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Since the era of decolonization, political parties have played a crucial role in shaping the national political landscape of independent Africa. They have mobilized citizens; provided platforms for the expressions of diverse ideologies, aspirations, and interests; channeled resources; and helped citizens try to hold governments accountable. Despite playing such a crucial role, the study of political parties in Africa has lagged significantly behind its counterparts elsewhere, with key moments of citizen interaction — such as campaign rallies and canvassing — often dismissed as simply avenues for clientelism and vote buying. In this chapter, we draw on a wide range of data to show that the behavior of African parties is far more complex than often claimed, particularly when it comes to their interactions with citizens. Indeed, far from primarily engaging in clientelism and vote buying, we show that parties across the continent engage in campaign strategies and citizen interactions that would be recognizable to scholars elsewhere in the world, and that campaigns in particular are important moments in which citizens learn about office holders, candidates, policy platforms and government performance. Ultimately, we argue that parties in Africa function as important parts of civil society, without which democracy across the continent would be severely weakened.

Global increase in the pace of climate action is urgent. Yet, it is less clear who citizens expect to take the lead on climate action across different regions of the world: historical emitters, their own governments, or themselves? Our analysis of Africa’s largest public opinion survey, the Afrobarometer, across 39 countries finds that Africans place primary responsibility for addressing climate change on their own government, a further third see ordinary citizens as most responsible, while very few place responsibility on historical emitters. Multinomial logistic regression analysis shows that education, decreased poverty, and access to new media sources are associated with increased attribution of responsibility to historical emitters. Our results suggest that poverty alleviation and increased access to education, combined with professional frontline government bureaucracies can re-apportion citizen expectations of responsibility for climate action onto historical emitters and actors with more resources for scalable climate action.

African legislators both resemble and differ from the societies they claim to represent in important ways. Based on a unique survey of representative samples of parliamentarians in 17 countries, we find that legislatures are representative of national publics in terms of ethnicity and religion. At the same time, compared to ordinary African citizens, their MPs possess far higher levels of education, and are far more likely to be older, male, and come from professional or business backgrounds. Besides coming from higher social and economic status backgrounds, many MPs also previously held senior posts in the state and national government, or leadership positions in their political party. Does this mean that African legislators constitute a coherent, self-interested, social, economic and political ‘power elite’ detached from the interests of the voters? In the legislatures under investigation, we find little evidence of this effect. Markers of social, economic or political privilege and power overlap irregularly and in a non-cumulative way. Thus, far from comprising a slowly changing, cohesive and self-interested elite, Africa’s legislators come from a plurality of social and political backgrounds, and are relative legislative neophytes.