and informal powers of the presidency and the president himself (as of publication, Africa has had only one female president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia) have been preponderant (van de Walle 2003). Before the recent democratization, the region’s ‘big man’ politics meant that the president could be quite literally above the law, with substantial discretion over the resources of the national budget, the irrelevance of terms of office, and with unchecked powers of appointment (Bayart 1989; Bratton and van de Walle 1997). Even in the most democratic states of the region, this presidentialism persists to this day. Botswana, Mauritius, South Africa and Lesotho have parliamentary systems, and several Francophone states have semi-parliamentary systems; in addition, recent power-sharing agreements in Zimbabwe and Kenya include semi-presidentialism. Otherwise more than 40 of the 48 countries in the region have presidential constitutions. Moreover, the formal powers of the presidency tend to be quite expansive relative to the other branches of government. These include limits on legislative prerogatives, the presidency’s powers of decree, discretion over civil service and judicial appointments, control over key revenue sources, such as natural resource parastatals, and general budgetary discretion.
One key dimension of democratization is thus necessarily the circumscription of presidential power, largely through the development and strengthening of institutions of accountability. Elections and political parties provide the main institutions of vertical accountability and are discussed below. Here, the institutions of horizontal accountability – the legislature and judiciary – deserve a brief mention.
Across the region, legislatures have become stronger, thanks to the efforts of a more independent, younger and better-educated cadre of legislators and, in some cases, the pressures of the opposition. Donor-funded efforts to build capacity within specific legislatures have also borne fruit, but the formal and informal powers of most African legislatures remain very much subordinated to the presidency, which continues to dominate the legislature, through some combination of constitutional power, a substantial presidential majority within the house, the president’s appointment powers and a culture of deference to the executive that is hard to overcome (Barkan, this volume). Much the same could be said about judiciaries across the region (Prempeh 1999), where if anything, issues of low capacity and professionalism are even more pressing. Although the apex of the judicial sector has played an often brave and proactive role in promoting the consolidation of democracy, the routine work of the judicial sector is undermined by under-qualified judges, inadequate resources and various forms of corruption.
The Emergence of Electoral Authoritarianism
Most of the countries in the ‘partly free’ and ‘not free’ categories in Table 18.1 combine more or less competitive regular elections with more traditional authoritarian practices to ensure that the incumbents never face real political challenges. Democratic government, with regular elections, has become a kind of political default, because of its widespread legitimacy both within Africa and in the donor community. At the same time, the pressures for further democratization do not appear irresistible, and incumbents have many instruments and resources at their disposal to maintain the various advantages that tilt the playing field in their favour.
A multitude of terms have been used to characterize these ‘hybrid’ regimes (Diamond 2002; van de Walle 2001), which combine democratic institutions and authoritarian practices, from ‘façade’ democracies (Joseph 1998), to ‘competitive authoritarianism’ (Levitsky and Way 2002, 2010). This chapter will use the expression ‘electoral authoritarianism’ because it best conveys the sense that these regimes remain authoritarian in nature despite the convening of regular multi-party elections. Can all these states be viewed as a single, distinctive regime, as Levitsky and Way have argued? Such a regime type seems problematic for two reasons. First, the category is essentially unstable; indeed, instability is one of its defining characteristics, because it is difficult to remain at the same level of semi-democracy for very long. Incumbents become more tolerant of dissent when they feel secure, or they increase repression levels when their rule is threatened. The example of Zimbabwe over the course of the last 20 years is compelling in this respect: has the fundamental nature of the Mugabe regime changed, or has Mugabe since 2000 exhibited the various anti-democratic tendencies of his regime that were always there, as his grip on power has weakened? Many observers of the regime would argue the latter (for instance, see Kriger 2005). Much the same could be said of such regimes as Gabon, Angola or Cameroon, in which the degree of repression has oscillated over time as a function of the political needs of regimes that appear quite stable.
Second, the category covers a very wide variety of regimes, from electoral regimes that fall just short of adequate political and civil rights, to thuggish dictatorships with a thin veneer of electoral respectability. One solution is to sub-divide the category into a more precise classification, but the gain in precision is probably offset by the loss of generalizability. Ultimately, the ‘electoral autocracy’ terminology is heuristically useful to designate a common general kind of political system, but it does not approach the analytical precision of a taxonomic category.
The predominance of electoral autocracies in the region leads to a key question: is Africa’s wave of democratization over? In our assessment of democratization, how much should we weigh the authoritarian reversals, such as the one in Congo-Brazzaville, which brought back to power another wily old strongman, Sassou Nguesso, at the end of a brutal civil war (Clark 2007)? What should we think of countries like Cameroon, Gabon or Tanzania, in which the old guard remain very much in power despite regular elections? Are these regimes still, slowly but surely, moving towards democratization or not?
Two distinct theoretical responses have been made to these questions. The first, pessimistic, response can be identified as the ‘end of the transition paradigm’ view and is associated with Thomas Carothers, who argues that these countries are mostly condemned to alternate between unstable and imperfect democratic periods and more autocratic phases, as they lack the structural requisites of full-fledged democracy, are undermined by some combination of ethnic conflict, inconsistent economic growth and weak institutions (Carothers 2002). There is certainly evidence from Africa to support the Carothers view. With empirical support, Prempeh (2008) argues that throughout the region, even in the more democratic countries, the president remains ‘untamed’, and endowed with all sorts of legal and administrative privileges that make him less accountable to voters and to the other branches of government. Rakner and van de Walle (2009) point to the continuing weakness of opposition parties across the region, and the rarity of incumbent defeats, to suggest that in most countries, alternation in power remains highly unlikely. Joseph (2008) also laments low levels of presidential accountability and emphasizes the lack of progress over the course of the last 10 years in most African countries.
The other, more optimistic view is what Lindberg (this volume) has called the ‘electoral path to democratization’. This view suggests that democracy has become the only legitimate form of government, and that every electoral competition advances the prospects for democracy. In part, democracy is a learning process: with every election, the democratic machinery (ballot counting and reporting, election monitoring, party organization and so on), gains strength. Yet the evidence that elections have advanced democracy over the course of the last several decades is mixed. The different contributions in Lindberg (2009) advance evidence for and against it, though with a slight tilt on its behalf. The analysis of elections in Africa suggests their quality is, if not rapidly improving, certainly not worsening in democratic quality (Lindberg 2006). Posner and Young (2007) argue that democracy is in the process of being institutionalized in the region, pointing to the increasing tendency of Africans to institute democratic safeguards such as term limits or independent electoral commissions.
However, term limits are only likely to have a significant impact if they promote transfers of power. Following Huntington (1991), most scholars agree that alternation of the executive is both the ultimate test of democracy and the best way to move democratization forward. What factors account for alternation? Maltz (2007) and Cheeseman (2010) have shown that an open-seat election is the single best predictor of an opposition victory. Much alternation on the continent is thus possible because a sitting president decided to respect term limits and/or to retire, and his party’s choice to succeed him was unable to get elected.
The ability of the opposition to defeat the incumbent president who decides to run is of course itself a measure of the democratic quality of the political system. Such African presidents as Laurent Gbagbo in Côte d’Ivoire, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Paul Biya in Cameroon remained in power, despite having almost certainly lost an election, because the opposition is not able to force the president’s ouster.
In addition, however, it is useful to examine the factors that enhance the possibility of alternation, at a given level of democratic quality. A standard argument is that opposition cohesion is a necessary pre-requisite for opposition success. Clearly, the ability of presidents to divide the opposition typically has been key in allowing them to stay in power. Most notoriously, Daniel arap Moi won the Kenyan elections in 1992 with a small plurality of the vote, because the opposition could never agree on a single candidate. Presidents Bongo in Gabon and Biya in Cameroon have also proved brilliant at this game, which has reduced the need for them to engage in outright repression. Presidential control over patronage and state resources suggests that this strategy is often available to the executive. One factor that does seem to facilitate alternation is a two-round majority voting system because the period between the two rounds of voting facilitates negotiation between the candidates of the opposition (van de Walle 2007).
In the end, the death or retirement of the incumbent president appears to represent an important watershed for Africa’s electoral autocracies and provide perhaps the most likely pathway for political reform for many of these countries. Revealingly, in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Gabon, and Togo, the death of the president resulted in a dynastic evolution, with sons taking over executive power, assuring the stability of the status quo. Additionally, in the case of Djibouti, the 1999 retirement of Hassan Gouled resulted in the presidency of his hand-picked nephew, Ismaïl Omar Guelleh. However, the exit from power of long-standing presidents brought about significant democratic breakthroughs in such countries as Kenya (2002), Ghana (2001) and, more problematically, Guinea (2008). In general, electoral autocracies appear to be threatened by power transfers, in part because their democratic failures undermine their long-term legitimacy, and in part because political power has been centralized around individual strong men, who were typically loathe to name a successor. The death or retirement of these long-standing presidents places strong pressures on the political systems to increase the institutionalization of political dynamics, unless the political elite can agree on a clear heir.
Emerging Party Systems
Having described the electoral autocracies that predominate in the region, this chapter turns its attention to the key role of political parties in shaping national political dynamics. Political parties typically play a key role in democratic political systems because they aggregate citizen preferences and give them voice and coherence. When effective, opposition parties in particular can use their organization and ability to mobilize voters and promote mass political participation that serves as a check on state power (Sartori 1976). Moreover, citizens are more likely to feel politically efficacious when they believe that strong parties represent their views effectively. Similarly, well-represented and robust parties in the legislature can constitute an effective check on presidential power. Thus, a number of scholars have argued compellingly that the stability of party systems and the strength of opposition parties are particularly important for the success of democratization in low-income countries, where other structural factors favourable to democracy are likely to be weaker (Linz and Stepan 1996; Randall and Svasand 2002).
The halting and inconsistent consolidation of democratic rule in Africa is in part characterized by the weakness of political parties, particularly those in the opposition. Even in the more democratic states, parties remain weak and poorly institutionalized, though the evidence suggests a small, positive correlation between democratic consolidation and party strength (Kuenzi and Lambright 2005; Rakner and van de Walle 2009). The institutionalization of party systems in the region has been disappointing, at least given the high hopes brought about by democratization almost two decades ago. The African parties that compete in elections today remain relatively young and inexperienced, and have not always proved able to survive more than one or two electoral cycles, fragmenting or consolidating with other parties. Thus, Kuenzi and Lambright report that the average age of parties in their data set of 33 African cases that had managed to win at least 10 per cent of the seats in a national parliamentary election was just 21.5 years, well under half of the mean age of parties in a similar sample of Latin American cases (Kuenzi and Lambright 2005: 431).
The weakness of opposition parties is in part a reflection of experience and in part a structural problem of funding. Experience plays a role in the sense that it takes time to develop effective party organizations. Because elections usually occur only every four or five years, and multiple electoral cycles are needed to master the technology of campaigning, voter registration and mobilization, and electoral monitoring, the performance of political parties improves only slowly. Reassuringly for the future of democracy in the region, Kuenzi and Lambright (2005) find that countries with a greater experience of electoral politics tend to have more stable party systems, but this process is likely to prove slow and incremental.
In addition, moreover, a tremendous disparity is likely to remain between the funding available to African opposition and incumbent parties. Opposition parties lack the resources to contest presidential power effectively, and presidential resources can and have been used effectively to undermine them. The incumbent party can tap into a wide variety of state resources. Not only can the incumbent obtain support through timely public spending, but party cadres can be given jobs in the administration and campaigns can be supported with the resources of the state administration, as when campaign workers use state transportation, or the police are used to discourage opposition rallies and hassle opposition party activities, and the state media is used to discredit the opposition.
For their part, opposition parties usually cannot rely on the membership fees of party rank and file, an important source of funding for political parties in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) democracies. Perhaps as many as a dozen countries in the region, including South Africa, have legislated public support for political parties (Mathisen and Svasand 2002). In some cases, public funding initiatives have been undertaken by incumbents in order to increase the number of parties and fragment the opposition, rather than to promote democracy. For instance, when President Omar Bongo promised roughly US$35,000 and a four-wheel drive car for any registered party in 1990, some 70 parties registered. Many appear to have simply disappeared before the election, but seven parties managed to win seats in the October 1990 parliamentary elections, helping Bongo’s incumbent Gabonese Democratic Party win a comfortable majority. In some of the richer and bigger countries of the region, state and local government offices can provide significant support for opposition parties if and when they can win these sub-national elections (Conroy-Krutz 2006), but this source of resources is not available to many parties in the region. As a result, opposition parties are usually reliant on the resources of individuals for their funding. Either opposition candidates typically have to fund their own campaigns, which tends to undermine party discipline and cohesion, and/or parties rely on the funding of businessmen (see Bryan and Baer 2005; Pottie 2003).
The historical pattern in the Western democracies suggests that parties can compensate for the advantages of incumbent parties through the development of organization and ideological resources, a pattern that was particularly effective for the emergence of mass left-wing parties in Europe, for instance (Shefter 1994). However, there are few signs of such a trend emerging in Africa. Party organizations remain thin and transient. Most parties are loose coalitions dominated by a small number of prominent individuals and lacking cohesion or discipline. Between electoral competitions, they remain mostly dormant, and maintain few links with citizens.
Too many parties remain focused on clientelistic linkages to voters and rely on ascriptive ties, such as ethnicity. Few mobilize voters effectively on policy issues of importance to them (Bleck and van de Walle 2011), and instead rely on vague promises of patronage rewards to core constituencies. This is puzzling because various surveys suggest African voters have a number of material and ideological concerns that politicians could invoke in order to mobilize constituencies. For instance, Bleck and van de Walle (2011) show that in six multi-party systems of West Africa, voters care deeply about such issues as the public role of Islam or the public management of national resources, yet political parties hardly mention these issues in their campaign rhetoric. Bleck and van de Walle give the example of the nearly unanimous passage in the 2009 Malian legislature of a deeply unpopular bill reforming Mali’s Family Code; passage of this bill, long sought by western donors and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), brought about massive popular protests orchestrated by grassroots Muslim civil society groups. They argue that the Westernized elites that shape party platforms are often too dependent on the donors and external actors, as well as inexperienced and out of touch with common citizens, to effectively mobilize voters on issues they care about.
Resnick (2012) argues that populist parties are starting to emerge in some countries, given the rapid levels of urbanization in the region, and the electoral incentives parties have to cater to poor urban voters. She argues that the Popular Front of Michael Sata in Zambia represents a kind of model of African populism, which is likely to become more common over time (see also Larmer and Fraser 2007; Cheeseman and Hinfelaar 2010). Populist dynamics can be gleaned in recent campaigns in such diverse other countries as Senegal (Resnick 2011), Ghana (Nugent 2001), and Madagascar (Razafindrakoto and Roubaud 2002). Nonetheless, attempts to mobilize voters through programmatic campaigns still remain the odd exception, as most parties rely on a mixture of non-programmatic appeals to co-ethnics, and broad valence-issue rhetoric linked to vague promises of service and infrastructure delivery to core constituencies.
Perhaps it is not surprising in this context, that the Afrobarometer attitudinal surveys suggest that opposition parties are little trusted by voters; in the fourth round of surveys recently completed, close to 60 per cent of voters said they did not trust opposition parties ‘at all or just a little’ (Resnick 2011: 18). In part, the notion of ‘loyal opposition’ as a legitimate function of political parties appears to remain foreign to African voters socialized in the era of the single party. In part, as well, in the absence of either coherent policy programmes or viable organizations, parties appear to voters as opportunistic and transient, interested in votes to gain power rather than to advance the common interests of citizens.
These different factors help explain two clear trends present in Africa since the return of electoral politics. First, opposition parties have only rarely been able to effectively contest incumbents in elections, even in the most democratic countries of the region. At the presidential level, very few incumbents have competed and lost an election since the early 1990s. In the less democratic countries, there has been little to no regime change, so stable is the political personnel in power. In no fewer than 10 countries (Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe), the leader in power in 1989 has remained in place. In each case, the old single party has adapted, more or less gingerly, to multi-party politics, but retains various advantages that protect it from competition.
In a handful of other, relatively democratic states (Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, South Africa), strong single parties have survived the movement to the multi-party era, and maintained a virtual stranglehold on the presidency, despite turnovers of individual presidents. Thus, in Tanzania, for instance, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the party created by Julius Nyerere in 1979 dominates national politics, despite its adherence to term limits for its leaders since Nyerere retired in 1985. The country is today officially committed to pluralism, but CCM’s historic role and incumbency advantages means it has comfortably won successive elections, at least in part with the help of gerrymandering, election day fraud and intimidation of the opposition (Tripp 2000). Adding to this list the countries mentioned above that have witnessed dynastic turnovers further narrows the set of countries in which democratization has brought about a real political turnover to a small handful of countries. Moreover, in countries like Zambia, Malawi, or Benin, the initial turnover of power that occurred at the founding election in the early 1990s has not been repeated, as incumbents have won every election they have competed in since.
This political continuity is also evident for political parties at the legislative level. The leading opposition party has averaged only a quarter of the vote in African elections since 1989 and fewer than 20 per cent of the seats (author’s database), compared to 57 per cent and 65 per cent for majority parties. Only 15 elections during this time did not lead to a winning party with a simple majority of seats, and most of those could in fact count on a stable parliamentary majority because of other subservient parties and independents. By way of comparison, it is very unusual in the democracies of Western Europe for the leading party to win an outright majority of votes and seats (Lijphart 1999), which typically implies the need for political coalitions and compromise for the biggest party, and consequently increases the number of political parties with a genuine chance of joining a governing coalition.
The second central characteristic of party systems in the region is the combination of dominant parties with a low number of effective parties in most African countries (van de Walle 2003; Kuenzi and Lambright 2005). Reflecting the many advantages of incumbency just discussed, the winning party in the legislative elections is the party of the sitting president in the overwhelming majority of cases. Moreover, the presidential majority often grows in the weeks following an election, as different legislators choose to join the incumbent’s party. This phenomenon is often particularly pronounced in the case of small parties and the large number of independents that have won seats in many recent elections. Circumstances vary across countries and elections, of course, but this swelling of the winning party’s ranks seems to reflect the reality that being in the majority affords material advantages. Some opposition parties are clearly lured into the majority with formal promises from the president of lucrative and powerful positions in the cabinet and state apparatus. Individual legislators may be convinced that joining the presidential majority is advantageous for their constituencies, as many believe the more or less explicit threats that opposition districts will receive less priority in terms of social services and infrastructure.
The extent to which presidential resources and patronage condition electoral and party dynamics is best illustrated in cases like Benin (2006) or Mali (2002), where the winning presidential candidate ran as an independent without party support, and then constructed a fairly stable legislative majority once in power, by promising cabinet positions to leading politicians of the parties that had competed in the election (on Benin, see Seely 2007; Mayrargue 2006; on Mali, see Baudais and Chauzal 2006). Given the low popularity of parties, the electoral campaigns of both Yayi Boni in Benin and Amadou Touré in Mali willingly emphasized their independence from partisan politics, and then once elected, resorted to tried and true clientelist strategies to construct a governing coalition with these same party leaders.
This dynamic also helps to explain the fact that despite the large number of political parties that fledgling African democracies have the reputation of encouraging, the typical African legislature actually features a relatively low number of ‘effective parties’ (a measure of parties that takes into account their size and the disparity between large and small parties; see Laakso and Taagepera 1979). Thus, while it is not unusual for well over two dozen political parties to participate in elections, on average just over six parties are represented in the typical African legislature, and because of the small size of many opposition parties the effective number of parties is around three (Rakner and van de Walle 2009).
Is this pattern of presidential dominance related to the quality of democracy? Compared to older democracies, the weakness of African opposition parties is striking, even in the region’s most democratic countries. Nonetheless, the evidence does suggest that the level of democracy and the length of the democratic experience does have a positive effect on the strength of the opposition. For instance, Rakner and van de Walle (2009) find that the second biggest party, in principle the leading party of the opposition, wins on average 75 per cent more seats in the legislature in ‘free’ regimes compared to those in the ‘not free’ category. Similarly, they find that opposition parties gain strength as countries convene more elections. Although the winning party remained as strong from the first multi-party elections to the fourth and fifth ones, the second biggest party went from winning under a fifth of the seats in the first election to winning over a quarter of the seats in fourth and fifth elections.
Conclusion
This chapter has focused on the weakness of political parties and the deficiencies of democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. With the wholesale shift to multi-party electoral politics in the 1990s and the new democratic rhetoric espoused by many erstwhile dictators, it is important to realize the limits of the transitions that have occurred in the region. The generalized move to multi-party electoral politics does not equal the triumph of democracy, albeit with a handful of exceptions. For the latter to occur, the region’s current electoral autocracies will need further reform that reduces the current abuses of political and social rights, makes governments more accountable and responsive to their citizens, and reins-in the centralized power currently in the hands of individual presidents, still largely above the law.
This chapter has also argued that these reforms will almost certainly require and be accompanied by stronger, better-organized and more institutionalized political parties, which play a key role in democratic consolidation. The chapter has shown that most opposition parties remain too weak to promote the greater accountability of governments. In fact, the nature of party systems in the region seems largely tributary of the level and quality of democratic practice. In particular, I have sought to demonstrate that the modal pattern of a large presidential party dominating a bevy of small, volatile and transient parties is a direct result of the presidentialism and clientelism of these regimes.
In closing, it is nonetheless worth stressing how much democratic progress has been achieved in Africa since the late 1980s. As Posner and Young (2007) and others have argued, democratic politics is now the only form of legitimate government in the region, to which all politicians now pay homage, however hypocritically. Political participation and competition has increased significantly in the vast majority of states, and the evidence suggests that governments and politicians are more responsive to the needs of citizens as a result. Thus, Stasavage (2005) finds a significantly positive relationship between democratization in Africa and social spending.
A further cause of optimism can be found in the apparent fact, underscored above, that democratic performance improves over time and with experience of multi-party electoral politics. Thus, though parties are weak and party systems favour incumbents, the passage of time and the greater experience it affords is likely to serve to promote party institutionalization and improved party performance. To be sure, this is a slow and uneven process, and increased competition and political participation can unleash dangerous demons in ethnically divided political systems, as argued by scholars like Paul Collier (2009). Still, it suggests that in many countries, the current evolution favours greater democracy over time.
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