Democracy

While past studies have put forward many reasons why partisanship in young African democracies should be considered weak and meaningless, this paper casts doubt on this notion by presenting evidence of strong and stable patterns of partisanship among ordinary citizens. Based on survey data from Ghana, I exploit the variation introduced by the political turnovers of 2008 and 2016 to compare perceptions and attitudes of party supporters when their preferred party is in power and when it is not.

Elections play a crucial role in every democratic system of government as a mechanism for producing a legislature that is representative of the policy preferences of the electorate (Thomassen, 2014), linking citizens’ priorities to the behavior of their policy makers (Powell, 2000). By the same logic, elections enable voters to select leaders and hold them accountable for their performance in office. In other words, the electoral process determines who should stay in office, who should be thrown out of office, and who should replace those who are thrown out (Harrop & Miller, 1987).

Popular trust in public institutions and officials is an important indicator of political legitimacy, a key resource for the development and functioning of modern democracies (Freitag & Bühlmann, 2009; Chingwete, 2016; Mishler & Rose, 2001; Newton, 2001). However, some analysts argue that while trust is important in a democracy, citizens would be naïve if they didn’t have a certain level of distrust as well (van de Walle & Six, 2004).

La Guinée vient d’adopter une nouvelle Constitution suite au référendum controversé du 22 mars 2020, qui a été couplé avec des élections législatives ayant conduit à la mise en place d’une nouvelle Assemblée Nationale. Ce double scrutin a été boycotté par bon nombre de Guinéens. La nouvelle Constitution stipule que le Président de la République est élu pour un mandat de six ans, renouvelable une fois.

In 2015, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) recommended that Lesotho undertake wide-ranging reforms of the Constitution, Parliament, the judiciary, and the public and security sectors (Post, 2017). These recommendations followed a 2014 coup attempt, then-Prime Minister Thomas Thabane’s escape to South Africa, the assassination of army commander Lt. Gen. Maaparankoe Mahao, and an SADC intervention.  

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Une grande majorité de Béninois ont constamment soutenu la limitation de leur président à un maximum de deux mandats. Mais ils ont résisté à la révision de la constitution qui visait la limitation du nombre de mandats présidentiels à un seul. Et les nouvelles données d'Afrobaromètre montrent que cette résistance se poursuit, mais avec une plus petite majorité.

In contrast to sub-Saharan Africa, where many countries experienced political liberalization during the late 1980s and early 1990s (Bratton, 1997), the authoritarian regimes of North Africa were largely able to resist popular demands for transformation by introducing limited, topdown reforms. In Tunisia, there were some improvements to political freedoms after Zine El Abidine Ben Ali took office in 1988 and was elected as president the following year in the country’s first election since 1972 (Abushouk, 2016).

Six years after protests swept Northern Africa in the Arab Spring, Algeria entered 2017 with unrest in the streets. Like many other petro-economies, Algeria relies heavily on high state spending and subsidies. But in recent years, plummeting oil and gas prices have hit the county’s economy hard. Algeria generates about 95% of its export earnings from oil, and faced with dwindling revenues and reserves, the government has been tasked with reducing state spending by 9% in 2016 and another 14% at the beginning of this year (Falconer, 2017; Stratfor, 2017; Wrey, 2017).

ALSO AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH.

ALSO AVAILABLE IN PORTUGUESE.

Vote-buying is defined as a transaction whereby candidates distribute private goods such as cash and gifts in exchange for electoral support or higher turnout. The direct implication of this definition is that vote shares and turnout would have been lower in the absence of electoral handouts. While there is ample evidence that candidates target certain voters with cash handouts, it is unclear whether these handouts actually result in greater turnout or higher vote shares in favour of the distributing candidate.

In early 2016, five years after the beginning of the Arab Spring, the Economist (2016) reported that hopes raised by the uprisings had been destroyed. “The wells of despair are overflowing,” the newspaper said, the uprisings having brought “nothing but woe.” In addition to stagnant economic growth, rent-seeking was “rampant,” security forces continued to repress the population, and grounds were more fertile than ever for the emergence of radicals “who posit their own brutal vision of Islamic Utopia as the only solution.”