'Big men' rule: Presidential power, regime type and democracy in 30 African countries

Democratization

Volumn 15, Issue 5, 2008, Pages 952-973

  van Cranenburgh, Oda ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

African presidentialism; African regime types; Democracy; Good governance; Presidential power

Indexed keywords

EID: 56349096456     PISSN: 13510347     EISSN: 1743890X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13510340802362539     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. See Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
2. Other influential studies on personal rule are Goran Hyden, No Shortcuts to Progress: African Development Management in Perspective (London: Heinemann, 1983)
3. and Richard Sandbrook, The Politics of Africa's Economic Stagnation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
4. See Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 253 and 259-60
5. Michael Bratton, 'Second Elections in Africa', Journal of Democracy Vol. 9,No. 3 (1998), pp 21-37
6. and Nicolas van deWalle, 'Presidentialism and Clientielismin Africa's Emerging Party Systems', Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2003), pp 297-321.
7. See Oda van Cranenburgh, 'Power and Competition: The Institutional Context of Multi-Party Politics', in M. Salih (ed.), African Political Parties: Evolution, Institutionalization and Governance (London: Pluto Press, 2003), pp. 188-207.
8. For the weakness of parliaments see Peter Burnell, 'Legislative-Executive relations in Zambia: Parliamentary Reform on the Agenda', Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2003), pp. 47-68
9. and the volume edited by M.A. Mohamed Salih, African Parliaments: between Governance and Government (New York: Pallgrave and MacMillan, 2005); for the power of former presidents
10. see Roger Southall and Henning Melber (eds), Legacies of Power: Leadership Change and Former Presidents in African Politics (Uppsala: The Nordic Africa Institute, 2006).
11. See Alan Siaroff, 'Comparative Presidencies: The Inadequacy of the Presidential, Semi-Presidential and Parliamentary Distinction', European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 42 (2003), pp. 287-312.
12. Shugart and Carey argued that rather than the presidential system, it is high presidential power that causes regime problems. See Matthew Soberg Shugart and John Carey, Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 38-43 and 157.
13. For example, three francophone African countries are former Belgian colonies, and anglophone Liberia was not a British colony. Among the anglophone countries included in this study, Namibia did not experience direct colonial rule by Britain; however, through South African rule the same political legacy was transmitted to Namibia.
14. Maurice Duverger, Échec au Roi (Paris: Albin Michel, 1978).
15. See Shugart and Carey (note 6), p 23 and Matthew Shugart, 'Semi-Presidential Systems: Dual Executive and Mixed Authority Patterns', French Politics, No. 3 (2005), pp. 323-51.
16. See Robert Elgie, 'The Classification of Democratic Regime Types: Conceptual Ambiguity and Contestable Assumptions', European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 33 (1998), pp. 219-38
17. and his 'Variations on a Theme', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 16, No. 3 (2005), pp. 98-113.
18. See Maurice Duverger (note 8).
19. See J. McGregor, The Presidency in East Central Europe (RFE/RL Research Report), Vol. 3, No. 2 (1994), pp. 23-31
20. Timothy Frye, 'A Politics of Choice: Post-Communist Presidencies', Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 30 No. 5 (1997), pp. 523-52
21. and Joel Hellman, 'Constitutions and Economic Reform in the Post-communist Transitions', East European Constitutional Review, Vol. 5 (1996), pp. 46-53
22. and Christian Lucky, 'Table of Presidential Powers in Eastern Europe', East European Constitutional Review, Vol. 3-4 (1993-1994), pp. 81-94.
23. See Shugart and Carey (note 6).
24. Metcalf noted that the scheme often skipped from a score of 1 to 3 and amended that problem by adding intermediate scores. See Lee Kendall Metcalf, 'Measuring Presidential Power', Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 33 No. 5 (2000), pp. 660-85. The fundamental methodological problem remains that the intervals between the values they assign are uneven, which makes it methodologically problematic to sum values.
25. These electoral outcomes are extensively analysed in Shugart and Carey (note 6).
26. See Siaroff (note 5), p. 305.
27. After completion of this research two additional Type 5 regimes exist since Kenya and Zimbabwe instituted a premier. Both countries score 8 for presidential power, raising the mean score for this type to almost 8.
28. Arend Lijphart's analysis also shows that no democratic country conforms completely to the majoritarian model with high power concentration. See Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
29. According to Freedom House, to qualify for electoral democracy, a state must have satisfied the following criteria: A competitive, multi-party political system; universal adult suffrage for all citizens (with exceptions for restrictions that states may legitimately place on citizens as sanctions for criminal offences); regularly contested elections conducted in conditions of ballot secrecy, reasonable ballot security, and in the absence of massive voter fraud, and that yield results that are representative of the public will; significant public access of major political parties to the electorate through the media and through generally open political campaigning. See http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=351&ana_page= 333&year=2007.
30. The criteria for a fuller liberal democracy are taken from Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Towards Consolidation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 10-11.
31. See in particular Juan Linz, 'The Perils of Presidentialism', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1990), pp. 51-71
32. and Arend Lijphart, 'Constitutional Choices for New Democracies', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1991), pp 72-85.
33. See Shugart and Carey (note 6), p. 157.
34. Andreas Schedler coined these captive terms in 'What is Democratic Consolidation?', Journal of Democracy, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1998), pp. 91-106.
35. Bratton (note 2).
36. For freedom ratings, see www.freedomhouse.org; Polity IV ratings are available at www.cidcm.umd. edu/polity/data
37. for governance indicators see Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi, 'Governance Matters V: Governance Indicators for 1996-2005', World Bank Policy Research Working Paper (September 2006), available at www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance.
38. Zambia's temporary move out of the category of electoral democracy may be a severe test of breakdown, considering that in this period a restriction on presidential terms was formulated preventing the incumbent to run again in 2001. I owe this point to one of the referees for this article.
39. There are two more cases of democratic breakdown among the 30 African countries which occurred before the current constitution came into force, i.e. Niger 1996 and The Gambia 1994. If we assume presidential power to be constant and include these two cases the percentage would rise to 38.1 per cent, but it is still not statistically significant.