African Party Systems Research Articles

Transitions to democracy, institutional choices and party system stability: lessons from small African islands

ABSTRACT It is not easy to understand why some African party systems manage to stabilise while others remain fluid. This article argues that institutional choices made during democratic transition impact the likelihood of party system stabilisation. The experiences of Cabo Verde, Comoros, São Tomé and Príncipe and Seychelles are compared; despite sharing many similarities (insularity, smallness, low ethnic diversity, authoritarian past, economic vulnerability and competitive elections), they differ substantively in terms of the patterns of interparty competition. It is shown that stabilisation is likely if party elites are able to control the rules of the game during the transition to democracy. A strategic choice of the party law, electoral system and executive system helps structure interactions over time and reduce uncertainty in electoral competition. The findings highlight the need to further explore the ‘black box’ of democratic transitions, and the role of agency in political outcomes in Africa.

Nationalized Incumbents and Regional Challengers: Oppositionn and IncumbenttParty Nationalization in Africa

The African party literature, especially research prescribing to the long-dominant ethnic voting thesis, has asserted that African party systems exhibit low levels of party nationalization. However, systematic research on nationalization across parties and party systems is still lacking. This study argues that the prospects for building nationalized parties vary substantially between incumbent and opposition parties. Incumbent parties, with their access to state resources, have been successful in creating nationwide operations, even in countries where geographical factors have been unfavorable and where ethnic fractionalization is high. The analysis utilizes a new data set of disaggregate election results for 26 African countries to calculate nationalization scores for 77 parties and study the correlates of party nationalization. The results show that factors like ethnic fractionalization, the size of the geographical area, and urbanization affect party nationalization, but only in the case of opposition parties. Incumbent parties, on the other hand, generally remain nationalized despite unfavorable structural conditions.

Nationalized incumbents and regional challengers

The African party literature, especially research prescribing to the long-dominant ethnic voting thesis, has asserted that African party systems exhibit low levels of party nationalization. However, systematic research on nationalization across parties and party systems is still lacking. This study argues that the prospects for building nationalized parties vary substantially between incumbent and opposition parties. Incumbent parties, with their access to state resources, have been successful in creating nationwide operations, even in countries where geographical factors have been unfavorable and where ethnic fractionalization is high. The analysis utilizes a new data set of disaggregated election results for 26 African countries to calculate nationalization scores for 77 parties and study the correlates of party nationalization. The results show that factors like ethnic fractionalization, the size of the geographical area, and urbanization affect party nationalization, but only in the case of opposition parties. Incumbent parties, on the other hand, generally remain nationalized despite unfavorable structural conditions.

The organizational ecology of ethnic cleavages: The nonlinear effects of ethnic diversity on party system fragmentation

The conventional wisdom regarding party system fragmentation assumes that the effects of electoral systems and social cleavages are linear. However, recent work applying organizational ecology theories to the study of party systems has challenged the degree to which electoral system effects are linear. This paper applies such concepts to the study of social cleavages. Drawing from theories of organizational ecology and the experience of many ethnically diverse African party systems, I argue that the effects of ethnic diversity are nonlinear, with party system fragmentation increasing until reaching moderate levels of diversity before declining as diversity reaches extreme values. Examining this argument cross-nationally, the results show that accounting for nonlinearity in ethnic diversity effects significantly improves model fit.

Elite-Mass Congruence in African Dominant Party Systems: The Cases of Botswana and Lesotho

This study investigates elite-mass partisan congruence in African dominant party systems. I argue that dominant party systems with stable opposition parties provide more capacity for programmatic issue congruence between voters and their political representatives than dominant party systems with volatile opposition parties. To test this argument I compare Lesotho and Botswana. Both countries feature regular and fairly free elections, which so far resulted in dominant party systems where the same party holds more than 50 percent of the lower house seats in subsequent elections. However, in Botswana, a stable opposition embodied in the Botswana National Front (BNF) confronts the dominant Botswana Democratic Party (BDP). In Lesotho, on the other hand, the dominant Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) faces a fluid and fragmented opposition. Accordingly, I expect to find more congruence on partisan policy preferences between political elites and voters in Botswana than in Lesotho. I measure the extent of elite-mass partisan congruence by combining an original elite dataset and survey data.

From Formlessness to Structure? The Institutionalization of Competitive Party Systems in Africa

Giovanni Sartori once described African party systems as “formless.” Our contribution challenges this view in an era of resurgent multipartism that swept through the subcontinent in the early 1990s and continues until today. The article brings together contemporary research on African party systems with the wider disciplinary literature on party system institutionalization. Using a data set including all continuous election sequences in Africa from 1950 to 2008, we find that Africa has some of the most volatile party systems ever recorded and yet, tremendous diversity across regimes. We test the relative impact of political institutions, economic performance, the history of party system development, and social cleavage structure on party system institutionalization in Africa. We find that its party systems have been shaped by a set of factors unique to the subcontinent, but some of the general global patterns of party system development hold true in Africa as well.

Party unity and presidential dominance: parliamentary development in the fourth republic of Ghana

Political power in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa is often portrayed as being highly informal and heavily personalised. The assumption that personalised politics is how ‘Africa works’ has led to the neglect of the study of Africa's formal institutions, including parliaments. This article assesses the position of the Parliament of Ghana under the Fourth Republic. It displays evidence suggesting that over successive parliamentary terms parliamentary committees became increasingly adept at handling legislation, and inputting into the policy process. It also shows that the parliament was increasingly able to oversee the implementation of legislation. Although the findings of hitherto undocumented progress represent a valuable nuance, the argument that the parliament became increasingly able to input into the legislative process says exactly that; while the parliament became increasingly capable of amending legislation rarely was this witnessed. The article argues that parliamentary development in Ghana has been a function of three interacting structural factors: the constitution; unified government since 1992; and political party unity. The strong partisan identities of legislators from the two major political parties – the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC) – provide the executive with extra leverage to control the parliament. Throughout the Ghanaian parliament is juxtaposed with the Kenyan National Assembly. More substantially, the article seeks to force a revision of the dominant narrative that generalises African party systems as fluid and fragmented, and African political parties as lacking any recognisable internal cohesion or ideology.

How ethnic are African parties really? Evidence from four Francophone countries

Though African party systems are said to be ethnic, there is little evidence for this claim. The few empirical studies rarely rely on individual data and are biased in favour of Anglophone Africa. This paper looks at four Francophone countries, drawing on representative survey polls. Results reveal that ethnicity matters, but that its impact is generally rather weak and differs with regard to party systems and individual parties. ‘Ethnic parties’ in the strict sense are virtually absent. In particular, the voters’ location seems more important than ethnic affiliation. Other determinants such as regional ties, elite strategies, cross-cutting cleavages, and rational preferences deserve more attention in the future study of voting behaviour in Africa.

Parties, Presidents, and State Consolidation: Cross-National Evidence with Illustrations from Kenya

AbstractThis paper conceives of state consolidation as comprising the two distinct concepts of state strength and state firmness. It is argued here that increasing the accountability between various branches of government and limiting the number of parties will lead to increases in the administrative capacity of the state (strength) and to increases in the republican character of the state (firmness). The results of several least squares analyses are combined with case evidence from Kenya to provide support for these arguments. Implications for bureaucratic and economic efficiency are discussed, as is the nature of African party systems.

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.

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.

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.