Abstract
AbstractBased for the most part on the results of the municipal elections of 1996, this article analyzes the behavior of parties and political forces in the context of an emerging democracy in Cameroon. The multi-party municipal elections demonstrated the influence of the ethnicity of political leaders on the configuration of their party organization, even though that influence manifested itself differently from one candidate to another depending on his political “machine’s” capacity to reach beyond his ethnic fiefdom. This effort at democratization appears to have been biased by monopolistic competition built around a government strategy aimed at a sham legitimization of ethnic division. The public authorities carried out this strategy through the political mobilization of television and the press as well as the promotion of new forms of minority and indigenous particularism that undermined the emergence of a national political force. In sum, the elections witnessed the formulation of a machiavelliansm b...
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