Extraversion, vulnerability to donors, and political liberalization in Africa

Abstract

In seeking to maintain their power, many African regimes rely on strategies of extraversion, converting their dependent relations with the external world into domestic resources and authority. This article assesses the relationship between extraversion and political liberalization, a dimension of African democratization that has been somewhat underappreciated in recent empirical studies. African countries vary in their extraversion portfolios, or the dimensions of their relations to the outside world that they can instrumentalize, and these variations correspond both to different degrees of vulnerability to the demands of foreign donors and to different preferences from the donors themselves. We find four quantitative measures of extraversion vulnerability to be statistically associated with the initial transitions of the 1989–1995 period and with the ‘consolidations’ at different levels of democracy observable between 1995 and 2011. These findings shed new light on both democratic and hybrid regime trajectories in Africa. MOST EMPIRICAL STUDIES of the determinants of political liberalization in Africa have focused on domestic variables, such as protest, the institutional features of previous regimes, the number of elections, the availability of oil rents, or the nature and structure of political parties. Few, in *Caryn Peiffer (caryn.peiffer@cgu.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate at Claremont Graduate University and Pierre Englebert (penglebert@pomona.edu) is professor of African politics at Pomona College. 1. On protest and the features of pre-existing regimes, see Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997), pp. 159–232, and Robert Bates, When Things Fell Apart: State failure in late-century Africa (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008); on elections, see Staffan Lindberg, Democracy and Elections in Africa (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MA, 2006), pp. 122–3; and Staffan Lindberg, ‘The power of elections revisited’ (paper presented at the conference on ‘Elections and Political Identities in New Democracies’, Yale University, 28– 29 April 2007); on mineral and oil rents, see Nathan Jensen and Leonard Wantchekon, ‘Resource wealth and political regimes in Africa’, Comparative Political Studies 37, 7 (2004), pp. 816–41, and Luc Desire Omgba, ‘On the duration of political power in Africa: the role doi: 10.1093/afraf/ads029 © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved 1 African Affairs, 00/00, 1–24 African Affairs Advance Access published June 11, 2012