Political Parties
Modern democracy is party democracy. Even modern authoritarianism cannot do without parties – witness the rise of electoral authoritarian or competitive authoritarian regimes, of which Africa has its fair share (van de Walle, this volume). There are still countries without political parties. Eritrea has no political parties, and in the Kingdom of Swaziland, whilst political parties are now able to register thanks to pressure from the High Court, they are not allowed to contest elections. In addition to these party-less states there are anti-party states with ‘regimes that have suppressed pre-existing parties, take an anti-party stand, or profess an anti-party doctrine’ (Sartori 1976: 40). The most instructive examples come from Ghana and Uganda.
No-Party Democracy
The best-known experiment with no-party democracy comes from Uganda. In 1986 Yoweri Museveni’s rebels secured power in Uganda. Building on the Resistance Councils that had been set up in the areas under the control of the National Resistance Army, Museveni outlined his vision of a political system without the political parties that he identified as a root cause of many of the country’s troubles. Political party activity was outlawed, all Ugandans were represented through the National Resistance Movement, and elections were held on the basis of ‘individual merit’.
Carbone’s (2008) study of the last 40 years of Ugandan politics shows the tension between the ideas of ‘no-party’ or movement democracy, and how the movement in the end assumed many of the functions of a political party in the electoral and parliamentary process. At the same time, the legal restrictions on party activity prevented the National Resistance Movement (NRM) from becoming a more effective political organization. These contradictions were only resolved in 2006, when the ban on party activities was lifted. It should come as no surprise that the first multi-party elections were won by the ruling ‘movement’.
Less well-known but perhaps even more instructive is the case of Ghana. The idea of a no-party government in Ghana was first mooted around 1966, when a Constitutional Commission was preparing the groundwork for the Second Republic. After the experience with Nkrumah’s one-party state (1964–66), there seemed to be widespread support for the idea of a ‘no-party state’. Two arguments were advanced in favour of no-partyism. First, that there was some sort of affinity between the no-party state and traditional authority, a claim that was strongly pushed by the Ghanaian chiefs. Second, that foreign models of party politics were unsuitable to the Ghanaian context. Owusu (1979: 97), for example, argued that one could ‘eliminate political parties without damage to the representational principle’.
In general, party politics was thought to be elitist; to encourage bribing and corrupting voters; to exploit regional, ethnic, and other primordial sentiments to the detriment of the nation; to degenerate into one-party tyranny; to have lost the faith of most people; and not to be based on real differences between parties (Owusu 1979: 100–1). This is the same diagnosis that led to the widespread adoption of one-party states across the continent in the late 1960s and early 1970s.1 However, the multi-party system found a staunch defender in the form of the supposedly impartial chairman of the Constitutional Commission, Ghana’s Chief Justice. In the end, the proponents of the traditional Westminster-type parliamentary democracy carried the day.
After the rapid demise of the Second Republic (1969–72), the idea of a no-party state resurfaced, this time with the strong backing of the military. Toward the end of 1976, the Supreme Military Council initiated a proposal for Union Government. A committee composed of legal scholars, academics, and representatives of key professional groups reviewed past constitutions, received scores of depositions, and conducted several public hearings. The 1977 Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Union Government proposed a no-party political system (Chazan and Le Vine 1979).
The following year, the people of Ghana were asked in a referendum whether the drafters of the new constitution should follow the principle of ‘Union Government’. The majority vote in favour was widely understood to have been rigged, but head of state General Acheampong proceeded to ban the main opposition movement and incarcerate its leaders nonetheless. As public hostility toward these government actions grew, a coup occurred. Under a new leadership, and under a new constitution approved by referendum in 1979, multi-party elections were to be held. However, before this could happen flight-lieutenant Jerry Rawlings came to power through a coup against the military government, promising a revolution and issuing a ban on party politics. ‘Rawlings was strongly opposed to a pluralist political system because he considered that it was merely a front for the corrupt and self-serving behavior of politicians’ (Haynes 1995: 101). Instead, some government representatives advocated the development of an indigenous system of democracy without parties, which they argued would return Ghana to the consensual methods of local decision making which they claimed had been destroyed by colonialism.2
In 1990 and 1991 the government stage-managed public discussions on the country’s political future. The outcome was a proposal to introduce district assemblies without parties. Whatever the possible intrinsic merits of this policy, the ‘plan was too much like the vilified UNIGOV proposal of the late 1970s to elicit much popular support. Rawlings’ support of the “no-party” option was to many Ghanaians unfortunately reminiscent of the attempt in 1978 to legitimize the breathtakingly corrupt military regime of General Acheampong’, writes Haynes (1995: 97). This helps to explain the high levels of opposition to the plan. Moreover, the re-launch of the idea of no-party government in Ghana was poorly timed, for it came at the very moment that the third wave of democratization reached Africa.
Thus, in 1991 Rawlings unexpectedly embraced the idea of conventional, multi-party elections for the national parliament. No-party democracy survived at the local level. The ‘revolutionary’ organs at the local level were reorganized into a no-party District Assembly structure. In the words of Crook, ‘the decentralized administration and District Assembly system created in 1988–89 was based on a theory of community-level, participatory, no-party democracy which idealized the consensual character of “traditional” Ghanaian village life’ (Crook 1999: 133). The underlying idea was that ‘ordinary people’ all have a common and obvious interest in development and the provision of basic services and infrastructure. Political competition is therefore about the qualities of the individuals who wish to take responsibility for these matters, and their fitness to work for or represent their communities. Parties are superfluous. The new constitution was approved with an overwhelming majority in a referendum in 1992.
The idea of non-partisan local councils has also found favour with some political scientists (see Kasfir 1992). However, it is difficult to see how such a combination of no-party elections at the district level and multi-party elections at the national level could have worked in the long run.
The no-party and the one-party state rests on negative conceptions about the role and impact of political parties. They are seen to distort representation, thwart nation-building, and imperil political stability. Even if this evaluation were correct, it does not follow that elections without parties produce a polity free from these evils. Like the one-party states, Uganda and Ghana both returned to multi-party politics and while Uganda remains an electoral-authoritarian regime, Ghana is now seen as a model of responsible electoral politics (but see Jockers et al. 2010).
The Study of Parties in Africa
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the last systematic study of political parties in Africa – in all their facets, including organization and ideology – was published almost half a century ago (Coleman and Rosberg 1964). However, much of the early scholarship is of limited relevance today. In the pre-independence period the focus was on the nationalist movements that helped to end colonialism, whereas after independence, the emphasis quickly shifted to the different types of one-party states (Hodgkin 1961; Morgenthau 1961) and the role of ‘machine politics’ (Zolberg 1966; Bienen 1971). Early typologies of African parties were largely simplifications of the European literature from the 1950s that sought to distinguish between mass and elite parties. This endeavour was handicapped by conceptual confusion and the absence of genuine mass parties in Africa (Dudley 1967; Sartori 1976). The spread of authoritarianism on the continent resulted in ‘lost decades’ for political party scholarship.
Parties perform a variety of functions (Bartolini and Mair 2001). First, they have a representative function, in that they represent societal interests within the political system. Second, parties perform a variety of institutional functions, including the recruitment of political leaders and the organization of parliament and government. However, ‘no matter what roles parties have been assigned, almost everywhere in tropical Africa – whether in single-party, multi-party, or non-party states – they perform few (of them)’ (Rotberg 1966: 571). What Carothers (2006: 4) calls ‘the standard lament’ about parties sounds eerily familiar to observers of African party politics: parties are corrupt, only active around election time, and do not stand for anything, while party leaders are selfish and preoccupied with squabbling instead of governing the country. Explanations have focused on social structures, economic development, presidential forms of government, weak rule of law, authoritarian legacies, and problems of state and nation-building (Randall and Svåsand 2002; McMahon 2004; Carothers 2006).
Already in 1966, Lapalombara and Weiner had cautioned in their classic study on parties and development that in emerging nations the conditions for party development were wanting. They were careful to note that ‘many of the so-called political parties in Africa are not political parties as we are using the term’ (Lapalombara and Weiner 1966: 29). That is to say, African party organizations normally lacked at least one of the following features: continuity, extension from the national to the local level, active pursuit of followers at the polls or popular support in general, or leaders determined to capture and hold decision-making power. Hydén (2006) therefore suggests thinking of some of these organizations as political movements rather than parties. For comparative purposes, the minimal definition of Sartori is probably most helpful. Sartori (1976: 64) defines a party as ‘any political group that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through elections, candidates for public office’.
There is consensus, although a waning one, about the importance of ethnicity for party politics in Africa. The first analyses of political parties in Africa had already noted how a lack of social differentiation led to the formation of parties the primary reference group of which was traditional. Today, it is commonplace to refer to African parties as ethnic parties. This does not imply the assumption of a simple one-to-one relationship between ethnic group and political party. Mozaffar (2006: 239) has stressed that the relationship between party and ethnicity is ‘strategic and contingent’. Posner’s (2005) influential case study of Zambia shows that ethnicity was a key factor during both one-party and multi-party politics. The change from dictatorship to democracy did not lessen or intensify the role of ethnicity in politics, but it did change the type of ethnicity: from local affiliations in one-party elections, to the building of regional coalitions in multi-party elections. However, most of the studies on ethnic parties are not so much about the parties themselves – how they are organized, their leaders and members, how they appeal to voters – but about voting behaviour. The logic being that if people from one group vote disproportionately for one party, the party must be ethnic (Basedau et al. 2011). Research that examines how parties appeal to voters reaches a more nuanced conclusion (Elischer 2012).
Ethnic politics is commonly linked to clientelism and neopatrimonialism. Following Erdmann and Engels, the distinguishing feature of neopatrimonialism is the ‘mixture of two co-existing, partly interwoven, types of domination: namely, patrimonial and legal-rational bureaucratic domination’ (Erdmann and Engel 2007: 105). Under neopatrimonialism the distinction between public and private exists, but is not always observed (see Erdmann, this volume). Following van de Walle (2007), a change can be observed in the nature of state capture by political parties. In the decades following independence, prebendalism was common. Prebendalism means that ‘an individual is given a public office in order for him/her to gain personal access over state resources’ (ibid.: 51). Resources were mediated by the state rather than parties. With the advent of multi-party elections, clientelism has democratized as well, changing from elite-centred prebendalism to a more responsive form of patronage with a bigger role for parties. A good illustration of this logic is the size of cabinets, which has increased over time (Arriola 2009). Several studies provide evidence of clientelism in election campaigns (Lindberg 2003; Wantchekon 2003).
Many donor organizations in the last 20 years have invested heavily in ways to assist parties in new democracies. This includes Western political parties, party foundations or institutes affiliated with parties, specialized aid organizations that work closely with political parties, as well as a growing number of multilateral organizations (Carothers 2006). Nonetheless, some would say political science is ill-prepared to give meaningful advice to donors, due to a lack of knowledge of party politics in new democracies outside Europe (Erdmann 2010).
Surprisingly, interest in party politics has been slow to pick up again since the advent of democratization. There is a dearth of case studies of individual political parties, and systematic comparisons are even more rare. In the words of Carbone, ‘[i]n spite of recent progress, however, research into African party politics is still unsatisfactory. Neither side of the balance – the elaboration of theoretical frameworks and the detail of empirical knowledge – has achieved adequate levels of development as yet’ (Carbone 2007: 18–19). The ‘renaissance’ of political party and party research in Africa predicted by Tetzlaff (2002) has only recently gained momentum. A good example is the comparative study of the strength of opposition parties in Southern Africa by LeBas (2011). Finally, little is known about the party in parliament, something that will change, it is hoped, with the recent interest in parliaments in Africa (Barkan, this volume).
African Parties in Comparative Perspective
Is there a specific model of a prototypical African political party and do we need a separate typology of African parties? Erdmann answered both questions in the negative, arguing that ‘a universal typology of parties that includes the differentiated experience of western Europe but is enlarged by non-European types provides a basic tool for party research in Africa’ (Erdmann 2004: 81). Gunther and Diamond (2001) provide such a typology. They first differentiate between what could be called democratic and non-democratic settings, and then group parties operating in a democracy into five broad types, each with their own sub-types: elite parties, mass-based parties, ethnicity-based parties, electoralist parties, and movement parties. Party types are distinguished through four criteria: goals, electoral strategy, organizational structure and linkages, and social base. Both Erdmann (2004) and Carbone (2007) suggest that Gunther and Diamond’s typology may be a good starting point for charting contemporary African parties. However, although widely cited, this party typology has not been used systematically in empirical research, whether in Africa or elsewhere.
Moreover, there is reason to believe that there is something particular about parties in third-wave democracies in general and Africa in particular. Compared to European parties, the trajectory of third-wave parties is unusually compressed. First, right from the start these parties have revolved around winning elections, not having accumulated the roles that European parties acquired and fulfilled over time, such as social mobilization and political integration. Carothers (2006: 54) calls this ‘electoralist-from-the-start’. Second, third-wave parties appeared in a very different era which was characterized by the rise of mass electronic communication. By consequence, they could rely on the mass media to reach and mobilize voters and supporters and they did not have to invest heavily in party organization. In Africa, clientelism is a functional equivalent. In other words, third-wave parties skipped some of the stages that Western parties went through, decisively shaping ‘patterns of party development’ (Carothers 2006: 56).
Unfortunately, there is ‘little systematic empirical knowledge about the various new types of political parties that emerged during the third wave of democratization outside Europe’ (Erdmann 2010: 1288). It is no excuse that ‘party organisations are often so weak that, in a sense, there appears to be little to observe’ (Carbone 2007: 10).3 Nor has multi-party politics in Africa spurred theorizing on the subject. In the final section of this chapter, I will sketch the contours of a research programme on African political parties that combines Carothers’s (2006) insights about the peculiarity of third-wave parties with the state-of-the-art literature on parties in Western industrialized countries. In line with the counsel of Erdmann (2004) and Carbone (2007), this approach seeks to give the African experience a place in a broader framework of analysis. Concretely, I will highlight the usefulness of the cartel party model for the study of African parties. While this model has never been applied outside the Western world, upon closer scrutiny I hope to demonstrate the cartel party model’s hidden potential for explaining the position of African parties in relation to state and society and for examining the consequences of this relationship.4
The cartel party is presented by the inventors of the term, Katz and Mair (1995, 2009), as the last in a long line of party models that have defined party politics in the Western world since the emergence of effective parliaments. First there was the elite party of the nineteenth century. Suffrage was restricted and parties were little more than small clubs of fellow members of the local elite. With the advent of mass politics came the mass party. The mass party had a distinct ideology, class, or religious constituency, a highly developed organization, close ties with ancillary organizations in society, and active and paying members. The mass party was the dominant form of party from the 1880s to the 1960s, when it was succeeded by the catch-all party. The transformation of the mass party into catch-all parties was reflected in a weaker ideological profile, more reliance on external sources of finance, a more hierarchical type of party organization, and a less important role for party members.
From the 1970s on, the catch-all party in turn began to morph into what Katz and Mair term the ‘cartel party’. This type of party relies increasingly on the state for its income, uses modern communication techniques to reach supporters and voters, creates autonomy for the party leadership within the party organization, has less and less need for members, and competes on the basis of managerial competence rather than policy positions. If the party is seen as an intermediary between society and the state, the evolution of parties over time resembles a move away from society and towards the state. Whereas the mass party still fulfilled the linkage function that many observers deem so important (Hill 1980), the cartel party has become part of the state, rather than part of society. Moreover, as the name suggests, the cartel party does not exist in isolation. To safeguard their position within the state and share its resources amongst each other, cartel parties form a cartel that tries to make it more difficult for new entrants. Clearly, then, the features of the individual cartel party plus their collective behaviour have provoked a new, critical, look at the functioning of political parties today.
The cartel party thesis has been highly influential and the model has been applied in a range of countries in North America, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe, despite theoretical and empirical critiques (see especially Koole 1996). The driving force behind the emergence of cartel parties is the self-interest of politicians and the collective interest of the political class (Blyth and Katz 2005). Although the promise of the cartel party thesis for an analysis of party politics in Africa has been noted (Kopecký and Mair 2003), no such study exists.
The question is therefore how well the cartel party thesis describes party organization and behaviour in Africa and what can be learned from such an analysis. From the start, we should be prepared to find a more complex picture. First, not all parties will follow the cartel party model; other party types may co-exist. For example, those ruling parties in southern Africa that started out as liberation movements are expected to show organizational legacies of mass mobilization. The same holds for parties that have their origin as rebel movements (Manning 2002) or Marxist-Leninist revolutionary organizations. Second, individual parties may be more ‘cartelized’ in some respects than in others. This is one of the lessons of recent research on cartel parties in Western Europe (Detterbeck 2005). We would expect the same pattern in Africa, where levels of party system institutionalization, although generally low, show remarkable variation (Kuenzi and Lambright 2001).
The cartel party thesis makes much of the dependence of contemporary parties on the state for its finances. Africa is no exception, as data on direct and indirect state subsidies to parties collected by Pinto-Duschinsky (2002) and International IDEA (2004) show (see also Lodge 2001). The need for money is expected to be high in Africa as ‘old-fashioned, face-to-face politicking costs more than the new mass-marketing, media-heavy approach’ (Pinto-Duschinsky 2002: 83). Following Southall and Wood (1998), three stages in party funding can be identified. Whereas the early mass-based political parties were said to be funded in considerable part by members, the ruling parties after independence utilized state resources. After the return of multi-party politics, ruling parties continue to rely on their control of state resources, whereas challengers look for grassroots financing and foreign donors. One insight from the application of the cartel party thesis to Africa is that attempts to strengthen parties through party finance reform in Africa may end up making parties even more dependent on the state, further weakening the incentive for building up party organizations with active membership and roots in society.
The second driving force behind the cartel parties is the trend toward the constitutionalization of parties (Bogaards 2008). In Africa, almost all constitutions now mention political parties. In a recent count, 35 countries had a law on political parties (Moroff 2010). Internationally, Africa stands out for its far-reaching bans on ethnic parties (Bogaards et al. 2010). Worldwide, regulations on disclosure of donations, bans on foreign donations, campaign spending limits and, to a much lesser degree, other restrictions on political finance are increasingly common (Pinto-Duschinsky 2002). In contrast, ‘political financing is relatively under-regulated in Africa’, which is explained with reference to the partisan interests of ruling parties and the weakness of opposition parties (Saffu 2003: 21). Another difference is that in Western Europe state regulation of political parties occurred in tandem with state funding for parties, whereas in Africa party laws have been adopted irrespective of, and often prior to, subsidies to parties.
Looking inside political parties, Katz and Mair (2009: 759) observe three tendencies: the rise of the party in public office, the centralization and professionalization of the party bureaucracy, and the ‘disempowering of activists’. Subsequent empirical research by other scholars has made progress in specifying the indicators of internal party cartelization: composition of national party executives, candidate selection, national party leadership selection, internal policy decision making, rights and obligations of members, and number of party staff. In Africa, in light of the persistent complaints about the weakness of parties there, their dependence on individual leaders, and their lack of internal democracy, we would expect to see strong signs of internal party cartelization. Of special interest to Africa, where dominant parties prevail (Bogaards 2004), is that organizational weakness may be linked to one-party dominance. Another prediction – that cartel parties cut their ties with social associations – has not been corroborated in Western Europe (Poguntke 2002). For African political parties the question is whether it pays off at all to establish links with identity groups. According to Widner (1997), this depends on the make-up of civil society and especially the presence of large and encompassing associations.
According to the cartel party thesis, party competition has changed because fiscal crisis and globalization have limited the policy space. Parties have reacted by emphasizing competence over content and by deliberately taking issues out of politics through a delegation of authorship to lower or higher levels of government (Blyth and Katz 2005). In Africa, where programmatic competition is in any case seen as rare, this should be even more true. The end of the Cold War and neoliberalism have constrained policy choices, and the big political questions have changed from those of ‘what’, to questions of ‘how’ (Carothers 2006: 61–63). Moreover, the scope of decision making in many countries is restricted by financial dependence on donors and international organizations.
The most controversial aspect of the cartel party thesis is undoubtedly that cartel parties form a cartel party system (see Koole 1996). Cartel parties collude to protect their collective interests. They use the state as ‘an institutionalized structure of support, sustaining insiders while excluding outsiders’ (Katz and Mair 1995: 16). In a democracy, it is parties themselves that decide on state funding and state regulation of parties, providing them with a unique opportunity to manipulate the rules of the game to their advantage. However, this is not what Bowler et al. (2006) found looking at all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in the period 1960–2000. In contrast, the trend was for requirements to be relaxed for new and small parties. Again, in Africa this question assumes particular importance in the presence of dominant parties and concern about their impact on democratic consolidation (Giliomee and Simkins 1999).
Against the background of the cartel party thesis, van Biezen and Kopecký (2007) propose a framework for the study of the party-state relationship that also holds promise for Africa. It focuses on the public funding of parties, the public regulation of parties, and their rent-seeking behaviour in the form of clientelism, patronage, and corruption. They suggest that a ‘particular type of party-state linkage may be prevalent in Africa, which is one where the sizeable benefits that parties amass from the state are almost solely derived from patronage and clientelistic practices and corruption’ (ibid.: 245). However, empirical evidence for this claim is lacking and Africa may be less exceptional than is often assumed in light of the role that party patronage plays in contemporary Europe. Clearly, then, while research on political parties in African has much to gain from a grounding in the contemporary European literature in general, and the cartel party thesis in particular, scholars should shy away from easy generalizations as well as equally superficial references to African particularities.
Nor is the cartel party the only modern party type that can be fruitfully applied to Africa. Marcus and Ratsimbaharison quote a joke about President Ravalomanana in Madagascar, in which the self-made millionaire is said to have ‘decided to enter politics in 1999 by running for mayor because there was too much red tape for him to conduct his business unfettered’ (Marcus and Ratsimbaharison 2005: 506). This is not much different from standard interpretations of Silvio Berlusconi’s motivation to go into politics and it would be interesting to compare the structure of Forza Italia, classified as a ‘business-firm type of party’ (Krouwel 2006), with Ravalomanana’s party, Tiako-i-Madagasikara. Ideally, the insights from such application of theory to practice could then filter back into the general literature on parties, to further the integration and accumulation of our knowledge on party development and its consequences.
Notes
1Shaw (1986) provides a particularly insightful account of the different arguments that were used by Mugabe in Zimbabwe but which resonate across the continent.
2The same argument has been made to justify the idea of ‘one-party democracy’, which Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere defended by asserting that ‘where there is one party, and that party is identified with the nation as a whole, the foundations of democracy are firmer than they can ever be where you have two or more parties, each representing only a section of the community’ (Nyerere 1967: 196).
3Moreover, Cheeseman and Hinfelaar (2010) clearly demonstrate the importance of intra-party politics.
4This approach will be further developed in my current research on cartel parties in Africa.
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