Opposition parties and democratisation in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Many accounts of democratisation in Africa from the early 1990s were infused with revived Afro-optimism at the outbreak of competitive elections in country after country on the continent. As noted by Huntington (1991:174) multiparty elections mean the demise of dictatorships and in many states the first years of the 1990s were heralded as the beginning of ac omplete political renewal (Ayittey 1992; Hyden and Bratton 1992; Joseph 1992). However, soon thereafter disputed elections in key states such as Kenya and Ghana in 1992, aborted processes in Togo and Cameroon, Zambia’s disappointing second elections in 1996, and breakdowns of the democratisation process in countries including Nigeria (1993), Angola (1992), and Gambia (1994) led to ah ost of pessimistic predictions: ac ontinuation of disorder and destructive politics (Chabal and Daloz 1999), no change at all (Akinrinade 1998), political closure (Joseph 1998), semi-authoritarianism (Carothers 1997), or ar eturn to ‘big man’, neopatrimonial, clientelist, informalised and disordered politics of the continent (Ake 1996; Bratton 1998; Chabal and Daloz 1999; Mbembe 1995; Villalon 1998). 1 While an umber of states have become either electoral or fully liberal democracies, many countries in Africa are still run by electoral authoritarian regimes. This article analyses the role of opposition parties’ behaviour in institutionalising democratic elections in electoral autocracies, and the effects of opposition choices on transformation of electoral authoritarian regimes to democracies. Specifically, the choices of opposition parties either to contest or boycott elections, and either accept or reject the outcome of the polls, are addressed in the analysis. The question is what type of opposition behaviour increases the likelihood of electoral autocracies becoming democracies and increasing participation, competition, and legitimacy? Political parties’ behaviour varies in important ways and that variation is taken as given in this article. One could legitimately also ask why opposition parties chose to act differently depending for example on the structural cleavages they represent (Lipset and Rokkan 1967), incentives of electoral systems they face (Sartori 1976; Lijphart 1984), the preferences of voters they seek to catch (Downs 1957), or because they are office-, voter-, or policy-seeking parties (Strom 1990). Seeking to explain the behaviour of opposition parties in Africa’s emerging democracies would be an interesting subject, but the focus on the con