Routledge Handbook of Democratization in Africa

Gabrielle Lynch, Peter VonDoepp, Gabrielle Lynch, Peter VonDoepp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351623636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Demokratie

This volume explores the issues and debates surrounding the ongoing processes of democratization in sub-Saharan Africa, illuminating the central dynamics characterizing Africa's democratic experiments, and considering the connections between democratization and economic, social, and cultural developments on the continent.

Reflecting the diverse and rich nature of this field of study, the Handbook of Democratization in Africa features more than thirty contributions structured into six thematic sections:

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• The politics and paths of regime development
• Institutional dynamics
• Political mobilization and voting dynamics
• The politics of identity
• Social forces from below
• The consequences of democracy.

Chapters offer overviews of the key scholarship on particular topics, including central insights from the latest research, and provide suggestions for those interested in further inquiry. The material includes attention to broad cross-continental patterns, for example with respect to public opinion, political violence, or the role of different institutions and actors. It also includes rich case material, drawing on and highlighting the experiences of a diverse collection of countries.

Encouraging a comprehensive view of key concerns and enhancing understanding of particular issues, the Handbook of Democratization in Africa represents a critical resource for experts and students of African politics, democratization, and African studies.

Part I

The politics and paths of regime development

1

Neopatrimonialism and democracy

Rachel Sigman and Staffan I. Lindberg¹

Amid the “third wave” of democratization, Collier and Levitsky (1997) famously warned of the “growing scholarly confusion” resulting from the proliferation of concepts related to democracy, or what they call “democracy with adjectives.” While the literature on democracy in sub-Saharan Africa has certainly contributed its share of new adjectives, one adjective in particular has dominated theoretical discussions surrounding regime trajectories on the continent: neopatrimonial.

Neopatrimonial rule, in Africa or elsewhere, combines strong presidents, clientelistic linkages between citizens and politicians, and the use of state resources for political legitimation (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). These features may be present across different regime types, from highly competitive democracies to highly closed authoritarian regimes. They may be embedded in formal political rules, such as the Ghanaian president’s constitutional right to appoint every mayor in the country, or they may reflect less formal practices such as political favoritism in the distribution of state resources.

While the notion of strong presidents engaging in patronage-based distribution of resources and eschewing institutional constraints to their power seems highly inimical to the idea of democratic rule, Africa, perhaps more than any other region, provides strong evidence that neopatrimonialism does not necessarily hinder the adoption or survival of democratic institutions. In fact, there is now considerable evidence that democratization, even in neopatrimonial contexts, can bring about expansions in civil rights and political freedoms (Lindberg 2006; Edgell et al. 2017), the institutionalization of constitutional rule (Posner and Young 2007), improvements in governance (Alence 2004), and wider distributions of public goods and services (Stasavage 2005; Burgess et al. 2015). Moreover, some have argued that patrimonialism may actually promote democracy (Pitcher, Moran, and Johnston 2009) and developmental governance (Crook 1989; Booth and Golooba-Mutebi 2012; Kelsall 2013). The main goal of this chapter is to delineate to what extent, and in what specific ways, African regimes live up to their neopatrimonial reputation. To do so, we develop a multidimensional measure of neopatrimonialism that enables us to explore the varying ways that neopatrimonialism manifests itself in political regimes across Africa, and the extent to which neopatrimonial rule acts as an actual impediment to democracy.

Our investigation reveals several important problems with common assumptions about neopatrimonialism in African political regimes. First, we find that, on average, regimes in Africa are not considerably more neopatrimonial than those of other regions of the developing world. Second, there is a large amount of variation in neopatrimonialism across African political regimes, both in terms of the level of neopatrimonialism across countries and the specific configurations of the three main dimensions of neopatrimonial rule. Finally, we show that neopatrimonialism does not act as a particularly strong or consistent impediment to the advancement or survival of democracy. Together, these observations suggest the need to further question widespread assumptions about the exceptional, undemocratic qualities of neopatrimonial rule in Africa.

Democracy with one adjective

Both states and politics in Africa are commonly described as neopatrimonial. At its broadest level, this term reflects the idea that patrimonial forms of authority permeate modern institutional structures. In patrimonial contexts, the right to rule is vested in the person; the legitimacy of this person’s authority is derived from popular acceptance of the norms, customs, or beliefs commonly associated with traditional familial or household structures (Weber 1946). Unlike rational-legal authority, which is based on impersonal, formally proscribed or natural laws, patrimonial authority vests the power to rule in a specific individual. Patrimonialism is also distinct from Weber’s notion of charismatic authority, which is based not on law, custom, or tradition, but on the perception that a leader has some extraordinary ability to rule. A patrimonial system is “held together by the oath of loyalty, or by kinship ties (often symbolic and fictitious) rather than by a hierarchy of administrative grades and functions” (Clapham 1985, 48).

Neopatrimonialism differs from patrimonialism in at least two important ways. First, the most basic distinction is the presence of institutions with the “trappings” of modern, legal-rational structures (Bratton and van de Walle 1997), even if authority remains highly personalized (Clapham 1985; Eisenstadt 1973; Zolberg 1966). As Clapham (1985, 48) explains, “officials hold positions in bureaucratic organizations with powers which are formally defined but exercise those powers, so far as they can, as a form not of public service but of private property.”

Second, the traditional basis of patrimonial authority may be less pronounced in neopatrimonial settings than in more purely patrimonial ones (Roth 1968). Rather than practicing loyalty, tribute, or reciprocity, all of which tend to be rooted in shared customs or beliefs, neopatrimonial relationships may take on a more transactional character. As Erdmann and Engel (2007) note, this transactional nature of power effectively divorces patrimonialism from the economic or political contexts (i.e., feudalism) in which specific customs and traditional beliefs were theorized to originate. To this end, Scott’s (1972) account of the decline of more traditional, longstanding patron–client relationships in the face of modernization and democratization in South-East Asia resonates with the way that many contemporary scholars tend to view neopatrimonialism.

Although the concept of neopatrimonialism is used widely throughout scholarship on the politics and development of Africa (and elsewhere), it has not gone uncriticized. As a number of pieces have persuasively argued, the concept is deployed so broadly that it tends to cloud the large variation in economic and political outcomes across the continent (Bach 2011; Mkandawire 2015; Crook 1989; Theobald 1982). Another critique, advanced by Pitcher, Moran, and Johnston (2009), points out that contemporary applications of the concept often fail to appreciate Weber’s view of (neo)patrimonialism as a form of legitimate authority characterized by reciprocity, voluntary compliance, and checks on rulers. Their insights suggest in particular that neopatrimonialism is not specific to any regime type. Contrary to the dominant perspectives, these works show how neopatrimonialism can be a force for democracy, social cohesion, redistribution, administrative effectiveness, and development. Likewise, increasing attention to “developmental” forms of patrimonialism in places like Rwanda (Kelsall 2013; Booth and Golooba-Mutebi 2012) and Angola (Croese 2017) are helping to challenge the more conventionally negative views of the concept.

Neopatrimonial democracy?

When, in the 1990s, the third wave of democratization reached sub-Saharan Africa, the concept of neopatrimonialism was rather quickly adopted to explain why both transitions and the resulting regimes appeared, in a number of ways, different from those of other regions of the world (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). In many cases, the adoption of the neopatrimonial adjective to describe African democracy was accompanied by pessimism about both its depth and durability. Many concluded that changes in formal political institutions were unlikely to fundamentally transform the deep-seated structures feeding the “politics of the belly” (Bayart 1993) and entrenched forms of “personal rule” (Jackson and Rosberg 1982) in most, if not all, African countries. “The advent of elections,” as Bratton and van de Walle (1997, 9) wrote, “marked a scramble for political positions and an intensification of tendencies to quickly make the most of the benefits of office-holding.” In short, in focusing on the neopatrimonial character of newly installed democratic regimes, many predicted a quick return to the chaotic and often predatory “Big Men” politics that dominated the 1970s and 1980s (Schatzberg 2001), since this is what “works” in Africa (Chabal and Daloz 1999).

This sense of pessimism about regime change in Africa was based on a set of ideas suggesting that, in neopatrimonial contexts, personalistic authority is, by nature, at odds with the working...