Multiethnic Opposition Coalitions in African Elections

Abstract

If the opposition can present a single candidate … then we will have a good chance of winning because you cannot cheat a whole nation for long. Edem Kodjo, opposition presidential candidate in Togo, 2003 The argument developed through the previous chapters attributes opposition behavior in Africa’s multiparty elections to the state control of capital. My general claim is that the liberalization of finance enables opposition politicians to pursue a pecuniary coalition-building strategy by using the resources of business to secure cross-ethnic endorsements. I have provided both qualitative and quantitative evidence at each link of the causal chain to explain the conditions under which incumbents relinquish their control over the financial sector; business chooses to defect from the incumbent regime in support of the opposition; and opposition politicians successfully bargain across ethnic cleavages to form electoral alliances. In this chapter, I now seek to establish whether the outcomes traced through the cases of Cameroon and Kenya are consistent with the electoral strategies pursued by opposition politicians across the region. I test my argument with a sample of all African countries that held executive elections between 1990 and 2005. The indicators that were examined in previous chapters to assess the politicization of finance – the total number of commercial banks (Chapter 4), the availability of credit to the private sector (Chapter 5), and the tenure of the chamber of commerce president (Chapter 6) – are used here as explanatory variables. Through this empirical analysis, I show that the state control of capital significantly affects the likelihood of multiethnic opposition coalitions being formed for executive elections. The ability of entrepreneurs to diversify their campaign contributions under conditions of financial liberalization appears to account for much of the variation in opposition coalition building across countries and within countries across time. Indeed, the empirical results show that the variables linked to the openness of the financial system are more consistent predictors of opposition behavior in Africa’s multiparty systems than either electoral rules or ethnic cleavages.