Understanding Democratic Survival and Democratic Failure in Africa: Insights from Divergent Democratic Experiments in Benin and Congo (Brazzaville)

Abstract

How do we explain adequately the relative success or failure of complex political phenomena such as democratization? In the battle between conceptual and explanatory parsimony, on the one hand, and rich, thick description on the other, social scientists often fall into traps that obscure more complete explanations for our cases from the portfolio of the possible. For example, we often unconsciously generalize from the cases we know best. In single case studies, we can fail to recognize the explanations that don't shine brightly or bark loudly. More generally, we acquire a habit of thinking that orders causality in particular ways for each of us, a result both of an empirical reliance on our own familiar cases, and the conceptual and theoretical conclusions we have generalized consciously or unconsciously from those cases. In this article, we are self-consciously engaged in two tasks: (1) comparing divergent outcomes of democratization in otherwise fairly similar cases—Benin and the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville); and (2) proposing three possible primary causal hypotheses for the successful (Benin) and failed (Congo) outcomes.