One-party Regime Research Articles

Neopatrimonial Regimes and Political Transitions in Africa

This article proposes revisions to the theory of political transitions by analyzing patterns of recent popular challenges to neopatrimonial rule in Africa. The approach is explicitly comparative, based on contrasts between Africa and the rest of the world and among regimes within Africa itself. Arguing against the prevalent view that transitions unfold unpredictably according to the contingent interplay of key political actors, the authors contend that the structure of the preexisting regime shapes the dynamics and sometimes even the outcomes of political transitions. They find that in contrast to transitions from corporatist regimes, transitions from neopatrimonial rule are likely to be driven by social protest, marked by struggles over patronage, and backed by emerging middle classes. Following Dahl, the authors compare African regimes on the basis of the degree of formal political participation and competition allowed. They find that regime variants—personal dictatorship, military oligarchy, plebiscitary one-party regime, and competitive one-party regime—are associated with distinctive transition dynamics. Whereas transitions from military oligarchies are typically managed from the top down and are relatively orderly, transitions from plebiscitary systems often occur discordantly through confrontational national conferences. A consolidated democracy is least likely to result from the abrupt collapse of a personal dictatorship and is most likely, though never guaranteed, from a graduated transition from a competitive one-party regime. In general, getting to democracy is problematic from all regimes that lack institutional traditions of political competition.

OBSERVING MULTIPARTY ELECTIONS IN AFRICA: LESSONS FROM ZAMBIA

IS AFRICA DEMOCRATIZING? Across the continent, growing numbers of incumbent national leaders are reluctantly introducing reforms to open up, or even dismantle, long-standing military and one-party regimes.1 There is much debate about whether the current impulse for political reform amounts to true 'democratization' or mere 'liberalization'.2 In many cases, political elites retain sufficient power to ensure that reforms are gradual and partial, involving little more than reduction in the most egregious abuses of political rights. Occasionally, elites lose control of the reform process and are pushed by international and domestic forces into conceding competitive elections which, in turn, sometimes lead to a transfer of power and the installation of a new government. We assume that the full implementation of 'free and fair' elections constitutes an unmistakable signal of the onset of democratization. However one defines democracy, it is irreducibly a system of government in which the authority to exercise power derives from the will of the people. In a democracy, citizens express their preferences by choosing leaders 'in periodic and genuine elections . . . by universal and equal suffrage and . . . by secret vote'.3 Robert Dahl identifies two dimensions to the process of

Zambia Starts Over

Zambia Starts Over Michael Bratton (bio) After 17 years of single-party rule, Zambia returned to multiparty competition in late 1991. In presidential and parliamentary balloting on October 31, Zambian voters took advantage of the unfamiliar opportunity of choosing among candidates from two major and three minor political parties to hand a sweeping victory to an opposition grouping called the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD). Its leader, trade unionist Frederick Chiluba, became president with a stunning 76 percent of the vote, while MMD candidates captured 125 out of 150 National Assembly seats. The 27-year reign of President Kenneth Kaunda, the country's founding father, and his United National Independence Party (UNIP) was at an end. As important as the election result itself was the transition from one type of political regime to another. The legal and political hegemony of a single ruling party was, at least for the moment, replaced by a plurality of competing political ideas and institutions. Zambia is the first English-speaking country in Africa to complete such a transition peacefully, in large part due to President Kaunda's genuine, albeit reluctant, acceptance of the demands made by a united opposition front. Other recent democratic experiments in Africa have had ripple effects in their immediate geographic neighborhoods, for example, in French-speaking West Africa (Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon, Benin) or among the Portuguese-speaking island nations of Cape Verde and São Tomé & Príncipe. Zambia is important because it provides a model of political reform that will resonate among ruling elites and popular movements in capitals as far-flung as Nairobi, Kinshasa, and Pretoria. [End Page 81] The Zambian case also raises general questions about the intriguing dynamics of transitions away from authoritarian rule. Precisely how are one-party regimes disassembled and replaced by more open, competitive ones? Which ideological and institutional innovations mark the route of political liberalization? What political tensions arise as plural affiliations and competitive elections are reintroduced? How stable are the new regimes? The process of political transition is best seen as a struggle between incumbent and opposition political interests over both the rules of the political game and the resources with which it is played. This struggle is starkly revealed during "transitional elections," which restore party competition after a long interval of official party-state monopoly.1 Under these circumstances, the ruling party employs all its strength to tilt the rules of political competition in its own favor. In Zambia, UNIP's best efforts to hang on to power were not enough to overcome its loss of legitimacy in the face of a concerted popular and legal challenge from the opposition. The transition unfolded rapidly, with only two years separating the first calls for multiparty politics in December 1989 and the inauguration in December 1991, under a liberalized constitution, of the Third Republic of Zambia. While the political transition was rapid, it remains fragile. In Zambia, newly independent political institutions and fledgling democratic values do not yet form a permanent buffer against abuse by executive authorities. And without tangible economic development, citizens may once again come to blame their deprivation on the government of the day. Thus few conditions for the consolidation of democracy are yet in place. The One-Party Regime Until 1973, Zambia had a history of plural politics. The African nationalist movement in what was then called Northern Rhodesia split in 1958, with the faction that became UNIP pursuing a more progressive and militant line than the moderate and traditionalist African National Congress (ANC). The country's first African government, formed in 1962, was a coalition of UNIP and the ANC. Zambia won full independence in 1964 and Kaunda acceded to the presidency under a republican constitution that affirmed freedom of political expression and association. Zambians became accustomed to the rough and tumble of electoral competition in the course of multiparty elections held in 1962, 1964, and 1968. Although all these elections took place after intense campaigns marred by wild charges and rumors, incidents of intimidation and overzealousness, and occasional factional violence, all parties respected the results. In the preindependence elections of 1964, UNIP secured [End Page 82] enough National Assembly seats to govern alone, without...

Uncommon democracies: the one-party dominant regimes

Uncommon democracies: the one-party dominant regimes

Uncommon democracies: the one-party dominant regimes

Uncommon democracies: the one-party dominant regimes

Contrôler ou encadrer ?

What kind of control ? Information and propaganda during Vichy, Denis Peschanski. As in other areas, the information and propaganda policy of the Vichy regime displayed a constant authoritarianism but also heterogeneity. Following the first months of bitter conflicts for the control of decision-making structures, three men defined three specific policies : Marion's policy was to structure society, with the prospect of a future one-party regime ; Laval's policy was that of mere control, for better collaboration with Germany ; for Henriot, it was a civil war waged by a desperate police state.

Sociology and the Spirit of Sixty-Eight

The intellectual (as distinct from the cultural) legacy of the late 60s has been dissipated. Many students now entering the universities were born after 1968. Even in the social sciences they may never have heard of Marcuse. Their attitude to sociology is sometimes that of Wordsworth to the solitary reaper: 'Will not one tell me what she sings?/Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow/From old, unhappy, faroff things/And battles long ago.' But what was that intellectual legacy? Why is it still more strongly represented in sociology than in other disciplines? The 1960s was a time of unrest. In the Third World there were guerrilla campaigns and anti-colonialist revolutions, mainly under communist leadership. Mao and Castro were already successful. Ho and Guevara, the romantic 'Che', were heroic exemplars of the continuing armed struggle. In the Soviet bloc the insurrections and the momentarily successful revolt, the Prague Spring, were against police-state repression, one-party government and central 'command' control of the economy, and for communism with a human face. In the West there was riot and rebellion (in which students were prominent participants) against the fraudulence of the claims that Western pluralist democracy was either efficient, humane, just or durable. This article will deal with the student movements of the West, and with the other two only in so far as they were directly relevant to it. The two most significant causes of this student unrest concerned the USA. In Vietnam military defeat was preceded by atrocities comparable to and on a scale exceeding any committed by the regular German army during the Second World War. The nightly sight on television of unsuccessful battles waged with carpet bombing, defoliation agents and napalm, and allegations, later substantiated, of the massacre of helpless villagers increasingly radicalized the young men who were liable to be conscripted. Since the end of the nineteenth century the strategy of Booker T. Washington had predominated among influential American blacks. Improvement was attainable by self-improvement. But with the

Explaining the growth of government in Sweden: A disequilibrium approach

Previous studies aimed at explaining the growth of government in a particular country have failed to distinguish between explanatory variables acting on the supply and demand side, respectively. Alternatively, they have tested one explanation at a time, implying explanatory equations that are misspecified. In addition, no allowance has been made for the fact that the interaction between supply and demand can hardly be assumed to be a self-equilibrating process, where the price of public goods and services adjusts to equate the two. Instead, a framework of disequilibrium seems more appropriate for the analysis of the growth of government. In this study we have identified a number of variables potentially important for the explanation of the growth of government. Each variable was either classified to pertain to the supply or demand side. In the empirical estimations we applied a disequilibrium maximum likelihood method, capable of accounting for the fact that we cannot expect the market for public goods to clear in each period. This method has the further advantage that we are not required to specify a priori whether we are in the supply or demand regime. Concerning the results, our regressions point to the importance of fiscal illusion, notably illusion resulting from an underbalanced budget, and bureaucratic pressure for a larger public sector as the two most important determinants behind the observed growth. A high demand for income redistribution is also found to be an important factor, especially behind the growth of transfers. Furthermore, Baumol's Disease in combination with a low price elasticity of demand seems to contribute strongly to the growth of government consumption. Finally, there is a tendency for coalition governments to let the public sector grow faster than does a one-party government.

Women and the Crisis in Commonwealth Africa

The consequences of the contemporary crisis for women in Commonwealth Africa are that their economic opportunities in both the rural and the urban sectors are declining, and that they are increasingly scapegoated as the causes of economic disintegration. Politically, the entrenchment of corporatist one-party states and military regimes means that what little participation was opened to women at independence is being eroded. As the economic crisis deepens in the 1980s, Africans may respond by retreating into low-level subsistence agriculture, in which the bulk of the work is done by women. If corporatism develops into fascism, the scapegoating of economically independent women will intensify. The meaning of the crisis of the 1980s for women in Commonwealth Africa is less political representation and fewer economic resources, more political repression and more work.

The Women's Movement in Yugoslavia: The Case of the Conference for the Social Activity of Women in Croatia, 1965-1974

Ever since the European socialist labor movement took up the cause of female emancipation, Marxist parties have incorporated special women's commissions or caucuses. Those Marxist parties that have come into power since 1917 have continued this part of the traditional commitment to women's liberation. In the Soviet Union and East Europe there are official women's organizations of varying visibility. But western feminists tend to doubt that these actually represent women's movements. 1 After all, they exist only under the aegis of male-elite, oneparty regimes. These regimes allow only one view-the so-called Marxist view-of the woman question, that women's emancipation is possible only after the revolutionary working class achieves the abolition of private property, freeing women for work and economic independence. Since women's emancipation has already been achieved, by definition, what is the purpose of women's organizations in countries where the workers' vanguard party, the Communist Party, has come to power? Indeed, even in those countries of East Europe that had women's movements prior to revolution or sovietization, women's organizations seem to have represented women less than they served the governments' needs: to mobilize women into an expanded labor force; to support disarmament or selected international revolutionary movements; to celebrate and legitimize the state. At the same time, speaking directly for or about women is limited in the way all non-Party organizations are limited: nothing may be said or done that can be construed as helping the enemies of socialism, or as threatening Party control. Although the Party has led the working class to power, it still must defend this power against western imperialism, in all its guises, through unity behind the Party. The loyalty of nonParty organizations is maintained through simultaneous membership of a portion of their leaders in the Party itself and through police vigilance. Regardless of how useful Marxist theory may be for feminists elsewhere, under these conditions it serves in the socialist countries to obscure genuine discussion. Published statements by women's organizations are often litanies of citations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin. One essential issue that they avoid is the relationship between men and women in familiestheir roles in the household-since this is bourgeois feminism, another guise of western imperialism. Added to the difficulties faced by women who want to work on behalf of women in these countries, official pronouncements notwithstanding, is women's overall condition of powerlessness. Women are mostly in badly paid, gender-determined jobs, are simultaneously personally responsible for domestic labor and child-raising, and in backward circumstances at that, and they have little time or energy to better themselves as individuals or as a group. Nevertheless, it is precisely this condition that increasingly characterizes women in industrial countries the world over. Women in the West have been driven to fight for themselves, and women in East Europe and the Soviet Union can be expected to do the same. Just because their societies are not pluralist does not necessarily mean that women cannot develop their own strategies. Above and beyond laws guaranteeing equal rights in these countries, in the past decade there have been many legal changes that far outstrip those in most capitalist countries.

Revolutionary Regimes in Developing Countries: an unexpected evolution

The following text is an extract from Craipeau's latest book, The Hidden Face of Capitalism: the so-called socialist countries (1979), which so far exists only in a French manuscript. Yvan Craipeau (born 1911) is one of the founders of the Trotskyist movement in Western Europe and one of its major ideologists. While studying for his BA in French and his MA in Philosophy at the Sorbonne, he was a leader of the French Communist Party youth organisation and of the French Trotskyist group. He was Trotsky's secretary in 1933. He led the French Socialist Party youth organisation in 1935 and the French section of the Fourth International during the Resistance and until 1948. As such, he received 15,000 votes in the legislative elections of 1946 when he was nearly elected. Being opposed to the sectarian approach to the question of organisation, he was from 1954 to 1978 a leader of the French New Left and of the PSU (Unified Socialist Party) while working as a teacher. He had disagreed with Trotsky's views on the nature of the Soviet Union since 1935, and in March 1937 he openly challenged them (see extracts from his article of March 1937 and of his “counter-report” of November 1937 and Trotsky's Defense du marxisme, Paris, EDI, 1972, pp. 73–85 and 311–319. He had even earlier opposed the thesis of the degenerate workers' state where bureaucracy is regarded as a mere temporary excrescene, the definition of the Soviet party as “centrist” and the definition of Soviet society as “socialist”. Well before some better known theoreticians, and while remaining in the Marxist if not the Leninist tradition, he concluded that there was in the USSR a stable bureaucratic class and a new exploitative society. In his later works and in this manuscript, he argues that the USSR is not an exception and that the communist ideology and the workers' movement are not necessarily the main factors in the establishment and the evolution of state capitalist one-party regimes. These represent one of the most appropriate nationalist, authoritarian solutions to economic and social backwardness in the absence of developed socialist societies, hence their spread throughout the underdeveloped countries. Craipeau published six books between 1958 and 1978, including three on the history of Trotskyism, and contributed to many others (in English, to Roy Medvedev et. al (eds), Detente and Socialist Democracy, Spokesman Books, Nottingham, 1977). Part One of The Hidden Face of Capitalism: the so called socialist countries is devoted to the USSR. The extracts which follow have been selected from the introduction (sections 1 and 2) and from the conclusion (section 3 of Part Two, which focuses on the revolutionary regimes in the developing countries). Part Three deals with the future of state bureaucratic societies. The translation was made by David Bilson, Vladimir Claude Fisera and Franz Leivers.

The Cultural Revolution and China's Search for Political Order

Since her traditional empire collapsed China has experimented with many political institutions. After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) imposed a revolutionary one-party regime, the pattern of political order has shifted from one form to another. Intra-Party conflicts preceded these shifts, of which the Cultural Revolution represented the culmination. But in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution another shift is taking place, so it too has raised a series of important questions about Chinese politics.

Toward a Theory of One-Party Government in Africa.

K. Tunteng — Vers une théorie du parti unique en Afrique. En dépit de la prévalence des systèmes politiques à parti unique en Afrique, le phénomène reste assez peu étudié sur le plan théorique. Parmi les causes favorisantes il faut relever les tendances centrifuges (tribalisme v. nationalisme, etc.) manifestées après l'indépendance. Le parti, en tant qu'institution, ne se confond pas avec l'attitude pratique de l'élite politique ; il y a une certaine confusion entre stabilité institutionnelle et maintien d'une même équipe au pouvoir. Cette dernière exigence est génératrice de contradictions, la suppression totale de l'opposition menant à des conflits de fait au sein de l'élite politique. La possibilité d'intervention des masses est réduite à néant par une contradiction analogue. En fait les méthodes mêmes des partis uniques contredisent leurs objectifs officiels.

One-Party Government in the Ivory Coast

One-Party Government in the Ivory Coast

One-Party Government in the Ivory Coast

One-Party Government in the Ivory Coast

One-Party Government in the Ivory Coast

VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee , Seite 126 - 129

Tunisia since Independence: The Dynamics of One-Party Government. Clement Henry Moore

<i>Tunisia since Independence: The Dynamics of One-Party Government</i>. Clement Henry Moore

‘Putting the lid on Leninism’

It will soon be forty years since Lenin decided, to ‘put the lid on opposition’, as he expressed it himself at the dramatic Tenth Congress of his party in March 1921. Much has happened since then, both in the Soviet Union and in the countries which have by imitation adopted the same pattern of one-party government. It is therefore worth reflecting on the reasons which led Lenin to adopt this drastic policy; and to pause to enquire into the results which have flowed from his action—whether he intended them or not.The bolsheviks took power in 1917 without having (as on so many other vital questions) formulated any precise theory about their future policy towards those who disagreed with them. There was a general acceptance of the need to deal sternly with ‘enemies’ – indeed no revolutionary government could hope to survive for long if it did not do something of the kind.

SHORTER NOTICES

Journal Article SHORTER NOTICES Get access One-Party Government in Mali: Transition toward Control, by Frank Gregory Snyder. Yale UP, 1965. xiv, 178 pp. 37s. 6d. African Affairs, Volume 66, Issue 262, January 1967, Page 82, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a095578 Published: 01 January 1967

Tunisia since Independence: The Dynamics of One-Party Government. Clement Henry Moore

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsTunisia since Independence: The Dynamics of One-Party Government. Clement Henry Moore I. William ZartmanI. William Zartman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 38, Number 4Dec., 1966 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/239992 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1966 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.