Personalist Rule in Africa and Other World Regions

Jeroen J.J. Van den Bosch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000377118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Afrikanische Politik

This book presents an innovative model linking insights from democratization, development and conflict studies to explain personalist behavior and their violent transitions.

Based on multiple case studies from Sub Saharan Africa, the author maps and predicts regime transitions, presenting examples of how states can avoid such vicious circles of conflict and tyranny. By integrating decades of specialist literature from various subfields of political science, the book models personalist behavior, its impact on the states they govern, and their future transitions. By systematizing regime behavior (coup-proofing, gatekeeping, repression and hoarding), the model identifies the mechanics on how personalist regimes establish vicious circles of personalism and explains how exactly they end up again in authoritarianism or in new personalist tyrannies after their demise, and so seldom transition to democracy.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of African politics, democratization and democratic consolidation, authoritarian rule and more broadly to political science, comparative politics, area studies, political leadership, peace and conflict studies and development studies.

1 A throne of bayonets

What is personalism and why does it matter?

DICTATOR, n. The chief of a nation that prefers the pestilence of despotism to the plague of anarchy.

—Ambrose Bierce (1911)¹

Tyranny and anarchy are never far asunder.

—Jeremy Bentham (1843)

1.1 The context

Even 21st-century experts were baffled by the speed of Libya’s disintegration after the fall of Gaddafi, or by the sudden rise of the Islamic state from the ruins of war-torn Iraq and Syria. Fortunately, not all regime breakdowns end up in civil war. Nonetheless, as the quotes above indicate, dictatorship and anarchy are often portrayed as two sides of the same coin. An iron fist is considered necessary to leash society’s destructive forces and maintain stability. But when ousted, these same despots crash like tall trees, uprooting the structures that have kept them in power, plunging their nation into chaos. Amidst the anarchy of rebellion or civil war, new tyrants vie for power, only to repeat the cycle.

Many interrelated factors contribute to such scenarios and different causal constellations account for varying pathways of regime transitions. For instance: the nature and ‘inclusiveness’ of the regime (political institutions and regime type); the capacity of the state to manage relative inequality by channeling or mitigating group grievances of the ruled; the state’s capability to uphold law, order and its monopoly on violence. It becomes even more complicated since all these elements interact not only with each other but with larger trends like economic downturns, spillover conflicts, climate change, etc. With this book I contribute to systematizing our thinking about regime transitions, by isolating one regime type and explaining the possible scenarios of its transitions.

Contemporary studies firmly link political institutions either with inclusion and prosperity or with exclusion and poverty. Earlier theories focusing on disease-environments, geography, cultural factors, or theories of economic incompetence failed to sufficiently explain contemporary outcomes in all its variation.² This book departs from the work by Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson: Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, which describes the durable meta-trajectories of states over time through the lens of institutions. Acemoglu & Robinson observe that the division between rich and poor nations has been stubborn and that the global relative inequality more or less presents the same picture as 50, 100 or 150 years ago. Intra-continental differences have also been stable.³

Acemoglu & Robinson firmly redirect the focus back to actors and agency. The core of their thesis is that (state) institutions possess the agency to shape reality for the people they govern in a durable way. These institutions, when unchanged, create path-dependent trajectories for these states, which will propel them toward prosperity or poverty. Of course, there is no determinism: Countries can both change their institutions through incremental adaptations or through revolutionary shifts in either direction. Central is the ‘nature’ of these institutions, which puts their findings in the midst of political regime theory. Even when the authors do not use any regime typologies, they discern between inclusive and exclusive regimes, a vague distinction that increasingly overlaps with democracies and non-democracies from the 20th century onwards. Each is responsible for its own path dependency; when governing institutions are inclusive and redistributive they create a virtuous circle of prosperity, when they are politically exclusive and economically extractive they generate a vicious circle of poverty.

A virtuous circle is a process that begins when a new order (usually a pluralistic coalition of various societal actors) comes to power and replaces the institutions of the incumbent, transforming them into something politically more inclusive and economically more distributive. While these newcomers try to consolidate their ascent to power, they need new allegiances and a new support base to oppose the vengeful incumbent and its supporters. Therefore, institutional reform becomes engraved and the political playing field more level. Even while these reforms do not lead to democracy by themselves, they will create a positive feedback loop that will strengthen new political and economic forces in society, leading to more inclusive reform. The institutional safeguards on political, civic and economic (property or intellectual) rights can create a dynamic of technological innovation and modernization, which – if not hampered by restrictions or disruptions – can create (more) sustainable growth, empowering new elites. Only democratic institutions can ensure a peaceful mechanism mitigating political conflict, in which this ‘creative destruction’ enables new segments of society and brings them to power. At the same time this dynamic consolidates reform in institutions to support such virtuous circles. Small initial institutional differences between nations can incrementally become wider over decades, or can trigger a rapid chain reaction in face of critical historical junctures.⁴

A vicious circle then creates quite a different dynamic. When ruling elites can effectively block out other segments of society from power, or when new elites change institutions in a way that they remain exclusive, a vicious dynamic of political exclusion mutually reinforces economic extraction from one segment of society to another, keeping the playing field uneven. In this case political, civic and economic rights are not granted to society as a whole or are restricted in some areas. There is no mechanism to keep rulers accountable, therefore it is difficult to stop them from setting up economic institutions that drain wealth from the state and impoverish society. Acemoglu & Robinson acknowledge that growth is still possible under exclusive and extractive institutions, but it will not be sustainable (like the USSR). Some forms of innovation challenge the status quo, which these institutions aim to uphold. In such cases, incumbents are hostile toward innovation, and limit or repress the effects of creative destruction, making growth unsustainable. The result is poverty and uneven development, and an increasingly widening inequality gap among countries in the world. Dictatorships in principle do not generate welfare and prosperity for the population as a whole, and when they do, there will be limits to this growth unless the state institutions are transformed in an inclusive way.⁵

The meta-insights from Acemoglu & Robinson’s work span centuries, but they are too broad to study current, contemporary transitions and make predictions. Moreover, not all dictatorships behave in the same way. In fact, some dictatorships differ more from each other than from democracy.⁶ Even non-inclusive regimes are too heterogeneous to be poured in one explanatory theoretical framework. When deciding to construct a model to explain the emergence of such vicious circles I needed to narrow my focus to the most representative regime type associated with them: personalist rule. At the first stage of my research it was impossible to untangle the various impacts of different regime types on such interrelated phenomena as democratization, development, poverty, political contestation and conflict. So, I opted to study only the most exclusive regimes to be able to clearly identify the causal pathways of the new model I was building. That is why this book presents a middle-range model that only focuses on personalist regimes. While other types of autocracy might mirror some aspects of this model, it cannot be fully applied to them since their internal constellation is different, providing them with other incentives, constraints, dilemmas, exit-options, etc.

So how do personalist regimes create vicious circles? Such cycles are characterized by the sequence of similar highly exclusive regimes. To investigate such pathways, I thus focus on their transitions: How does one personalist regime break down and what regime is most likely to come after? I define a regime transition as a clean break, only completed when a regime and its power base are replaced by another group. The mere introduction of elections without changing the current powerholders does not count. In this chapter I start with introducing personalist regimes (1.2); then I shortly categorize their behavior (1.3); and operationalize them as my object of study (1.4). Next, I will say a word about how they emerge (1.5) and finally lay out the research questions for this book (1.6), before presenting a new model to study their impact in the next two chapters.

Before diving into a quick classification of dictatorships and untangling the nuances regarding personalism, two issues: First, I define political regimes as networks with an institutionalized set of fundamental formal and informal rules identifying the political powerholders (character of the possessor(s) of ultimate decisional sovereignty) and regulating the appointments to the main political posts (extension and character of political rights) as well as the vertical limitations (extension and character of civil liberties) and horizontal limitations on the exercise of political power (extension and character of division of powers – control and autonomy).⁷ In other words, a regime is a group of people who possess their own hierarchy and rules – laws, procedures, but also unwritten rules – which allow them to work together to exert power. These institutionalized rules determine the relations between the branches of government as well as how the regime governs the population as a whole.

This definition encompasses all regime types – from liberal democracy to totalitarianism – and distinguishes political regimes from smaller political bodies like governments or from the larger sets of institutions they control (states). A government is only a part of a regime and can be defined as the “public organization consisting of the small group of decision-makers who control and coordinate the execution of authoritative political decisions.”⁸ Regimes are much larger groupings and reach far beyond these highest public institutions connecting actors at local levels and in the private sphere as well. Most regimes do not fully control all bodies of the government and their respective bureaucracies, but nonetheless do so sufficiently to drive decision-making in states. All political regimes function within state structures, although parts of them (in particular the foreign policy executive) interact with other states at the international level. Regimes change regularly, while the state endures much longer as a rather permanent set of public administrative, enfor...