African Party Research Articles

Votes, Money and Violence: Political Parties and Elections in Sub-Saharan Africa, Matthias Basedau, Gero Erdmann, and Andreas Mehler

Reviewed by: Votes, Money and Violence: Political Parties and Elections in Sub-Saharan Africa John W. Harbeson Matthias Basedau, Gero Erdmann, and Andreas Mehler, eds. 2007. Votes, Money and Violence: Political Parties and Elections in Sub-Saharan Africa. Uppsala, Sweden: Nordic African Institute. 301pp. $37.50. Votes, Money and Violence is a richly and carefully researched inquiry into the roles of political parties, political-party systems, and electoral systems and their relationships to democracy in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. Also included are two chapters exploring the roles and reasons for political violence in relationship to parties and elections in emerging democracies and one on the role of money. The volume is drawn from papers presented in Hamburg, Germany, in May 2003 at a meeting of the Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies, a conference entitled "How People Elect Their Leaders: Parties, Party Systems and Election in Africa South of the Sahara." The volume's authors are thorough, careful, and balanced throughout. With distinctive transparency, they work through many of the problems, pitfalls, and issues they confront in arriving at their conclusions. Indeed, they are so conscientious in this respect that many of the important conclusions and hypotheses their work suggests tend to be somewhat obscured, so careful are they to qualify their findings. In presenting their findings rather as a work in progress, the book will be more valuable to those with a strong interest but less background in the subjects than if the authors had presented their findings and supporting evidence in a more forthright manner. Notwithstanding their thoroughness, balance, and analytical transparency, many significant themes emerge in the book—themes that deserve attention from other researchers, as these authors acknowledge. First, while everyone grants the importance of parties to the viability of democracies, nascent or otherwise, the book's editors are correct in stating that African political parties have received less attention than they deserve, beyond a general recognition that they are weaker and less programmatic than they need to be. The same is at least as true for party systems, including not numerous structural possibilities, but (equally I would add) whatever rules of the game parties work out—or fail to work out—to frame and regulate their electoral competition. Second, the dispassionate examination of the roles, reasons, and functions of violence in electoral circumstances—as distinct from a focus on how to end or prevent it—is a useful contribution of two of the book's chapters. The connections of violence to other dimensions of parties and party-system structures and functions will be a useful focus for further research. [End Page 130] Third, the authors usefully consider and weigh the question of how, and in what ways, what is known and generally accepted about the roles and functions of parties and party systems in industrialized-society contexts applies outside these settings in places like sub-Saharan Africa. One finding in particular stands out: that party polarization may be inversely related to the stability and sustainability of democracy. Fourth, while the importance of the informal politics in relationship to formal institutions has long been well understood, the book rightly emphasizes this connection in the context of African parties and elections, notably the role of patronage and clientelistic networks. This emphasis is particularly apt in the context of electoral campaigns—what happens before election day. Fifth, in all the concern with electoral processes and outcomes, the broad question of what exactly it means to have a representative democracy has received less attention than it deserves. Clearly representativeness includes, but is not limited to ensuring, appropriate ethnic and gender balances. Vicki Randall contrasts movement parties that, she hypothesizes, may give voice to women's concerns at particular moments before, as she puts it, "external economic pressures and conservative vested interests (re) assert themselves" (p. 101). She expresses concern for how these and other interests "vulnerable to marginalization and redefinition" can be adequately represented by parties, movement or otherwise. Sixth, one chapter offers a valuable inquiry into the merits of blocking from electoral participation, or even registration, parties that appeal narrowly to a single ethnic, sectararian, or other particularistic interest, as some African countries have done so as to...

Party systems in Africa: Problems of categorising and explaining party systems

Starting from controversial findings about the relationship between party systems and the prospects of democratic consolidation, this article argues that problems can only be properly addressed on the basis of a differentiated typology of party systems. Contradictory research results do not pose an ‘African puzzle’ but can be explained by different and inadequate approaches. We argue that a modified version of Sartori's typology of party systems provides an appropriate method for classifying African party systems. Based on Sartori's framework, a preponderance of predominant and dominant party systems is identified. This can be explained partly by the prevailing authoritarian nature of many multiparty regimes in Africa but not by electoral systems or the ethnic plurality of African societies. All kinds of electoral systems are connected to dominant party systems. High ethnic fragmentation does not automatically produce highly fragmented party systems. This phenomenon can be attributed to the ‘ethnic congress party’ that is based on an ethnic elite coalition.

DANS LE PARTI, DANS LE QUARTIER : LES BRANCHES LOCALES DE L'AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS (ANC)

Cet article traite de l’organisation locale de l’African National Congress (ANC). Il se focalise sur les branches locales du parti, le rôle qui leur est dévolu dans les structures du parti, leur activité dans les communautés. S’appuyant sur le modèle conceptuel du parti de masse et sur une approche empirique, il se veut une contribution à l’analyse organisationnelle des partis politiques en Afrique, domaine largement délaissé.

Dominant Party Systems and Electoral Volatility in Africa

In a recent publication in this journal, Mozaffar and Scarritt claim to have found a puzzling combination of low fragmentation and high volatility in African party systems. However, if we look at national party systems rather than Africa-wide averages, include regime type as a variable and specify dominance, we find three different constellations: dominant party systems with relatively low volatility, non-dominant and pulverized party systems with high volatility and dominant authoritarian party systems with high volatility. The real surprise is that dominant parties in authoritarian regimes have higher electoral instability than dominant parties in democracies. The analyis is based on data from 78 elections in 20 African countries with at least three consecutive multiparty elections.

Are African party systems different?

Recently Mozaffar et al. [Mozaffar, S., Scarritt, J.R., Galaich, G., 2003. Electoral institutions, ethnopolitical cleavages and party systems in Africa's emerging democracies. American Political Science Review 97, 379–390] presented evidence suggesting that African party systems are somehow different from party systems elsewhere in the world. In doing so, they promoted the common notion of African exceptionalism. We believe that their conclusions are open to question because they draw inferences from a number of multiplicative interaction models in which they do not include all constitutive terms, interpret constitutive terms as unconditional marginal effects, and fail to calculate marginal effects and standard errors over a sufficiently large range of their modifying variables. By correcting these practices, we reach substantively different conclusions. Specifically, we find that African party systems respond to institutional and sociological factors such as district magnitude and ethnic fragmentation in the same way as party systems in more established democracies.

African Resistance and Center Party Recalcitrance in the Reichstag Colonial Debates of 1905/06

On May 26, 1906, as German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow rested on the North Sea coast recuperating from a recent physical collapse, his administration suffered a resounding triple defeat in the Reichstag at the hands of his hitherto indispensable Catholic political partners in the Center party. In the course of a single day, the Centrists rejected the military justification for a railroad in wartorn Southwest Africa, ruled out further government compensation for settler losses in the Herero and Nama Uprisings, and then blocked the elevation of the Colonial Department of the Foreign Office to the status of an independent imperial office. Moreover, the intense interest of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the passage of each of these colonial measures rendered the Center's decisive contribution to the rout acutely embarrassing for the chancellor. Faced seven months later with a similar Centrist refusal to authorize more than twenty of the latest twenty-nine million marks toward suppression of the Nama, Bülow would then dissolve the Reichstag, putting a definitive end to nearly a decade of government-Center parliamentary cooperation.

Assessing African Party Systems after the Third Wave

In this article, I explore the nature of party systems that have emerged in Africa in the wake of the adoption of democratic political systems after 1990. Although political parties help shape core democratic processes and institutions, parties and party systems have received relatively scant attention in the scholarly literature on democratization in Africa. I argue that party systems in most African countries are built on quite a different foundation from the one that undergirds both advanced industrial democracies and the theories about party systems generated by their experiences. I assess the strengths and limitations of the comparative literature on party system development in the light of African experiences, and argue for a more critical examination of concepts from that literature that have been widely used to assess the prospects and progress of party system institutionalization, including pluralism, system fragmentation and volatility.

The Puzzle of African Party Systems

Two puzzling features characterize African party systems: low fragmentation and high volatility. We present systematic data describing these features and provide a theoretically grounded explanation of them. The explanation emphasizes the role of strategic choice structured by the institutional legacies of authoritarian regimes in the formation and development of political parties. Political restrictions under authoritarian regimes produced severe information deficit concerning electoral mobilization, strategic coordination and the collective action problems that typically attend party formation and coalition-building. Under these constraints, political actors in Africa’s emerging democracies established political parties to preserve their fragmented power bases and relied on presidential elections and ethno-political cleavages as alternative sources of strategic coordination over votes and seats and electoral coalition-building. The result is the entry of large numbers of short-lived political parties, producing high volatility, and the electoral and legislative dominance of a small number of large parties producing low party system fragmentation.

The integration of emotional and cognitive messages in election campaigns: A South African case study

A substantial amount of political communication research in the Western world has focused on the question of whether images instead of issues are emphasised in election campaign messages. The underlying concern is that voters need information in order to make informed voting decisions. In this article the argument is that, if this is a concern in well-established democracies, it should be an even bigger concern in a young democracy. This article posits that image and issue messages are interrelated, and that both have to be addressed in elections. To explore this argument the concept of images is defined more broadly. In literature on campaigns in the United States of America (US), image is often equated with the personal characteristics of the candidate. Here the argument is that ‘image’ and ‘issues’ are interrelated because issues could contribute to the image of the party. Against this background, the authors, refer to emotional and cognitive messages. They assume that typical election issues (emotional messages) should be used to attract voters' attention. However, this is not enough since these issues should be explained in greater detail and contextualised within a young democracy. The research question for this article is thus: to what extent were emotional and cognitive messages integrated during the 1999 general elections in the North - West Province of South Africa. An extensive qualitative analysis of all relevant material (i.e., party manifestos, newspaper advertisements, radio advertisements, pamphlets, posters and Websites) indicates that South African political parties placed much less emphasis on the ‘image’ of the party or its leader than happens in a mature democracy such as that of the US. This did not imply that the substance of the message was emphasised adequately, because the cognitive and emotional campaign messages were not fully integrated. While the focus was on typical election issues, they were not fully explained and contextualised.

News values, ethics and violence in KwaZulu-Natal: Has media coverage reformed?

The article examines the coverage of violent conflict between the African National Congress (ANC) and Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), commonly referred to as the Natal violence, by three newspapers in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, from 1987 to 2000. It attempts briefly to unravel the ideological and political construction of violence through comparative analysis of newspaper headlines and stories, and demonstrates a breakdown in ethical reporting during the years of apartheid, that has shadowed journalists into the new millennium.

African Political Parties: Evolution, Institutionalization and Governance

African Political Parties: Evolution, Institutionalization and Governance

Proportional Representation and Racial Campaigning in South Africa

This analysis of election campaigning in South Africa demonstrates that those parties that invoke an exclusive “us and them” message fare better than those that attempt an inclusive “catch-all” strategy. This conclusion has important implications for the debate over the best electoral system for a divided society. It is suggested here that list proportional representation encourages the growth of a centrifugal party system where the most successful parties are those that “outbid” their competitors for the votes of the groups they principally represent. It is quite possible that, over time, South African political parties will “learn” that the most successful means of mobilizing voters is to play on the fears and aspirations associated with their race, thus exacerbating racial tensions.

The Attitudinal Structure of African American Women Party Activists: The Impact of Race, Gender, and Religion

The Attitudinal Structure of African American Women Party Activists: The Impact of Race, Gender, and Religion

The Attitudinal Structure of African American Women Party Activists: The Impact of Race, Gender, and Religion

Using data on grassroots party activists in the South, we explore the attitudinal structure of Democratic activists. Because of their socialization experiences with both racial and gender discrimination, we hypothesize that African American women will have a unique attitudinal structure regarding racial and gender issues when compared to other activist subgroups. Our results indicate the importance of race, gender, and the black church for understanding the structure of African American women’s political attitudes. Unlike whites or black men, African American women locate issues of race and gender on a single dimension; whether abortion attitudes fit on that dimension depends on the religious involvement of these activists.

Cape Verde: An African Exception

At a time when there is a widespread conviction that various obstacles are preventing African countries from advancing to democratic consolidation and that the main issue is whether democratic regimes will survive at all, the small West African island republic of Cape Verde stands out as a successful case of political reform. In January and February 2001, this Portuguese-speaking country of slightly more than 400,000 people held its third parliamentary and presidential elections since its democratic opening began in 1990. The result was that the African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde (PAICV), which had been ousted from office by the Movement for Democracy (MPD) in 1991, regained a majority in the National Assembly and saw its favored candidate win the presidency. Although the elections were hotly contested and not free of complaints about vote-rigging, respect for the rule of law and democratic competition prevailed. Few other African countries have experienced a renewed change of government after successful founding elections, Benin and S~ao Tome and Principe being among them. A few others have also recorded notable changes of government through elections in recent years, including Ghana, Senegal, and of course Mauritius, where this has occurred more often than anywhere else in Africa. While countries such as Botswana or South Africa, where a single party enjoys sustained electoral dominance, can still be candidates for democratic consolidation, the experience worldwide has been that extended rule by a single party, even if legitimated by elections, more often than not undermines accountability and transparency. What makes the comparative success of Cape Verde’s democratic Peter Meyns is professor of politics at the University of Duisburg in Germany. His recent publications include Konflict und Entwicklung im Sudlichen Afrika (2000) and, as coeditor, Transformationsprobleme im portugiesischsprachigen Afrika (2001).

Political Party Funding in the 2004 Election

The paper concentrates on public funding of political parties during the 2004 general election. The fact that no regulatory framework exists for private funding is detrimental to the proper regulation of public funding so the Institute for Democracy in South Africa has launched a court action to compel parties to disclose their private sources. International experiences and comparisons are used as a point of reference to analyse the South African situation. South Africa's framework for party funding consists of the African Union and Southern African Development Community agreements, the Public Funding of Represented Political Parties Act and its Regulation, and the Electoral Code of Conduct. South African parties represented in the national and provincial legislatures are funded on the basis of a formula consisting of proportional and equitable components by a fund appropriated mainly by Parliament and managed by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). The parties' accountability to the IEC is hampered by a lack of statutory powers.

France Accused: French North Africa before the United Nations, 1952–1962

In the decade after 1952 France faced sustained United Nations criticism of its colonial policies in north Africa. As membership of the UN General Assembly expanded, support for the non-aligned states of the Afro-Asian bloc increased. North African nationalist parties established their permanent offices in New York to press their case for independence. Tracing UN consideration of French North Africa from the first major General Assembly discussion of Tunisia in 1952 to the end of the Algerian war in 1962, this article considers the tactics employed on both sides of the colonial/anti-colonial divide to manipulate the UN Charter's ambiguities over the rights of colonial powers and the jurisdiction of the General Assembly in colonial disputes.

'A Great Cause': The Origins of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, June 1959-March 1960

The Boycott Movement was initiated in June 1959 by exiled South African supporters of the Congress Movement with the aim of internationalizing the boycott campaign which the African and Indian Congresses had launched in South Africa. In South Africa the 1959 boycott campaign came at the end of a decade of intensifying repression which had closed off almost all peaceful means of protest against apartheid. In Britain, the late 1950s was a period of disillusion with mainstream politics. A network of organizations and individuals campaigned on three interlinked issues- peace and nuclear disarmament, racism and freedom for Britain's colonies, particularly in Africa. Working with organizations like the Movement for Colonial Freedom, Committee of African Organizations, Christian Action, the Africa Bureau and the Communist Party, a group of committed Congress Movement supporters joined by Patrick van Rensburg of the South African Liberal Party, worked within this network to launch a campaign for the boycott of South African goods. This culminated in a month of action in March 1960. It was taken up by the Labour Party, which had lost the October 1959 General Election and was split over nationalization and nuclear disarmament and by the Trades Union Council. To keep its broad base of support, the campaign stressed that it was a moral crusade of individual protest. The aim was to influence rather than overthrow the South African government. The situation was transformed by the shootings at Sharpeville, which led to the banning of the African National Congress and Pan-Africanist Congress. The Boycott Movement became the Anti-Apartheid Movement which in April 1960 called for international economic sanctions against South Africa.

The 1996 municipal elections in Kwazuiu‐Natal: an eyewitness account

The political significance of the municipal poll in KwaZuIu‐Natal transcended the local level. Looming large were issues such as the struggle between the African National Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party, the clash between traditional and democratic forms of authority, and the enduring relevance of race in South African politics. The article explores these themes through an examination of the administration of the election, the social character of party support and the organisational capacity of political parties and their respective campaign themes. The picture that emerges is on the one hand discouraging: intolerance levels were high and free political activity proscribed in many areas, voting patterns were crystallised along stark racial and urban‐rural lines, and political parties were poorly institutionalised at all levels. The election showed up the inability of parties to break free of their reliance on traditional sources of support and appeal to new constituencies. On the other hand, some features emerged from the election pointing to the development of a more mature and less immoderate political culture.

The politics of the independence of Kenya

Although Iain Macleod is fully entitled to the credit for breaking the constitutional deadlock over Kenya by clearing the path to African rule, his subsequent actions were dictated by fear of British public opinion. He felt unable to risk the Governor's threat to resign if he were to be stopped from calling Jomo Kenyatta ‘a leader to darkness and death’. Macleod's stonewalling over Kenyatta's release resulted in sending the African majority party into opposition and allowing the minority party to insist on its own embarrassingly complicated constitution. The situation looked so desperate by 1962 that, fearing another Congo, Harold Macmillan wanted to ask the UN to take over control of Kenya. At the last minute two men, Jomo Kenyatta and Malcolm MacDonald, saved Britain and Kenya from a great imperial fiasco.