James R. Scarritt

The Puzzle of African Party Systems

Two puzzling features characterize African party systems: low fragmentation and high volatility. We present systematic data describing these features and provide a theoretically grounded explanation of them. The explanation emphasizes the role of strategic choice structured by the institutional legacies of authoritarian regimes in the formation and development of political parties. Political restrictions under authoritarian regimes produced severe information deficit concerning electoral mobilization, strategic coordination and the collective action problems that typically attend party formation and coalition-building. Under these constraints, political actors in Africa’s emerging democracies established political parties to preserve their fragmented power bases and relied on presidential elections and ethno-political cleavages as alternative sources of strategic coordination over votes and seats and electoral coalition-building. The result is the entry of large numbers of short-lived political parties, producing high volatility, and the electoral and legislative dominance of a small number of large parties producing low party system fragmentation.

The specification of ethnic cleavages and ethnopolitical groups for the analysis of democratic competition in contemporary Africa

Ethnicity remains an important (but not the only) cost‐effective strategic resource for organizing collective political action in Africas emerging democracies. To advance systematic analysis of the impact of ethnicity on current patterns of democratic politics and the potential for democratic consolidation, this article describes and presents a comprehensive data set on ethnopolitical groups in all 48 African countries. It explicates the theoretical orientation that informs the data set and the methodology used in defining, identifying and coding ethnopolitical groups.

Protest and Rebellion in Africa: Explaining Conflicts between Ethnic Minorities and the State in the 1980s

This article examines the sub-Saharan African portion of the global Minorities at Risk project. It analyzes the relationships between group characteristics, grievances, mobilization, state characteristics, and nonviolent protest and rebellion in Africa and compares these relationships with those found in a global analysis using the same data set. Mobilization is more important than group characteristics or grievances in explaining nonviolent protest and rebellion in the 1980s globally, and especially in Africa because political action there is taken mainly in response to the dynamics of mobilization and state response over the last 30 years. The state characteristics that are associated with the two forms of political action in Africa and globally differ; in the former case the strongest relationships are between greater—although partial—democracy in the 1960s and nonviolent protest and between competitiveness of participation in the 1960s and rebellion. An interpretive explanation of these differences is presented.

The Interaction Between Democracy and Ethnopolitical Protest and Rebellion in Africa

This article reconciles theoretical and methodological differences between the Minorities at Risk (MAR) project and Bratton and van de Walles 1997 analysis of democratic transitions occurring between 1990 and 1994. Analyses based on MAR have shown that protest in the 1980s was more likely to occur in more democratic African countries, whereas violent rebellion was more likely to occur in more autocratic countries. Bratton and van de Walle have shown that urban protests also occurred more frequently in more democratic countries. This article replicates earlier findings that prior democracy is an important variable for explaining ethnopolitical protest and rebellion. The authors analyze the relationship between such ethnopolitical action and democratic transitions and levels of democracy in 1994 and show that democracy and worker-student protest are mutually reinforcing, whereas democracy and rebellion are mutually incompatible. The authors further demonstrate that ethnopolitical protest is neutral in its consequences for democratization.

The utility of reuters for events analysis in area studies: The case of Zambia‐Zimbabwe interactions, 1982–1993

Principal investigators in the Global Events Data System project (GEDS) and others have argued that Reuters Library Report is a superior global source of events data because its coverage of the worlds regions is relatively even and it is easily accessible on‐line for automated or semi‐automated coding. The question if Reuters should be coded in conjunction with regional and local sources is left open. We test three expectations: Reuters yields a greater number of events as well as more even reporting across COPDAB issue‐areas than a regional and a local source; Reuters has high face validity; and analysis of data from Reuters, a regional, and a local source will yield very different results. We perform tests of the ‘concurrence’ of data from Reuters, Africa Research Bulletin, and the Zimbabwe Herald covering interactions between Zambia and Zimbabwe from January 1st 1982 to December 31st 1993. Interrupted ARIMA time series and OLS measures of covariation are used to test whether substantive results change...

Ethnopolitical demography and democracy in sub-Saharan Africa

Ethnic fragmentation is largely presumed to be bad for democracy. However, many African countries belie this claim, as democracy has recently sprouted in several of its multiethnic states. We argue that African countries that have demographic patterns where the largest ethnopolitical group is at least a near-majority and is simultaneously divided into nested subgroups produce Africas most democratic multiethnic societies. This large-divided-group pattern, which has gone largely unnoticed by previous scholars, facilitates transitions to democracy from authoritarian rule. The large groups size foments the broad-based multiethnic social agitation needed to pose a genuine threat to a ruling autocrat, while its internal divisions reassure minorities that they will not suffer permanent exclusion via ethnic dominance under an eventual democracy. We support our claim with cross-national quantitative evidence on ethnic fragmentation and regime type.

State Legitimacy and Development in Africa. By Pierre Englebert. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000. 243p.

In this well-informed, theoretically and methodologically sophisticated, and highly innovative book, and in related articles that appeared recently in Political Research Quarterly (53 [March 2000]: 7-36) and World Development (28 [Octo- ber 2000]: 1821-35), Pierre Englebert proposes and tests the hypothesis that variations in vertical and horizontal state legitimacy account for variations in the developmental capac- ity and economic growth of African states and of Africa in comparison to other world regions. Developmental capacity, which combines an index of specific economic policies (em- phasizing a free market and human capital) and an index of good governance, is the crucial intervening variable between state legitimacy and growth.

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In this article we conduct a plausibility probe of the hypothesis that uneven democratization decreases cooperation within primarily cooperative dyads. This hypothesis is derived from a combination of Remmers theory of democratization and international cooperation with democratic peace theory. The case of cooperation and conflict between two small powers, Zambia and Zimbabwe, from the latters independence in 1980 to 1993 fits Ecksteins criteria for a useful plausibility probe. In addition to overall, bilateral and regional interactions between the two countries, we examine relations in the political, economic, strategic, and physical environment issue areas. Methodologically, we combine time series analysis of events coded in the COPDAB format and interviews with policy makers. We find that, although net cooperation between the two countries remained positive during the entire 1980–1993 period, it decreased significantly overall and in economic issues after the beginning of the Zambian democratic transition in June 1990. Our data allow us to trace the process involved in this decline in net cooperation, ruling out some alternative explanations but not concurrent Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), and showing how even slightly uneven democratization was an important cause because it decreased similarity and trust, while not decreasing transparency, and increased uncertainty and thus nationalist responses. We conclude that this plausibility probe justifies further systematic research on the effects of uneven democratization on cooperative dyads to test our hypothesis on cases with and without SAPs, and suggests the utility of further probes of the effects of different types of uneven change on various types of dyads.

A process tracing plausibility probe of uneven democratization's effects on cooperative dyads: The case of Zambia and Zimbabwe 1980--1993

We, the corporate owners of Africa Today, were greatly saddened by the death of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere. As a group of scholars and Africa activists for over 40 years, we knew and worked with your former President. Because Africa Today began publishing under the auspices of the American Committee on Africa in 1954, the same year that Nyerere and his friends founded TANU to work for Tanganyikan independence, some of us knew him almost from the beginning of that struggle. We admired the courage of the young leader who faced great odds in the struggle for freedom. Mwalimu, as a true teacher, had a great effect on all of our lives, comporable to that of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. We found strength in his wise words and were honored to publish them from time to time in Africa Today. We especially appreciated his graciousness, in the midst of his other duties, to write the lead article, “From Uhuru to Ujamaa,” for a special issue on Tanzania we published in 1974. Our journal always followed his work in Africa whether it was leading his political party, governing his people, or peacemaking among the states. His modesty and charm were a great example to all of Africa and the world. We trust Africa will raise up other great leaders in his footsteps. All of us will continue to miss him.

President Mkapa, Family, and Friends of Mwalimu Nyerere

Most writers on Zambia are agreed that President Kenneth Kaunda has grown more powerful over the last two decades by having learned to deal with changing circumstances, and that he has developed a unique position as an able and trusted mediator among political factions. There is also a consensus among those authors, however, that Kaundas powers are rather severely constrained by the bourgeoisie-in-formation, by the weakening of the governing United National Independence Party (U.N.I.P.), by a declining economy, and by a difficult international environment, and that these limitations are growing stronger as time passes despite his ideological initiative in formulating what is known as ‘Zambian Humanism’. 1