Economic Reform in a Democratizing Africa

Abstract

The spread of the third of democratization to sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s represented the most significant political change in the continent since the independence period three decades earlier. Throughout the continent a more or less free press, as well as opposition parties and a multitude of independent civic organizations, emerged. Between 1990 and 1994 twenty-nine out of forty-eight states in the region convened the first multiparty elections in over a generation.l In some of these countries the elections were free and fair and resulted in the defeat and removal of the authoritarian head of state. Has the new, more open political climate helped or hindered economic reform in sub-Saharan Africa? Most of the region's economies had been in seemingly inexorable decline since the first oil crisis. Throughout the 1980s attempts to promote policy reform and renew growth were mostly frustrated. Most observers concluded that political obstacles undermined reform.2 By 1989 even the World Bank admitted that Africa's was rooted in a crisis of governance and agreed that economic liberalization and privatization were unlikely to be implemented by governments that held tenuously on to power by systematic patronage and rent-seeking.3 These analysts, particularly in the policy community, were optimistic that democratization would help address Africa's economic crisis. Yet, when the wave of democratization reached sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s, most academic observers were pessimistic about the prospects of successful dual transitions that combined economic and political reform. The most common view was that all good things did not go together and that one reform process would undermine the other.4 This pessimism was based on three assumptions. First, democratization would increase social pressures on governmental decision making. Africanists were echoing the view in other regions of the world that democratization sharply increased political participation. As Haggard and Kaufman summed it up, new democratic governments face exceptionally strong distributive pressures, both from groups reentering the political arena after long periods of repression and from established interests demanding reassurance.5 Second, by redistributing power from the executive to the more populist legislative branch of government, democratization would weaken the executive's autonomy to design and implement policy and thus