The Politics of Legislative Expansion in Africa

Abstract

The number of seats in national legislatures around the world rarely changes. Yet, in Africa, a substantial number of countries have regularly increased the size of their legislatures, and these increases have become more common in recent years. Previous research on political offices in Africa’s electoral autocracies has suggested that their numbers and increases are largely motivated by patronage and clientelist considerations. Is this also the case for national legislatures? Curiously, very little political science scholarship exists on legislature size, either in Africa or the rest of the world. Using a mixture of descriptive statistics to present a new database, as well as econometrics and three case studies, we find that legislative expansion can be linked to executive branch manipulation. Presidents have found it politically useful to expand the size of African legislatures to weaken and/or control it.