Electoral Institutions, Ethnopolitical Cleavages, and Party Systems in Africa's Emerging Democracies

Abstract

Do electoral institutions and ethnopolitical cleavages shape the structure (the fragmentation or concentration) of party systems separately or jointly? If they shape the structure of party systems jointly, how can this joint effect be theoretically specified and empirically tested? If ethnopolitical groups and associated ethnopolitical cleavages are not primordially fixed but constructed in the course of social, economic, and political interactions, as the accumulated findings of over three decades of comparative research on ethnopolitics attest, how can constructed ethnopolitical groups be specified and associated eth