Bridgewater Review

Volume 16 | Issue 2 Article 6

Dec-1997

Democratic Transitions in AfricaShaheen MozaffarBridgewater State College, smozaffar@bridgew.edu

This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

Recommended CitationMozaffar, Shaheen (1997). Democratic Transitions in Africa. Bridgewater Review, 16(2), 7-10.Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol16/iss2/6

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DEMOCRATICTRANSITIONS

IN AFRICAShaheen Mozaffar

Democracy in Africa! The very ideasounds like a cruel oxymoron. Ter­rible pictures of seemingly endless

civil wars in impoverished countries, ofstarving children in squalid refugee camps,and of the human brutality of ethnic geno­cide have typically filled the all-too-erraticAmerican media reports on Africa in recentyears. These pictures represent very realhuman suffering and tragedy, but they alsotell unduly exaggerated and only partial sto­ries that evoke horrifying images of wide­spread social, economic and political deg­radation of an otherwise complex and di­verse region of the African continent. Theseimages distort our perceptions and reinforceunspoken stereotypes of the 560 millionpeople living in 48 countries. Beyond thesehorrifying images, however, and largely un­noticed by the American media, a dramaticpolitical transformation has been underwayin sub-Saharan Africa since 1989, and insome countries, even before that. The cen­tral feature of this transformation is the yetunfinished process of democratic transition.

The Historical Context ofDemocratic Transitions in AfricaThe unfolding process of democratic

transition in Africa is part of what Harvardpolitical scientist Samuel P. Huntington hastermed the "third wave" of democratizationin the modem world. In the first wave be­tween 1828-1926, modem democracy ex­panded from its intellectual roots in theAmerican and the French Revolutions toWestern Europe and parts of Latin America,before being reversed by the rise of fascismin Italy and Germany. The second wave be­tween 1942-62 witnessed the advent of de­mocracy in Germany, Italy and Japan, inmost of Latin America, and in the Asian andAfrican countries gaining independencefrom European colonial rule. The years

1962-1973 witnessed a reversal of the sec­ond wave as authoritarian governments re­placed most of the fledgling democracies inAsia, Africa, and Latin America. The thirdwave began on April 25, 1974, with the over­throw of Portugal's 48-year old authoritar­ian government in a peaceful military coupand the installation a year later of one ofthe world's most successful democracies.From this ironic beginning, the third wavespread rapidly to Spain and Greece, acrossthe Atlantic to Latin America, and then toAsia. In 1989, as communism and the Ber­lin Wall fell, it engulfed Eastern Europe, Rus­sia and most of the former Soviet Repub­lics, and simultaneously swept across Africa.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, thethird wave fostered a supportive interna­tional environment for the incipient but un­even movements toward democracy in Af­rica. Democracy has always been an inte­gral, albeit a problematic, component ofAf­rican political development for over threedecades. Most African countries gained in­dependence in the 1960s with democraticgovernments elected in the waning days ofEuropean colonial rule. While most ofthemsubsequently turned toward authoritarianrule, Botswana and Mauritius remained, andcontinue to remain, uninterrupted democ­racies. Gambia's 27 year-old democracy wasoverthrown by a military coup in 1994, butthe country elected a new democratic gov­ernment a year later. In the 1970s, BurkinaFaso, Ghana, Liberia, Madagascar, Nigeria,Sierra Leone and Sudan elected short-liveddemocratic governments. More controver­sially, apartheid South Africa and NorthernRhodesia (now Zimbabwe) held regularcompetitive elections, but with franchise re­stricted to the minority European popula­tion. Even in some single-party regimes,notably in Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi,Senegal, and Zambia, tightly-controlled can­didate nominations and electoral competi­tion among aspiring local candidates servedas important mechanisms for pork-barrelservicing of local communities with valu­able national resources, for recruiting newleaders with strong local ties, and for legiti­mizing authoritarian governments.

The 1980s witnessed intermittent butdiscernible movements toward democracyon the continent. In Zimbabwe (1980) andNamibia (1989), negotiated settlements toprotracted civil wars facilitated the estab­lishment of democratic governmentsthrough multiparty elections. In 1983,

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Senegal elected its first government throughmultiparty elections after 20 years of single­party rule. At the time, it had one ofAfrica'smost stable authoritarian regimes and alsoone of the continent's most successfuleconomies. Its tum toward democracy wassymptomatic of the growing pressure on Af­rican authoritarian rulers for political andeconomic liberalization. The source of thispressure was the severe economic crisescaused by the combination of a global re­cession in the early 1980s and misguideddomestic policies of market controls, traderestrictions, deficit spending, and inflatedcurrencies. African authoritarian rulers re­sponded to these pressures with a combi­nation of political concessions aimed at as­suaging the most politically important seg­ments of the society and political repressionaimed at controlling the pace and extent ofliberalization. Thus, the Nigerian militaryrulers aborted their self-proclaimed plans fordemocratic transition by imprisoning thebusiness tycoon who had defeated theirhand-picked candidate in the freest and thefairest elections ever held in the country.In Ghana, on the other hand, the militarygovernment, forced to implement harshstructural adjustment policies as a condi­tion for receiving Western financial aid,promised and eventually held non-partisanlocal elections in 1988 that presaged a suc­cessful transition to full democracy fouryears later. Elsewhere, for example in Kenya,Tanzania, Zaire, and Zambia, authoritarianincumbents used co-optation, exile and im­prisonment to silence the weak and frag­mented pro-democracy forces until con­certed international and domestic pressuressparked by the third wave compelled themdemocratize.

Indicators of DemocraticTransitions in Africa

As in Latin America and Eastern Eu­rope, democratic transitions in Africa didnot always produce the desired democraticoutcomes, due to a combination of politi­cally astute authoritarian rulers and politi­cally inept pro-democracy forces. Even so,the impact of the third wave on the conti­nent was, by all measures, dramatic. First,it unleashed a wave of mass, often violent,protests (86 in 1991 alone) that directly pre­cipitated political liberalization in 28 coun­tries and indirectly launched preemptivepolitical liberalization in 10 others. In mostcases, political liberalization reformed au-

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governmental powers and responsibilitiesare crafted. African political actors, influ­enced by strong international norms, havegenerally agreed on the basic provisions ofconstitutional guarantees of civil liberties

and political rights. However,they have differed sharply onthe rules of electoral competi­tion and restraints on govern­mental power, because theserules determine opportunitiesfor political representation, forshaping public policies, and foraffecting the resulting distribu­tion of burdens and benefits insociety. It is, therefore, usefulto think of liberalization anddemocratization as separateprocesses, even though theyare interrelated in practice.

Liberalization is neces­sary for democratization, butmay not automatically lead toit. It can produce political

So\j~~~ chaos, as, for example, in,.. Rwanda and Zaire. It can en­

gender a prolonged period ofuncertainty, especially whenauthoritarian rulers (usuallythe military) feel threatened bythe pace and extent of politicalliberalization and block furtherreform, as, for example, in Ni­geria and Togo. It can producefragile democracies susceptibleto military coups, as, for ex­ample, in Niger. It can lead toflawed democratization in

which authoritarian incumbents with suf­ficient political leverage against fragmentedpro-democracy forces successfully manipu­late democratic elections in their favor, as,for example, in Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire,Gabon, and Kenya.

Most importantly, thinking about lib­eralization and democratization as separateprocesses helps us to recognize the com­plexity of democratic transitions and the un­certainty of transition outcomes. Demo­cratic transitions are complex processesbecause they require the simultaneous de­struction ofan existing authoritarian regimeand the construction of a new democraticorder. Democratic transitions are success­ful to the extent that these two contradic­tory imperatives are adequately managed,even if not entirely resolved. Democratictransitions outcomes are always uncertain

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large numbers of candidates will enter theuntested waters of electoral competition.This conclusion is validated by the fact thatan average of 5 candidates ran for the topoffice in the 29 founding elections.

The Politics of DemocraticTransitions in Mrica

These quantitative indicators of thewide scope ofAfrica's third wave democratictransitions challenge conventional wisdomabout the economic and cultural pre-con­ditions for the origin of modern democra­cies. They point instead to a political logic.An understanding of this logic requires clari­fying the meaning of democratic transition.A democratic transition consists of twoclosely related processes: (1) a process ofliberalization in which constitutional guar­antees of civil liberties and political rightsand limits on the exercise of power by thegovernment and the people replace personaland arbitrary rule as the basic institutionalframework of governance; and (2) a processof democratization in which rules regulat­ing electoral competition and specifying

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thoritarian regimes with the introductionof explicit constitutional guarantees of fun­damental civil liberties and political rights.Second, these initial political openingssparked an unprecedented efflorescence ofcivic associations, private mediaoutlets (mostly print and radio),unfettered political debate, andvigorous criticisms of govern-ments. Third, and more signifi­cantly, political liberalization ledto competitive legislative elec-tions in all 38 countries, with op­position parties winning seats innational legislatures for the firsttime since independence in 35.In addition, 29 countries held"founding elections" in which r v

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the chief executive was directlyelected by the people in a com­petitive election. Finally, thesefounding elections producedpeaceful leadership turnover forthe first time since indepen-dence, as 13 former authoritar-ian incumbents who ran for elec-tion were defeated, while 15 werere-elected. In a novel politicaldevelopment for Africa, formerauthoritarian rulers who weredefeated in the founding elec-tions were returned to office inthe second round of democraticelections in Benin and Madagas-car.

Measures of levels of politi­cal participation and electoralcompetition in founding elec­tions also confirm the dramatic nature ofMrica's third wave democratic transitions.Measuring the level of political participationby voter turnout as percentage of registeredvoters indicates an overall average turnoutof 64 percent across the 29 countries hold­ing founding elections. This figure is nothigh by global standards, but is impressivenevertheless, especially ifwe recall that mostof these countries were governed for overtwo decades by authoritarian regimes whicheither proscribed or tightly controlled po­litical participation. Measuring electoralcompetition by the winner's share of votesas a percentage of total votes cast indicatesan average winner's share of 63 percent forthe 29 countries holding founding elections.This equally impressive figure indicates that,after an extended period of authoritarianrule with limited political opportunities,

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because the construction of a new demo­cratic order requires crafting new rules ofgovernance whose potential costs and ben­efits reside obscurely in the future. Sinceauthoritarian incumbents and pro-democ­racy elites who craft democracies can onlyanticipate without fully knowing these fu­ture costs and benefits, they will prefer rulesthat will favor their particular interests inthe new democratic order. With their cur­rent power relations defining their conflict­ing interests, they struggle to design therules of the new democratic order. Thisstruggle animates the politics of democratictransitions. All new democracies, whetherin the first, second or third wave, thusemerge as improvised, negotiated and of­ten unintended second-best solutions tothis quintessential political struggle.

The nature of this struggle and thetypes of democracies emerging from it inMrica today is best illustrated by examiningthe politics surrounding the choice of elec­toral systems. The choice of an electoralsystem-the sets of rules that regulate com­petitive elections and determine their out­comes-is one of the most important po­litical decisions made in emerging democ­racies, because competitive elections are theprincipal-but not the only-institutionalmeans for securing political representationand access to valued state resources in allmodern democracies. Particularly criticalin new democracies is the choice ofan elec­toral formula for translating votes into seats.Plurality (or majority) formulas, tradition­ally used in Britain and the United States(and France), require political parties to wina relative (or absolute) majority of votes inorder to win legislative seats, and usuallydiscriminate against smaller parties. Pro­portional representation (PR) formulas,widely used in Western Europe, allocate leg­islative seats in proportion to the votes wonby political parties, and usually favor smallerparties.

The two formulas embody different vi­sions of democratic politics that define dif­ferent types of democracy. Plurality formu­las embody a majoritarian vision of demo­cratic politics that clearly defines the locusof political authority and accountability,whereby incumbent and opposition partiespresent voters with clear policy choices, vot­ers elect the party closest to their policy pref­erences, and the winning party governs un­til the next election. PR formulas embodya consensus vision of democratic politics

Table 1. The Political Dynamics of Bectoral SystemsChoice in Africa's Third Wave Democratic Transitions

Balance 01 Plurality Proportional

Polilical Power (Majorily) RepresenlationElectoral Systems Electoral Systems

Favorable to CameroonAuthoritarian Central Africa Rep.Incumbents Comoros(or to Small CongoNumbers of Cote d'ivoireLarge Groups) Gabon

Gambia (1996)GhanaKenyaLesothoTanzania.TogoZimbabwe (1985)Zambia

Favorable to BeninPro-Democracy Burkina FasoForces Burundi

Cape VerdeGuineaGuinea-BissauMadagascarNigerSao Tome &Principe

Equally Divided AngolaBetween Incumbents Liberiaand Opponents MozambiqueEngaged in Civil War Namibia

Sierra LeoneSouth AfricaZimbabwe (1980)

Table 1

that contains a more inclusive definition ofdemocratic governance, whereby a varietyof parties present socially diverse voters awide range of policy choices, parties andvoters are proportionally represented, anda coalition government is formed by bar­gaining among winning parties, virtually allor most ofwhich are represented at one timeor another in shifting governing coalitions.

In Mrica's third wave democratic tran­sitions, the choice of electoral systems withcorresponding visions of democratic poli­tics reflects the outcome of three distinctpolitical dynamics, each distinguished bythe relative balance of political power be­tween authoritarian incumbents and thepro-democracy forces (see Table 1). First,plurality (or majority) electoral systems weregenerally chosen in those countries inwhich the balance of political power favoredthe authoritarian incumbents. They werealso chosen in a small number of countriesin which the authoritarian rulers departedbefore the onset of democratization, and thepolitics animating the choice of electoralsystems was dominated by a small numberof large pro-democracy groups either with

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a national support base (e.g. Mali) or a re­gionally-concentrated support base (e.g.Malawi). In all these countries, the relativepower balance enabled the favored groupsto virtually dictate the choice of new elec­toral systems, with their known supportbase and local dominance offering protec­tion against opposition in competitive elec­tions.

Second, PR electoral systems were cho­sen in countries in which the balance of po­litical power favored the pro-democracyforces, because of the following politicallogic. In all these countries, pro-democracyforces were multiparty coalitions with thepotential of splitting during and after theelections. On the one hand, therefore, op­position leaders wished to reinforce futureelectoral opportunities for themselves as ablock vis-a-vis the authoritarian incum­bents. On the other, they wished to protectfuture opportunities for their individual par­ties that provisionally comprised the presentcoalition against the authoritarian incum­bents. The choice of PR systems was a stra­tegically rational response to these twin po­liticallogics.

Finally, PR electoral systems were cho­sen in deeply-divided countries which ex­perienced recent civil wars or near-civil warconditions (e.g. South Mrica). In all thesecountries, protracted violent conflicts even­tually produced what political scientist andnegotiation expert I. William Zartman hascharacterized as a situation of "mutuallyhurting stalemate." This is a situation be­yond which further conflict is recognizedby all combatants to be mutually destruc­tive. In the ensuing negotiated settlementsto these conflicts, the choice of PR electoralsystems offered the most strategically ratio­nal option to protect the future political in­terests of all parties in the new democraticorder.

The South Mrican solution, of course,attracted the most press coverage in theUnited States, but that coverage failed toreport that the fatally flawed apartheid sys­tem and its debilitating legacies preventedboth Nelson Mandela and De Klerk initiallyfrom accepting and articulating a consen­sus vision of democratic politics. Neitherleader, as a result, preferred a PR electoralsystem as his first choice. The PR systemthat guided South Mrica's historic demo­cratic transition was adopted after two yearsofvigorous national debate and intense po­litical negotiations. In the other six coun-

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tries listed in Table 1 under this pattern ofelectoral systems choice, there never wasany discussion of plurality (or majority) sys­tems, even though Liberia and Sierra Leonehad employed plurality systems in theirfailed experiments with democracy in the1970s, and Zimbabwe eventually returnedto a plurality system in 1985. In negotiat­ing democratic transitions as settlementsto protracted conflicts, the choice of PR sys­tems represents a critical confidence-build­ing strategy aimed at encouraging violentpolitical enemies to become peaceful politi­cal adversaries. That such systems are cho­sen in countries which have no previous ex­perience with them suggest, more broadly,that democracies are neither historically de­termined nor culturally prescribed, but arecrafted by strategically rational actors tem­pered by political calculations in changingcontexts.

The Prospects for SustainingDemocracy in Africa

What are the prospects for sustainingAfrica's third wave democracies? Definitiveanswers would be premature, since notenough time has elapsed to accumulate sys­tematic data on the performance of thesedemocracies. Several possibilities suggestthemselves, however. First, the prospectsfor sustaining new democracies in Africa arelikely to increase with the ability of newdemocratic institutions to manage politicalconflicts peacefully. Political conflicts arethe inevitable concomitants of routine de­cisions about the allocation of scarce soci­etal resources, and the distinguishing hall­mark of all democracies is the provision ofinstitutional opportunities for their orga­nized expression and peaceful management(contra authoritarian regimes, which dealwith political conflicts by attempting toeliminate them altogether). Particularlyimportant are provisions for power-sharingamong major political groups. Such provi­sions were instrumental in the success ofSouth Africa's democratic transition, amongothers; their absence or ambiguous lan­guage contributed to the failure of demo­cratic transition in Angola and the brutaltragedy in Rwanda. In the absence of for­mal provisions, informal power-sharingstrategies can also be pursued. For example,in Guinea, Malawi, and Senegal, among oth­ers, political parties winning the transitionalelections have invited the leaders of majorlosing parties to join national coalition gov-

ernments as a means of legitimizing thenew democratic order.

Second, and related to the first, the newdemocratic institutions must provide for ad­equate opportunities for both present and

'future political representation. A crucialweakness of African authoritarian regimeswas their arbitrary exclusion and inclusionof targeted groups from political power,which increased unpredictability, aggra­vated fears of permanent exclusion (orworse), and destroyed any prospects of se­curing 10ng-terl11 allegiance to the regimes.To the extent that democratic sustainabilityrequires a long-term horizon, political ac­tors require incentives to play by the rules,especially when they lose. One key sourceof this incentive is the recognition thattoday's loser will have the opportunity tobecome tomorrow's winners. The institu­tional design of electoral systems is espe­cially important in this respect. Thus, PRformulas have fostered political inclusive­ness in such deeply-divided societies asBenin, Namibia, and Sierra Leone. How­ever, plurality systems have also producedsimilar outcomes when voters (usually fromthe same ethnic group) are regionally con­centrated and vote as a block, as, for ex­ample, in Malawi.

Third, improved prospects for demo­cratic sustainability require institutionalflexibility. Once crafted, institutions (setsof rules) tend to stick, promoting peace andstability. But they are unlikely to do so ef­fectively if they foster socially undesirableoutcomes. Institutional reform is then bestachieved when rules are new and politicalactors are just beginning to learn their costsand benefits. As the experience of severalEast European third wave democraciesshow, reform of newly-introduced electoralsystems is particularly instrumental in sta­bilizing otherwise fragile democracies. Thesurvival ofAfrica's fragile third wave democ­racies will also depend on their ability toaddress this dilemma. Countries such asBenin, Burkina Faso and Mali have alreadysuccessfully reformed their new electoralsystems via an inclusive process of politicalnegotiations involving government, oppo­sition, and key civil society actors. Similardebates are underway in Kenya, where thepresent plurality system heavily favors theincumbent, and in Namibia and South M­rica, where the present PR systems, despitetheir initial success, give too much powerto political party leaders over the rank-and-

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file members in selecting political candi­dates.

Fourth, widely accepted rules, evenwhen they have undesirable consequences,promote political stability, and political sta­bility is an essential condition for economicdevelopment. Even as they have challengedthe conventional wisdom that economicgrowth is necessary for democratic transi­tion, the experiences of third wave democ­racies in Latin America and Southern andEastern Europe suggest that economicgrowth is necessary for the survival of newdemocracies after they are born and that po­litical stability grounded in widely-acceptedrules of the game is a strong foundation foreconomic growth. Perhaps more crucially,even when such growth has occurredthrough harsh and unpopular structural ad­justment policies that have lowered livingstandards, the recognized fairness of demo­cratic rules have substituted as much-need"political capital" for the survival of demo­cratic governments in otherwise fledglingthird wave democracies. Whether Africa'sfledgling third wave democracies have de­veloped such political capital, or are likelyto do so in the future, is unclear. But, asthe well-known West African proverb says:"No condition is permanent!" ~

Shaheen Mozaffar is Associate Professor ofPolitical Science and Research Fellow of theBoston University African Studies Center.