Political Parties

Party structures and organization building in Africa

with Sarah J. Lockwood and Robert Mattes | Party Politics

Political parties are a vital element in the quality of representative democracy, playing a crucial role in mobilization, competition, governance, and accountability. Despite their importance, however, we currently know relatively little about how political parties in Africa are organized, with most evidence restricted to journalistic accounts or country-specific scholarly accounts. In this introduction to the symposium, we highlight how African parties are anything but inconsequential. Like their counterparts elsewhere, they contest elections, engage with citizens, recruit, train, and socialize political actors, hold incumbents accountable (albeit to varying degrees), organize creatively in response to changing and challenging circumstances, and affect citizens’ views of the democratic system. Therefore, parties in Africa are an important part of political activity on the continent, and a better understanding of their activities, behavior, and organization is essential.

Party footprints in Africa: Measuring local party presence across the continent

with Sarah J. Lockwood and Robert Mattes | Party Politics | Pre-Print (Afrobarometer Working Paper No. 186).

The conventional view holds that most of Africa’s political parties are organizationally The conventional view of Africa’s political parties holds that they are organizationally weak, with little presence at the grass roots. Yet, few studies are based on systematically collected data about more than a handful of parties or countries at any given point. In this paper, we attempt to remedy this situation, by focusing on one crucial aspect of party organization – the local presence that enables political parties to engage with and mobilize voters during and between elections – and developing the first systematic, survey-based measure of the extent of this presence across 35 countries. We draw on a wide variety of data to demonstrate the validity and reliability of this new index, and in the process showcase its ability to be calculated at a number of different levels. Finally, we illustrate its utility by applying it to a key substantive question in the literature.

ORGANIZING FOR SUCCESS: THE EFFECT OF INTRA-PARTY DEMOCRACY ON LOCAL LEVEL PARTY PRESENCE

with Sarah J. Lockwood | Working Paper (Under Review) | Political Party Database Conference 2020.

Levels of intra-party democracy have long been seen as important for candidate recruitment, policy development, and party membership. But what impact do they have on the ability of parties to interact with citizens at the local level? In this paper, we leverage new data on the formal rules governing political parties in Africa, along with an innovative measure of local party presence, to investigate the role intra-party democracy plays in the outward facing activities of parties, highlighting the importance of bringing together research in these two areas.

CLIENTS OR PARTY ACTIVISTS? PARTY MEMBERSHIP AND MOBILIZATION IN AFRICA

with Sarah J. Lockwood | Working Paper | APSA 2020, MPSA 2018, Italian Political Science Association 2018

In Africa, party members are often seen as clients in search of material benefits, rather than activists that contribute to large political organizations. However, few studies have attempted to actually measure the extent and effectiveness of party activism in the African context. In this paper, we use survey data from more than 30 countries to assess the ability of parties in Africa to organize local-level engagement. Contrary to received wisdom, we find that political parties on the continent can rely more on active partisans than expected, and have similar numbers of party activists compared to parties in other parts of the world. We also test the relative importance of socio-economic and institutional factors in explaining the variance in party activism across our sample, and close by exploring the consequences of this variation on a key metric of democracy – voter mobilization.

The consequences of partisanship in Africa: Cognitive lens or tribal straight-jacket?

with Robert Mattes | Book chapter: Research Handbook on Political Partisanship | Pre-print IDCPPA Workingng Paper No. 449 PDF

We provide evidence that partisan identification exists in African polities, though its extent varies considerably across countries. Moreover, we find that partisanship helps people organize their political world. It shapes the way they vote, and also exercises important influences on citizens’ propensity to become involved in a wide range of democratic politics, whether during or between elections. Finally, we produce several nuggets of evidence which suggest that partisanship in Africa constitutes, at least for many voters, a ‘standing choice’ rather than a fixed identity. That is, while voter support for ruling parties is shaped by ethnicity (and other demographic background factors), it is not determined by them. Voter evaluations of the overall direction of the economy, national economic trends, and government responsibility for those trends, matter.