Party Systems and Democracy in Africa Party Systems and Democracy in Africa

Edited by

Renske Doorenspleet and Lia Nijzink Selection and Editorial Matter © Renske Doorenspleet and Lia Nijzink 2014 Individual chapters © Respective authors 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-43649-1 ISBN 978-1-137-01171-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137011718 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Party systems and democracy in Africa / [edited by] Renske Doorenspleet, associate professor of Comparative Politics, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK, Lia Nijzink, senior researcher, Law, Race and Gender Unit, University of South Africa. pages cm Summary: “Do party systems help or hinder democracy in Africa? This collection offers important new insights into the relation between party systems and democracy on the African continent. It presents a comparative analysis of how African party systems influence procedural aspects of democracy such as accountability and government responsiveness and also shows how party systems affect citizens’ satisfaction. It paints a vivid picture of the one-party dominant systems in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa and how these impede the deepening of democracy. Drawing lessons from Benin, Ghana and Zambia, it also portrays the fluidity of African party systems and draw attention to the importance of party system change. The insightful contributions show that African party systems affect democracy in ways that are different from the relation between party systems and democracy observed elsewhere” — Provided by publisher. ISBN 978–1–137–01170–1 (hardback) 1. Political parties—Africa, Sub-Saharan. 2. Democracy—Africa, Sub-Saharan. 3. Africa, Sub-Saharan—Politics and government—1960– I. Doorenspleet, Renske, 1973– II. Nijzink, Lia. JQ1879.A795P37 2014 324.20967—dc23 2014029174 Contents

List of Tables and Figures vii

Acknowledgements viii

Notes on Contributors ix

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations xiii

1 Do Party Systems Matter for Democracy in Africa? 1 Renske Doorenspleet and Lia Nijzink

2 Multiparty Elections in Africa: For Better or Worse 22 Matthijs Bogaards

Part I One-Party-Dominant Systems

3 South Africa: Electoral Dominance, Identity Politics and Democracy 47 Steven Friedman

4 Botswana: Presidential Ambitions, Party Factions and the Durability of a Dominant Party 69 Christian John Makgala and Shane Mac Giollabhuí

5 Namibia: From Liberation to Domination 87 Henning Melber

Part II Other Party Systems

6 Ghana: The African Exemplar of an Institutionalized Two-Party System? 107 Cyril K. Daddieh and George M. Bob-Milliar

7 Benin: A Pulverized Party System in Transition 129 Rachel M. Gisselquist

8 Zambia: Dominance Won and Lost 148 Dan Paget

v vi Contents

Part III Conclusion

9 Do Party Systems Help or Hinder Democracy in Africa? 171 Renske Doorenspleet and Lia Nijzink

Index 188 Tables and Figures

Tables

1.1 Results of parliamentary and presidential elections in six selected countries 10 2.1 Freedom House combined ratings after consecutive elections in Africa 31 2.2 Regime change and stability over successive elections in Africa 32 2.3 Stability and change in authoritarian regimes in Africa 36 7.1 Number of parliamentary groups in Benin since 1991 135 7.2 Results of parliamentary and presidential elections in Benin since 1991 136 8.1 Results of parliamentary and presidential elections in Zambia 149

Figure

9.1 Public opinion about democracy in six African countries (In your opinion how much of a democracy is your country today?) 177

vii Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the Development Partnerships in Higher Educa- tion (DelPHE) Programme of the British Council and the Department for International Development (UK). This programme has funded the Accountable Government in Africa Project, a South–North partnership of the University of Cape Town’s Department of Public Law (South Africa) with the Universities of Warwick (UK) and Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania). The partnership project provided financial assistance to us to organize an international conference that brought together many of the con- tributors to this book. Additional assistance for this conference came from the Institute for Advanced Studies (University of Warwick) and the Department of Politics and International Studies (University of Warwick). We are grateful for their support. The conference Party Systems and the Future of Democracy in Sub- Saharan Africa was held from 22 to 24 September 2011 and hosted by the Centre for Studies in Democratisation of the University of Warwick. We would like to extend our gratitude to everyone who contributed to the success of our conference. We especially appreciate the enthusiasm with which all conference delegates participated in the proceedings and gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Prof. Lars Svasand (Uni- versity of Bergen, Norway), Prof. Peter Burnell (Warwick University, UK) and Prof. Vicky Randall (University of Essex, UK) who served as discussants. Our special thanks go to the chapter authors of this book who promptly attended to our queries and requests during the editing process and to everyone at Palgrave Macmillan for their professional assistance. With special appreciation, we remember Prof. Gero Erdmann, a kind and committed colleague. His death is a great loss to our community of scholars working on parties and party systems in Africa. And finally, to Martin, Jinte, Marijn, Chris and Zara: thank you & bedankt & dankie!

viii Contributors

Editors

Renske Doorenspleet is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK. She is also Director of the Centre for Studies in Democrati- sation. Her research interests include democracy and democratization, political institutions, comparative politics and Africa. Her work has been published in World Politics,theEuropean Journal of Political Research, Acta Politica, Democratization and the International Political Science Review.She is the author of Democratic Transitions: Exploring the Structural Sources of the Fourth Wave (2005) and the co-editor, with Lia Nijzink, of One-Party Dominance in African Democracies (2013).

Lia Nijzink is a political scientist based in Cape Town, South Africa. She has extensive experience in capacity building, teaching and research with various South African and African organizations, including the University of Cape Town, the National Assembly of Nigeria and the Netherlands Institute for Multi-Party Democracy. Her publications include Accountable Government in Africa (2012), Electoral Politics in South Africa: Assessing the First Democratic Decade (2005) and Building Representative Democracy: South Africa’s Legislatures and the Constitution (2002). With Renske Doorenspleet, she has edited One-Party Dominance in African Democracies (2013).

Contributors

George M. Bob-Milliar received his PhD from the University of Ghana in 2012. He currently lectures at the Department of History and Polit- ical Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. His research interests include democratic studies, politi- cal economy of development, qualitative methods and African diaspora. His articles have appeared in leading journals including African Affairs, Journal of Modern African Studies, Democratization, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Africa and International Journal of African Historical Stud- ies. He has received prizes both for his published work (African Author Prize 2010) and for his contribution to research on African policy

ix x Notes on Contributors issues (Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) 2012, Waterloo).

Matthijs Bogaards is Professor of Political Science at the Jacobs Univer- sity Bremen, Germany. He obtained his PhD in Political Science from the European University Institute in Florence in 2000. His research interests include democracy in divided societies, institutional design, democratization, electoral systems and political parties. His most recent publication is a book with Palgrave Macmillan on consociational parties, comparing the representation and accommodation of ethnic diversity in seven dominant parties around the world.

Cyril K. Daddieh (PhD Dalhousie) is Professor of Political Science and Director of Graduate Studies at Miami University, USA. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana). His research interests include conflict man- agement, governance and social accountability, gender issues in African higher education, parties and political campaigns, elections and demo- cratic consolidation in Africa. He has written extensively on the political economies and foreign policies of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

Steven Friedman is Director of the Centre for the Study of Democ- racy at Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He researched and wrote widely on the South African transition to democracy and is the editor of The Long Journey and The Small Miracle (with Doreen Atkinson), which presented the outcome of two research projects on the South African transition. His current work focuses on the theory and practice of democracy. His study of South African radi- cal thought Race, Class and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid will be published in 2014. He is also a media commentator on the development of South African democracy and the author of a weekly newspaper column.

Rachel M. Gisselquist is a political scientist and is currently a Research Fellow with the United Nations University’s World Institute for Devel- opment Economics Research (UNU-WIDER). She works on the politics of the developing world, with particular interest in ethnic politics and inequality, democratization, state fragility and governance in sub- Saharan Africa. She has conducted fieldwork in multiple locations, including dissertation fieldwork in Benin on why and how political par- ties mobilize along ethnic and class lines in elections. She holds a PhD in Notes on Contributors xi

Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Boston, USA).

Shane Mac Giollabhuí is Departmental Lecturer in the Politics of Africa at St Peter’s College, University of Oxford, UK. Over the past years, he has held lectureships at University College Cork and Dublin City University, as well as a postdoctoral fellowship at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. Mac Giollabhuí has a broad interest in the the- ory and methodology of the social sciences, though he specializes in the comparative politics of African democracies. He is the author of ‘Things Fall Apart: Candidate Selection and the Cohesion of Parties in South Africa and Namibia’, which appeared in the July issue of Party Politics (2013).

Christian John Makgala is Associate Professor of History at the Uni- versity of Botswana. He has published on work ethics, race relations in Botswana and South Africa, Botswana’s economic diversification effort, monetary history of Botswana, refugees and illegal immigrants in Botswana and South Africa, witchcraft and magic in Botswana. He is the author/editor of Elite Conflict in Botswana: A History (2006), History of Botswana Manual Workers Union (2007) and History of the Bakgatla-baga- Kgafela in Botswana & South Africa (2009) and has co-authored History of Botswana Public Employees Union (2010) and The 2011 BOFEPUSU Strike (2014). Makgala is also an historical novelist and literary critic. His lit- erary works are The Dixie Medicine Man (2010) and The Paroled Pastor (2014).

Henning Melber is a political scientist and sociologist and Direc- tor Emeritus/Senior Advisor of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden, where he was the Research Director at the Nordic Africa Institute earlier (2000–2006). Between 1992 and 2000, he was the Director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research United (NEPRU) in Windhoek. He is Extraordinary Professor at the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pretoria and at the Centre for Africa Studies of the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He is editor-in-chief of the Strategic Review for Southern Africa, managing co- editor of Africa Spectrum and co-editor of the Africa Yearbook (published since 2005). His latest book is Understanding Namibia (2014).

Dan Paget studies political parties in sub-Saharan Africa. He currently conducts research in Tanzania and Botswana for his doctorate in Politics xii Notes on Contributors at St Cross College, University of Oxford. His primary interests are politi- cal party campaigns, and he hopes that by examining them, he will shed light on parties’ resources and comparative advantages in political mobi- lization. In the past, Paget has worked on political party messages in developing countries, and his published work has connected politiciza- tion of civil society groups and the formation of programmatic parties. He cut his teeth studying political parties in Zambia, where he studied populism in the opposition and factionalism in the government. Acronyms and Abbreviations

AFRC Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (Ghana) AFU Strength in Unity Alliance (Benin) ANC African National Congress (South Africa) AU African Union BDP Botswana Democratic Party (Botswana) BMD Botswana Movement for Democracy (Botswana) BNF Botswana National Front (Botswana) CERD Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination CoD Congress of Democrats (Namibia) COPE Congress of the People (South Africa) CPP Convention People’s Party (Ghana) DA Democratic Alliance (South Africa) DFP Democratic Freedom Party (Ghana) DPP Democratic People’s Party (Ghana) EC Electoral Commission ECN Election Commission of Namibia ECOWAS Economic Community of West African States ENEP Effective Number of Electoral Parties ENLP Effective Number of Legislative Parties FARD-Alafia Action Front for Renewal and Development-Alafia (Benin) FCBE Cauri Forces for an Emerging Benin (Benin) FDD Forum for Democracy and Development (Zambia) FPTP First Past The Post GBA Ghana Bar Association (Ghana) GCP Ghana Congress Party (Ghana) GDP Gross Domestic Product HP Heritage Party (Zambia) ID Identity Document IFP Inkatha Freedom Party (South Africa) IPAC Inter-Party Advisory Committee (Ghana) MAP Muslim Association Party (Ghana) MMD Movement for Multiparty Democracy (Zambia) MP Member of Parliament

xiii xiv List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

NCBWA National Congress of British West Africa (Ghana) NDC National Democratic Congress (Ghana) NGO Non-Governmental Organisation NIP National Independence Party (Ghana) NLC National Liberation Council (Ghana) NLM National Liberation Movement (Ghana) NPP New Patriotic Party (Ghana) NRC National Redemption Council (Ghana) NUNW National Union of Namibian Workers (Namibia) OPO Ovamboland People’s Organisation (Namibia) PF Patriotic Front (Zambia) PHP People’s Heritage Party (Ghana) PNC People’s National Convention (Ghana) PNDC Provisional National Defence Council (Ghana) PNP People’s National Party (Ghana) PR Proportional Representation PRB Renaissance Party of Benin (Benin) PP Progress Party (Ghana) PRD Democratic Renewal Party (Benin) PSD Social Democratic Party (Benin) RDP Rally or Democracy and Progress (Namibia) RP Republican Party (Zambia) RPD Reformed Patriotic Democrats (Ghana) SADC Southern African Development Community SDP Social Democratic Party (Sweden) SOE State Owned Enterprise SWAPO South West African People’s Organisation (Namibia) TC Togoland Congress (Ghana) UB Union for Benin (Benin) UBF Union for the Benin of the Future (Benin) UGCC United Gold Coast Convention (Ghana) UN United Nations UNDP United Nations Development Programme UNIP United National Independence Party (Zambia) UP United Party (Ghana) UPND United Party for National Development (Zambia) UTRD Union for the Triumph of Democratic Renewal (Benin) ZCTU Zambia Congress of Trade Unions (Zambia)