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Parties in chains: Do ethnic party bans in Africa promote peace?
Abstract
Since the sweeping (re)introduction of multiparty systems in the early 1990s, almost all sub-Saharan countries have introduced legal provisions to ban ethnic or other identity-based particularistic parties. Altogether, 12 countries have actually banned political parties on these grounds. In theoretical terms, such bans can exclude particularism from politics but - contrary to public discourse - also run the risk of forcing groups to resort to violent means or of becoming an object of conflict themselves. Empirically speaking, hardly any general patterns in the effects of bans can be detected. A closer look at 12 politically relevant bans in six countries reveals an initially stabilizing impact in one case (Rwanda in 1994). A ban on a religious party in Kenya in 1993 triggered violent conflict. In cases such as Equatorial Guinea (1994) and Rwanda (2001, 2003), this regulatory measure, allegedly designed to promote peace, seems to be part of the 'menu of manipulation' and is abused to suppress the opposition.
... institutions have yet to bear fruit: Basedau and Moroff (2011) report that regulations against identity parties that were introduced in Africa in the 1990s did not reduce the incidents of violent conflict in the continent. Moroff (2011) points out that, except for the ruling party, most political parties in Tanzania and Uganda, in which regulation on ethnic parties started earlier, still rely on specific geographical support just like parties in Kenya, where the introduction of regulations lagged behind. ...
... institutions have yet to bear fruit: Basedau and Moroff (2011) report that regulations against identity parties that were introduced in Africa in the 1990s did not reduce the incidents of violent conflict in the continent. Moroff (2011) points out that, except for the ruling party, most political parties in Tanzania and Uganda, in which regulation on ethnic parties started earlier, still rely on specific geographical support just like parties in Kenya, where the introduction of regulations lagged behind. ...
... However, all pre-existing formulae (Cheeseman and Ford 2007;Huber 2011;Moroff 2011;Dowd and Driessen 2008) rely on the relationship between voters' linguistic affiliations and the parties for which they voted or intend to vote for. The reason why these approaches cannot measure ethnic voting correctly becomes evident by imagining a simple hypothetical situation where only two groups (A and B) exist. ...
The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the origins of inter-ethnic hostility, which need to be
addressed if the centripetalism institutions are to function properly. Using intention of ethnic
voting as an indicator of inter-group discrimination, this paper tests several classic hypotheses
adapted from social psychology based on the surveys conducted in 14 urban areas from six sub-Saharan African countries. Results show, among others, that horizontal inequalities, when
perceived either advantageously or disadvantageously, actually increase the level of inter-group
hostility, but that the malicious effect is context-dependent: a greedy tendency in terms of
socio-economic group inequality is limited to non-minorities; minorities who think their own group is superior to others economically do not have stronger hostility towards others compared
to those who do not see any socio-economic gap; perceived horizontal inequalities matter chiefly
in the countries without any kind of political power mobility; hostility between groups is not
associated with perceived horizontal inequalities in countries where experience of power sharing
or change of government has convinced people that political change is not impossible.
... The political system dummy variable is coded as 1 for countries with a multi-party system and 0 for countries with other party systems. Basedau and Moroff (2011) and Goldsmith (2015) have revealed that a nexus exists between political systems and peace (Table 1). ...
The nexus between democracy and peace in Africa is examined by applying data to 42 sub‐Saharan African (SSA) countries between 2008 and 2020. The study used panel regression techniques that include Ordinary Least Squares, the Tobit regression to account for the limited range of the dependent variable, and the System Generalized Method of Moments to account for endogeneity bias. Using seven indicators of democracy, which include electoral democracy, liberal democracy, participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, egalitarian democracy, a total democracy index derived from principal component analysis, and the Polity2 score, and using the global peace index as a proxy for peace, our findings show that all the indicators of democracy, irrespective of the model, have a positive and significant influence on peace in SSA. The result has underscored the importance of advancing democratic practices and values to promote sustainable peace and stability in the region.
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... In Europe, the ethnicisation of party systems, e.g. in Ulster/Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Hercegovina and South Tyrol, has complicated or monopolised the forming of governments. When multi-party systems evolved in many sub-Saharan African countries in the 1990s, several of them included legal provisions against, or even banned, ethnic or other identity-based particularistic parties due to widespread fears that they increase the risk of inter-communal conflict (Basedau & Moroff, 2011). The hypothesis that ethnicised party systems emphasise or promote ethnic tensions is based on the theory that political parties represent societal cleavages (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967). ...
Group rights for the Palestinian-Arab minority are commonly considered in Israeli Jewish society as undermining Israel's Jewish character. In light of this hostility to group rights to the Arab minority in Israel, an important question should be answered: How come does Israel de facto recognize several group rights that in fact protect and enhance Palestinian-Arab culture in Israel?
I argue that in order to answer this question, a distinction should be drawn between non-territorial group rights and semi-territorial group rights for the Palestinian-Arab minority. When group rights for the Arab minority are exercised in a non-territorial fashion, in a space which is shared by Jews and Palestinian-Arabs, Jews are more likely to resist them. However, when group rights for the Arab minority are limited to a specific semi-territory, such as schools in which the teaching language is Arabic, or Sharia courts that bind only Muslims, they tend to be much less controversial.
The best example of non-territorial group rights is comprehensive language rights. That is, language rights that make Arabic visible in public spaces that are common to Jews and Arabs, such as streets, roads, bus stops, municipal symbols, government websites, and trains.
As opposed to the common opinion in Israel among Jews, I will stress that not only do non-territorial group rights not risk Israel's Jewish character, but they also enhance Israel's democratic character. Comprehensive language rights for the Palestinian-Arab minority, for example, have never risked the dominant status of Hebrew. They therefore do not pose any risk to Israel's Jewish character. On the positive side, comprehensive language rights for the Arab minority do have the potential to enhance Israel's democratic character by enhancing the current vulnerable civic status of Palestinian-Arabs in Israel, mitigating their constant exclusion from the public sphere.
... Basedau and Moroff (2011) study 12 party bans in sub-Saharan Africa, with mixed findings. ...
... Although the paper does not make a claim that the results are simply transposable to other cases, the approach and mechanisms suggested by this study might offer a useful way to start thinking about the more pro-longed effects of war on national politics. This paper goes beyond the rebel groups and their transformation to political parties, immediate party politics following peace agreements, and elite driven coalition bargaining which often form the usual research agenda many scholars focus on in the context of post-conflict societies (Zeeuw 2008;Manning 2007;Basedau and Moroff 2011;Ishiyama and Marshall 2017;Marshall and Ishiyama 2016). The paper operates on a level of everyday reality of MPs and what they say hoping only handful of people is listening years after the war is over. ...
The paper analyses almost fifteen years of Croatian parliamentary debates and identifies a discourse of war legacies. Using the latest advancements in natural language processing, the paper utilizes models based on latent semantic analysis and discusses how politicians talk about war in terms of common narratives and shared frameworks. Using a complex vector representation of war-related concepts, the paper specifically focuses on their framing in the context of right-wing authoritarianism. The results show a negative trend of pushing the most frequent war-related concepts to more extreme framing as a potential reflection of their political abuse and ongoing mythologization.
... In highly divided societies with a history of ethnic conflict, parties can play a role in: (1) translating socio-cultural divisions as ethnic-based parties; (2) aggregating differences as multi-ethnic parties; or (3) blocking the organization of socio-cultural issues as non-ethnic parties (Bogaards 2010, p. 731). 5 Indeed, in Sub-Saharan Africa, fears of politicizing ethnicity, entrenching cleavages, and ethnic violence have led to ethnic party bans in various countries (Bogaards et al. 2015;Basedau and Moroff 2011). It is beyond the scope of this article to address the normative or practical questions of which ethnic group deserves to be represented, or the best mode of ethnic accommodation for Myanmar (Dovi 2002). ...
Party system stability is core to new democracies. In Myanmar’s 2015 general elections, more than 90 political parties competed but only 11 won seats. Will the proliferation of parties undermine Myanmar’s party system stability? Given its single-member plurality electoral system and ethno-geographically segregated electoral landscape, what kind of ethnic parties are likely to be electable? This paper addresses these questions by examining how Myanmar’s electoral system affects the electability of small ethnic parties and party system stability. Specifically, we compare the mechanical and psychological effects of the electoral system on ethnic parties and voters since the creation of an ethnically segregated geographical landscape after 2008. For mechanical effects, we compare the degree of disproportionality, extra or ‘bonus’ seats, and how malapportionment affects small ethnic parties. For psychological effects, we examine how electoral experiences shape voting behavior and ethnic party strategy. Our findings, based on limited electoral data and recent party developments, indicate that, in addition to the mechanical effects of electoral institutions, the electoral success of ethnic parties are dependent on the geographic distribution of seats, concentration of voter support, strategic fielding of candidates in underpopulated constituencies, and co-ordination with other parties to prevent vote splitting.
... The structural group covers predominantly the structural characteristics of political parties and their systems. Typical examples would be studies of party organisation (Sindre 2016;Reilly 2006), party leadership and candidate recruitment (Khazen 2003;Lyons 2016;Ishiyama and Marshall 2015), various networks of cooperation (Taleski 2012), the party system itself (Jarstad and Sisk 2008;Goeke 2016), typology and characteristics of political parties (Reilly and Nordlund 2008), electoral system designs and their effects on political parties (Reilly 2008;Ishiyama 2014), or institutional restrictions such as party bans imposed on political representation (Basedau and Moroff 2011). The functional group, on the other hand, focuses on the political parties' actions and functions. ...
wars are extreme events with profound social consequences. political science, however, has a limited grasp of their impact on the nature and content of political competition which follows in their wake. that is partly the case due to a lack of conceptual clarity when it comes to capturing the effects of war with reliable data. this article systematises and evaluates the attempts at modelling the consequences of war in political science research which relies on quantitative methods. our discussion is organised around three levels of analysis: individual level of voters, institutional level of political parties, and the aggregate level of communities. we devote particular attention to modelling the legacies of the most recent wars in southeast europe, and we offer our view of which efforts have the best potential to help set the foundations of a promising research programme. © 2019 Croatia Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
... There is an extensive literature about the causes that explain the emergence and features of the ethnic parties (Van Cott 2003Basedau and Moroff 2011;Chandra 2011), their electoral success (Chandra 2004;Ferree and Horowitz 2010), and, in some cases, the study of the ethnic voters as 'bloc voting' (Wolfinger 1965;Mattes 1995;Norris and Mattes 2003;Collet 2005;Ishiyama 2012). Nevertheless, the study of the electoral behaviour of ethnic groups considering opinion polls and aggregate data by districts has been less attended. ...
In this article, we evaluate ethnic solidarity and the vote in Chile with reference to the Mapuche, the largest and most traditional ethnic group in the country. We use electoral data from the mayoral elections of 2012, drawn from all the municipalities of the Araucanía, the region with the largest percentage of Mapuche population. Using a multi-level linear regression model and controlling for poverty and rurality, we found that Mapuche candidates, regardless of their political orientation, were indeed more successful than non-Mapuche candidates in areas with the greatest concentration of Mapuche voters. Additionally, we used results from an unpublished opinion survey conducted in three municipalities of the Araucanía. We concluded that after controlling for other variables ethnic solidarity prevails as a robust predictor of electoral behaviour, albeit more strongly in rural areas than urban ones. The Chilean case, moreover, is useful for studying the strategies used by the traditional parties that promote this solidarity – that is, by presenting candidates with Mapuche surnames in their lists.
... Ethnic recognition is distinct from nondiscrimination clauses that bar differential treatment based on ethnicity. Recognition also stands in contrast to bans on references to ethnicity (Basedau & Moroff, 2011;Ishiyama, 2009). ...
An enduring debate in the conflict management literature concerns the wisdom of recognizing versus avoiding reference to ethnic identities in institutions to manage ethnic conflict. Understanding why ethnic recognition occurs is crucial for informing this debate. We develop a theory based on functional and political mobilization effects of recognizing ethnic groups. Contrary to reasoning that minority leaders would be most interested in recognition, the theory suggests that recognition consistently favors the interests of leaders from larger, plurality groups, whereas minority leaders face a ‘dilemma of recognition’ between functional gains and mobilization threats. We use mixed methods to test our theory. For our quantitative analysis, we draw on an original coding of recognition in constitutions and comprehensive political settlements from 1990 to 2012. We find that for cases with leaders from plurality groups, recognition is adopted 60% of the time. With leaders from minority groups, the rate is about 40 percentage points lower, even after accounting for many background factors. Additional quantitative tests and a qualitative analysis present more detailed evidence to show that the processes correspond to the logic of our theory. Answering these questions about when and why recognition is adopted is a crucial step in evaluating its effects on conflict.
... These regulations have taken different forms, including (a) the dissolution of an existing political party, (b) the temporary suspension of a political party, (c) the denial of registration to a group that wants to register as a political party, (d) the prohibition of certain behaviours at political campaigns, and (e) limitations on political broadcasts and campaigns by political parties. 60 The denial of registration to groups seeking to register as political parties is the most common form of political regulation in Africa. Since 1990, 138 incidents of political party regulation have taken place in Africa, of which 112 are denials of registration and 25 dissolutions of existing parties, while the remaining incident was a case of suspension of a political party. ...
This article analyses the ways in which African countries are grappling with the problem of electoral violence. It argues that, although electoral violence has posed a serious challenge to democratic consolidation and peace in Africa, knowledge of how to prevent and or manage it is largely inadequate. Much of the academic interest in electoral violence has focused on defining the phenomenon, particularly analysing its causes, scope, patterns and consequences. This article examines the measures adopted by Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria to manage electoral violence. The specific measures analysed in this study include: (1) establishment of commissions of inquiry; (2) mediation in high-tension situations; and (3) regulation of political activities. While these measures represent significant efforts to curb electoral violence in Africa, they do not, of course, directly address the underlying causes of the problem. Electoral violence will continue to pose serious challenges to democracy and peace in Africa until the lingering socio-economic and political tensions and the lack of credibility of the electoral process in many African countries are addressed; however, in the meantime, to save lives, it is worth putting into place effective deterrents to election violence wherever it threatens.
... As Nenad Stojanović explores in his chapter, parties with national alignment were originally prohibited by law and this ban was only overruled by the Constitutional Court in June 1990. The ban on ethnic parties was by no means unique to Bosnia and Herzegovina, as similar parties were banned in Bulgaria and Albania in the Balkans and such bans were common in post-Soviet elections, as well as in Africa (Basedau and Moroff 2011;Bieber 2008;Birnir 2008;Bogaards 2008). The ban on ethnonational parties in the Balkans was only moderately effective, as the main minorities in Albania and Bulgaria were able to circumvent the ban (with the tacit consent of the majority). ...
This study asks whether existing standards of good governance have incorporated ideals and measures to manage communal diversity. The context is an intellectual landscape in which the efficacy of heterogeneity policies has typically been compared through their impact on the likelihood of violent conflict. Alternate approaches would fine‐tune the outcome variable and/or enlist new independent variables. The Ethnic Power Relations project provided measures of the groups' co‐determination position (egip, excl) and measures of empowerment through self‐governing start to follow suit, such as improved indicators of territorial autonomies, decentralization, and language use rights. We also crafted a measure of functional autonomies, based on the ENTA Network's case‐study collection. With the exception of territorial autonomies, all existing measures of policies that accommodate the difference tend to improve the group's relationships with other groups and with the country as a whole. They also correlate well with the general good governance indicators.
For many people outside of Africa, the continent conjures up images of perpetual violence seemingly revolving around ethnic or religious identity. Atrocities in Darfur, genocide in Rwanda, clan warfare in Somalia, and long history of the Tuareg rebellions in Mali support habitual understandings of Africa as the “dark continent.” Two decades ago, African officials criticized the Western media for their “unbalanced” accounts “motivated only by the pursuit of the sensational—coups, corruption, chaotic economics, crocodile attacks, and quaint tribal rites” (Ebo 1992, 17). This representation of Africa has hardly changed: well-screened reports of telegenic Nigerian rebels pointing their AK-47s at the adventurous CNN anchor, gangs of soldier-thugs rampaging through the Congo, and Somali’s children with stomachs bloated from hunger. These images, reinforced by those of investors at the Haradhere stock exchange trading shares in upcoming Somali pirate attacks, continue to emphasize “the Four Horsemen of Africa’s Apocalypse: Poverty, Famine, War and Corruption.” 1 Popular images of that kind, exaggerated for general audience by political war thrillers, like Die Another Day (2002) and Blood Diamond (2006), have surprisingly extensive backing in academic literature. To some of the analysts looking from afar, African violence is seen as the sad legacy of colonialism; to others as manifestations of corruption, greed, ancient tribal hatreds, or simply the feasibility of engaging in insurrection. For North Africa, the stereotype is uncompromising religious conflict, among Muslim groups or between Muslims and secularists.
Although referendums have been used for centuries to settle ethnonational conflicts, there has yet been no systematic study or generalized theory concerning their effectiveness. Referendums and Ethnic Conflict fills the gap with a comparative and empirical analysis of all the referendums held on ethnic and national issues from the French Revolution to the 2012 referendum on statehood for Puerto Rico. Drawing on political theory and descriptive case studies, Matt Qvortrup creates typologies of referendums that are held to endorse secession, redraw disputed borders, legitimize a policy of homogenization, or otherwise manage ethnic or national differences. He considers the circumstances that compel politicians to resort to direct democracy, such as regime change, and the conditions that might exacerbate a violent response.
Ethnicity has emerged as a prominent issue in electoral contests around the world, particularly in countries that have embraced multiparty elections in the past few decades. What factors influence ethnic mobilization and the politicization of ethnicity? Although a number of factors have been hypothesized to influence the politicization of ethnicity in the comparative politics literature, many of these relationships have not been established through empirical testing. This study empirically tests a number of the hypotheses derived from the literature with our unique data set on candidates' ethnic appeals in the Nigerian 2007 gubernatorial elections. We find that political parties' use of ethnic appeals is correlated with the competitiveness of the election, nature of the campaign, partisan attachments, and social, demographic, and economic characteristics of the states. Of particular note is the finding that the salience of ethnic identity in the electorate influences political leaders' use of ethnic appeals.
What explains bloc voting among ethnic groups in Africa? Using the Herfindahl Hirschman Index of Concentration on partisan preference data from the Afrobarometer, this article tests several hypotheses regarding the explanation as to why some ethnic groups: (1) express voting preferences as a bloc; (2) express voting preferences as a bloc for the governing party or the opposition. This article found that the geographic concentration of the group best explained general bloc voting. In terms of the direction of support, the degree to which a group is discriminated against and politically mobilized explains bloc voting against the governing party, whereas bloc voting for the governing party is explained by the extent to which the governing party is politically dominant. This suggests that the prospects for patronage helps explain voting as a bloc for most all groups, except those that face discrimination and are politically mobilized.
The debate on institutional engineering offers options to manage ethnic and other conflicts. This contribution systematically assesses the logic of these institutional designs and the empirical evidence on their functioning. Generally, institutions can work on ethnic conflict by either accommodating (“consociationalists”) or denying (“integrationists”) ethnicity in politics. Looking at individual and combined institutions (e.g. state structure, electoral system, forms of government), the literature review finds that most designs are theoretically ambivalent and that empirical evidence on their effectiveness is mostly inconclusive. The following questions remain open: a) Is politicized ethnicity really a conflict risk? b) What impact does the whole “menu” (not just single institutions) have? and c) How are effects conditioned by the exact nature of conflict risks?
This chapter explores how electoral arrangements have been used and can be used in Sub-Saharan Africa to shape the political organization of ethnicity in the emerging party systems of the region. Electoral system is understood here in the broad sense, including not only the way votes are translated into seats, but also the regulations for party registration and candidate nomination. The analysis covers countries spread over most of the continent, in the present and past. In the process, the chapter will propose corrections to three prevailing conceptions about electoral engineering for conflict management.
One under-theorized aspect of "multiculturalism and the antidiscrimination principle" is religious and ethnicity based political parties. With political organization, the fact of pluralism is made concrete for democratic purposes. When the struggle for empowerment is "waged within the world of democratic politics" it is waged through parties. That is the associational form modern democracies have settled on for participation, representation, and governing, and for countervailing power and regular opposition. Particularist parties and bloc voting are key instruments of political conflict and, as important, of political integration. This paper looks at the challenges these parties pose to democracy; specifically, at the principal reasons given for banning parties from participation in electoral politics. I identify four categories of justification for disqualification: violent overthrow, incitement to hate, altering the character of the nation, and outside support or control. This is a preliminary to setting out regulative principles of "defensive democracy."
Comparative scholarship suggests that democracy in ethnically-diverse societies is likely to be fostered by the development of broad-based, aggregative, and multi-ethnic political parties, rather than fragmented, personalised, or ethnically-based party systems. However, surprisingly little scholarly attention has been given to how party fragmentation can be addressed or how broad-based parties can be sustained, despite some remarkable recent experiments in conflict-prone societies such as Indonesia, Turkey, Nigeria, Kenya, Thailand, the Philippines, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea aimed at influencing party system development. Drawing on these and other cases, this article identifies four strategies of ‘party engineering’ that have been used to promote broad-based, cross-regional, or multi-ethnic political parties in new democracies around the world.
Do ethnic parties exacerbate ethnic conflict? Many scholars have argued that the mere appearance of ethnic parties inevitably leads to a spiral of ethnic conflict and the collapse of incipient democracies. This article tests this proposition by examining how ethnic parties affect protest and communal conflict across 82 countries and 213 ethnic/communal groups from 1985–2003. Using a variety of quantitative techniques, I find that ethnic parties do mobilize minority ethnic groups to engage in protest, but there is no natural connection between the appearance of ethnic parties and the extent to which the minority group engages in communal conflict.
Ten years after the 1994 genocide, Rwanda is experiencing not democracy and reconciliation but dictatorship and exclusion. Although the government led by the Rwanda Patriotic Front has achieved rapid institutional reconstruction and relatively good bureaucratic governance, it has also concentrated power and wealth in the hands of a very small minority, practised ethnic discrimination, eliminated every form of dissent, destroyed civil society, conducted a fundamentally flawed ‘democratization’ process, and massively violated human rights at home and abroad. The Rwandan army twice invaded neighbouring Zaire-Congo, where its initial security concerns gave way to a logic of plunder. It has caused protracted regional instability and derailed the transition process in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Rwandan government has succeeded in avoiding condemnation by astutely exploiting the ‘genocide credit’ and by skilful information management. The international community has been complicit in the rebuilding of a dictatorship under the guise of democracy. It assumes a grave responsibility in allowing structural violence to develop once again, just as before 1994. In years to come, this may well lead to renewed acute violence.
The wave of democratization that has engulfed African countries since the 1980s has been characterized by the establishment of or return to multi-party politics. This has mostly happened in political systems with a long history of de facto and de jure constraints on the ability of political parties to function effectively. While few countries today (examples include Eritrea and Swaziland) continue to deny the principle and legitimacy of a pluralistic organization of political associations and parties, many political parties in “new democracies” still face insurmountable obstacles in creating a level playing field and have to cope with legal and administrative provisions that severely restrict their free operation.
Scholars in comparative politics and international relations routinely evaluate causal hypotheses by referring to counterfactual cases where a hypothesized causal factor is supposed to have been absent. The methodological status and the viability of this very common procedure are unclear and are worth examining. How does the strategy of counterfactual argument relate, if at all, to methods of hypothesis testing based on the comparison of actual cases, such as regression analysis or Mill's Method of Difference? Are counterfactual thought experiments a viable means of assessing hypotheses about national and international outcomes, or are they methodologically invalid in principle? The paper addresses the first question in some detail and begins discussion of the second. Examples from work on the causes of World War I, the nonoccurrence of World War III, social revolutions, the breakdown of democratic regimes in Latin America, and the origins of fascism and corporatism in Europe illustrate the use, problems and potential of counterfactual argument in small-N-oriented political science research.
In the literature on civil war onset, several empirical results are not robust or replicable across studies. Studies use different definitions of civil war and analyze different time periods, so readers cannot easily determine if differences in empirical results are due to those factors or if most empirical results are just not robust. The authors apply a methodology for organized specification tests to check the robustness of empirical results. They isolate causes of variation in empirical results by using the same definition of civil war and analyzing the same time period while systematically exploring the sensitivity of eighty-eight variables used to explain civil war in the literature. Several relationships with the onset of civil wars prove robust: large population and low income levels, low rates of economic growth, recent political instability and inconsistent democratic institutions, small military establishments and rough terrain, and war-prone and undemocratic neighbors. Variables representing ethnic difference in the population are robust only in relation to lower level armed conflict.
Most tests of hypotheses about the effects of “ethnicity” on outcomes use data or measures that confuse or conflate what are termed ethnic structure and ethnic practice. This article presents a conceptualization of ethnicity that makes the distinction between these concepts clear; it demonstrates how confusion between structure and practice hampers the ability to test theories; and it presents two new measures of ethnic practice—ECI (the ethnic concentration index) and EVOTE (the percentage of the vote obtained by ethnic parties)—that illustrate the pay-offs of making this distinction and collecting data accordingly, using examples from the civil war literature.
Elections,usually taken to be a hallmark of democracy,can also become a tool of authoritarian powerholders seeking to legitimate their rule.
Following the introduction of multiparty systems, almost all sub-Saharan countries have introduced wide-ranging measures of party regulation, particularly bans on ethnic or – in more general terms – particularistic parties, in order, it is claimed, to prevent intercommunal conflict and to promote democracy. While this restrictive type of party regulation has become a dominant political feature in Africa, little is known about the efficacy of such measures. This article engages in an analysis of the possible effects on democracy and peace of different types of party regulation and implemented party bans and shows that party bans are apparently less suited to alleviating conflict than has been claimed. It also finds that implemented bans seem to be negatively related to democracy as ethnic bans are frequently abused to suppress the political opposition or to silence ethnic or religious minorities.
With the re-introduction of multiparty politics at the beginning of the 1990s most African countries started to regulate political parties extensively, especially ethnic and other particularistic parties. This article presents a new database on particularistic and other party bans in sub-Saharan Africa, drawing on a comprehensive collection of African party regulations and records of their implementation since 1990. After demonstrating the magnitude and complexity of party bans in Africa the article deals in depth with enforcement institutions and legal procedures. It shows that party bans are especially pervasive in less democratic countries and have often targeted politically relevant parties.
During the 1990s the number of African states allowing multiparty elections increased dramatically. Paradoxically, this has been accompanied in the majority of countries by legal bans on ethnic and other particularistic parties. The main official reason has been the aim of preventing the politicization of ethnicity as this is feared to lead to ethnic conflict and political instability. Despite the resurgent interest in institutional engineering, this phenomenon has received little scholarly attention. This contribution outlines the main research questions and preliminary answers of a collaborative research project which combines large and small N comparisons and case studies. Bans are relatively rarely enforced and the decision actually to ban parties is best explained by the interaction of an experience of ethnic violence in the past and hybrid regimes using these measures to restrict political party competition. Positive effects on democracy and conflict management seem generally limited and are context dependent.
In most studies of the impact of ethnic diversity on economic growth, diversity is hypothesized to affect growth through its effect on macroeconomic policies. This article shows that most measures of ethnic diversity (including the commonly used ELF measure) are inappropriate for testing this hypothesis. This is because they are constructed from enumerations of ethnic groups that include all of the ethnographically distinct groups in a country irrespective of whether or not they engage in the political competition whose effects on macroeconomic policymaking are being tested. I present a new index of ethnic fractionalization based on an accounting of politically relevant ethnic groups in 42 African countries. I employ this measure (called PREG, for Politically Relevant Ethnic Groups) to replicate Easterly and Levine's influential article on Africa's “growth tragedy.” I find that PREG does a much better job of accounting for the policy-mediated effects of ethnic diversity on economic growth in Africa than does ELF.
Document collected by the University of Texas Libraries from the web-site of the Reseau Documentaire International Sur La Region Des Grands Lacs Africains (International Documentation Network on the Great African Lakes Region). The Reseau distributes "gray literature", non-published or limited distribution government or NGO documents regarding the Great Lakes area of central Africa including Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. UT Libraries
Although there are obvious merits to the consociational argument, including the need to recognize the claims of minorities through power-sharing arrangements, translating theory into practice has generally failed in much of Africa. The reasons for this are many and are by no means reducible to single-factor explanations. Looking at the recent experiments in power sharing in former Belgian Africa, this article offers a comparative assessment of the radically different trajectories followed by Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in their efforts to regulate conflict through consociational formulas. Although Rwanda stands as a textbook example of failed power sharing, and the DRC as a less than successful experiment, Burundi, which comes nearest to institutionalizing the Lijphart model, offers grounds for cautious optimism about the merits of a consociational polity. On the strength of the evidence from Burundi, one might conceivably argue that the key to success lies in the extent to which the technicalities of power sharing tend to approximate the conditions spelled out by Lijphart, notably group autonomy, proportionality, and the minority veto. Closer scrutiny of the cases at hand suggests a somewhat different conclusion. Perhaps even more importantly than the mechanics of power sharing, the socio-political context is what spells the difference between success and failure.
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