Party Proliferation and Political Contestation in Africa

Senegal in Comparative Perspective

Catherine Lena Kelly

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030196165
• eBook ISBN: 9783030196172
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

?This book analyzes several components of democratization and party competition in West Africa focusing on Senegal – a country with one of the longest histories of multiparty elections. It does so in service of examining the origins and consequences of the proliferation of political parties, a trend that has taken hold in Senegal and a variety of other African countries. The author uses novel sources of data to illuminate the economic and political roots of party functions and trajectories by placing party formation, opposition, ruling party loyalty, and presidential turnover into local and regional contexts. This work will appeal to African Studies scholars, professors, graduate students, and policy makers.

© The Author(s) 2020

Catherine Lena KellyParty Proliferation and Political Contestation in AfricaContemporary African Political Economyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19617-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Party Proliferation and Its Consequences in Senegal and Beyond

Catherine Lena Kelly¹

(1)

American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, Washington, DC, USA

Catherine Lena Kelly

The statements and analysis expressed are solely those of the author and have not been approved by the House of Delegates or the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association and do not represent the position or policy of the American Bar Association.

End Abstract

Political parties are critical for making democracy work. When parties aggregate and represent citizens’ broad-based interests, while also grooming capable and appropriate candidates for elected office, they empower citizens to make clear political choices and hold public officials accountable for the governance that they provide. Although multiparty politics is essential for citizens to express preferences about who governs them, too many political parties can dilute the power of the opposition, render vote choices opaque, and erode popular confidence in parties as vehicles of interest articulation and accountability. It is for these reasons that the recent proliferation of registered political parties—both in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa—is important for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to understand.

This book examines the origins and consequences of the proliferation of political parties, a trend that took hold in sub-Saharan Africa after many countries transitioned to multiparty politics in the 1990s. When the Berlin Wall fell, the political and economic support of Western and Soviet powers declined across the continent, leaving many African leaders more vulnerable to domestic popular pressures for regime change. In protests from Benin and Mali to Zambia and Gabon, citizens expressed the demand for more freedoms, liberties, and opportunities than they had enjoyed under the military, personalist, and single-party authoritarian regimes that had predominated after independence in the 1960s. In 1989, all but five African regimes were authoritarian, but by 1995, 38 countries had reformed their constitutions to allow for multiparty politics and competitive elections (Bratton and Van de Walle 1997: 7). Since the start of these “democratic experiments,” the number of registered political parties has multiplied—and in some cases, drastically accelerated—in a diverse set of countries with different legacies of conflict, sources of wealth, histories of military and civilian rule, and salience of identity-based political cleavages. By 2010, after 20 or more years of multiparty competition, Cameroon had over 250 parties, Madagascar and Senegal over 150, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Mali over 100, and Mozambique, Malawi, and Kenya approximately 50. By mid-2018, these numbers had climbed even higher, especially in the francophone African cases (Fig. 1.1).¹

Fig. 1.1

Patterns of party proliferation by country

Party proliferation has persisted long after the founding presidential and legislative elections of each country’s multiparty transition. It is around these transitional elections that democracy and governance experts would expect to see a temporary spike in party formation in response to newfound political opportunities. They would also expect party leaders with unsuccessful electoral performance in the founding elections to learn from their mistakes. In other words, although proliferation is expected during transitions to multipartism, the parties performing poorly are then expected to disappear or fuse with other, more successful parties in subsequent rounds of political contestation.

Senegal is a least-likely crucial case of party proliferation because its transition from post-independence authoritarianism to multiparty politics occurred earlier than in most other African countries.² While most of these countries were authoritarian regimes from independence in the 1960s to the end of the Cold War, Senegal held its first post-independence multiparty presidential elections in 1978, over a decade earlier than its counterparts that transitioned in the early 1990s. Until 1974, President Leopold Sédar Senghor oversaw a de facto single-party authoritarian regime and headed the ruling Socialist Party (PS). However, in that year, Abdoulaye Wade—an aspiring politician who was then a lawyer and university professor—convinced Senghor to allow him to create the Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS). Subsequently, in 1976, Senghor oversaw the establishment of three ideologically differentiated parties: the PS, which was declared the country’s social democratic party; the PDS, labeled as Senegal’s liberal democratic party; and the African Independence Party (PAI), designated as Marxist. His successor, Abdou Diouf, initiated legislative changes to allow for an unlimited number of parties in 1981. Based on current theories of party behavior after multiparty transitions, Senegal’s longer experience with multiparty politics makes it the place where one might least expect party proliferation to persist and most expect the party system to have consolidated. Yet, by mid-2011, Senegal had 174 registered political parties, a number that had tripled between 2000 and 2010 alone; by mid-2018, there were nearly 300.

In Senegal and many other African countries, conventionally cited factors like ideological preferences, formal electoral rules, and social cleavages are not highly correlated with the number of registered parties. Consequently, they cannot fully account for the dynamics of party proliferation (LeBas 2011; Manning 2005; Van de Walle and Butler 1999). Why, then, do so many politicians continue to found parties in Senegal, and why do others choose not to create them? What are the implications of proliferation for party trajectories, presidential turnover, and party loyalty, which each shapes the nature and quality of political contestation? More specifically, why do so many politicians create parties in Senegal? What are the determinants of a consistent opposition party trajectory, as opposed to one of collaboration with incumbents? What explains why ex-regime insiders, rather than regime outsiders, induced presidential turnovers in 2000 and 2012? And how do politicians conceptualize and evaluate their choices to defect or remain loyal to particular parties? This book seeks to answer these core questions in the chapters that follow.

These questions are important not only because of their implications for democratization and governance but also because of Senegalese and other African citizens’ interest in answering them. Generally, political science research in the West neglects issues focused on a country’s total number of registered parties. It focuses almost exclusively on the study of parties that run candidates for office or control parliamentary seats. Yet when analysts restrict their view to such parties in countries like Senegal, they ignore other types of parties that provide further insight into the social and political dynamics that shape governance and contestation; this creates an incomplete, if not misleading picture of how patronage distribution, political bargaining, and engagement with the state actually work. Quite contrastingly, the proliferation of registered parties has not escaped the attention of African academics, statespeople, and journalists. They observe with worry and disillusionment that proliferation is accompanied by chronic party switching, social fragmentation, fragile opposition parties and coalitions, and low public trust in political parties and their leaders.

As early as 2001, legislators from African countries in the International Organization of Francophonie (Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, OIF) expressed concern about the consequences of party proliferation for political development, given the parochial nature of many parties that are formed (Abdrahman 2001). Burkinabè analysts have concluded that “the efflorescence of political parties gives voters and citizens the impression that [party] leaders are motivated by lowly material interests, which reduces the collective credibility of the opposition” (CGD-IGD 2009: 17). Cameroonian experts lament the “mushrooming of non-viable political parties” and the “proliferation of ghost parties” that subvert democratization and dilute the “real opposition” (Tandé 2009: 127; Nyamnjoh 2005: 121–122). Some Malian observers note the correlation between proliferation and the prevalence of ephemeral, oversized political coalitions united only by the desire for government posts (Camara 2012: 49), while others claim that the “uncontrolled” creation of parties with low mobilizing capacity reduces the popular legitimacy of political parties as a whole (Sidibé 2015).

Similarly, within Senegal, the historian Sémou Pathé Guèye (2003) contends that the proliferation of “parties that have nothing but a name” contributes to the “degradation of pluralist democracy in the eyes of people who don’t feel [parties to be] useful in their everyday life” (181–182). Moustapha Niasse, the current President of Senegal’s National Assembly, remarks that “the Senegalese have created the concept of the ‘telephone booth party,’ a party composed of the wife, the husband, the two children, the cook, and the chauffeur.”³ These are not the “real political parties” needed for coalitions to have “stability, permanence, and political clout” (Sud Quotidien 2015). The political scientist, El Hadji Omar Diop (2011), documents such patterns and their erosion of the “Senegalese democratic myth.” There is also vibrant press coverage of proliferation, with some pieces defending each citizen’s legal prerogative to form a party, but others accusing the parties that result from proliferation of pursuing opportunistic self-promotion or of blurring the political landscape and obscuring the ease with which citizens can assess their voting and policymaking choices.

Taking these apprehensions seriously, the book examines party proliferation, party trajectories, presidential turnovers, and patterns of party loyalty and defection in contemporary Senegal, which has long been considered a bastion of peaceful, multiparty electoral competition in sub-Saharan Africa. The book first seeks to describe the proliferation of registered parties and understand its sources. Building on these insights, it then analyzes three notable developments in Senegalese politics in the context of party proliferation: the paucity of parties that consistently oppose any given incumbent; the tendency for ex-regime insiders inst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Party Proliferation and Its Consequences in Senegal and Beyond
• 2. Theories of Party-Building: Africa, Competitive Authoritarianism, and Democracy
• 3. Party Formation and Proliferation on Senegal’s Uneven Playing Field
• 4. Negotiators or Adversaries? Tracing the Sources of Party Trajectories
• 5. Defeating Presidents from Within: Regime Insiders and Turnover in Senegal
• 6. Party Loyalty and Defection from the Ruling Party Under Proliferation
• 7. Conclusion and Notes on Comparative and Policy Perspectives on Party Proliferation in Africa
• Back Matter