Ragnhild L. Muriaas

Executive dominance and the politics of quota representation in Uganda

Quota policies securing the presence of marginalised groups in decision-making bodies have been adopted across sub-Saharan Africa. These policies are frequently understood through the lens of a pluralist perspective. This stance is not appropriate in African regimes characterised by executive dominance. Through a qualitative study of official documents, newspaper articles and interviews conducted during two field studies in Uganda in 2005 and 2010, this article shows how the understanding of quota policies in Africa may gain from the corporatist debate on interest representation. The analysis reveals that the incumbent National Resistance Movement has employed the reserved seat policy strategically to maintain its dominant position, and that strategies for using the quota system have evolved gradually over time in response to key political events, and the interests of group activists at the local and national levels with vested interests in its survival.

Food security as a political issue: the 2009 elections in Malawi

Abstract African electorates are expected to use non-evaluative rationales, like patronage and ethnicity, when casting their vote. In famine-struck countries like Malawi it is however worthwhile to investigate how a salient political issue like food security influences voters’ decisions. At the turn of the millennium Malawi went through a series of famines. In 2005 the government changed its famine prevention strategy and started to subsidise fertilisers. The fertiliser programme was a political success and is used to explain the outcome of the 2009 elections. Although this explanation seems plausible, such analyses should be grounded in thorough analyses of the origin and implementation of the food policy. Through archival studies and fieldwork, this study reveals the importance of the opposition in changing the food policy and the politics of the implementation process. Hence, even if food security increased ahead of the 2009 elections, the election cannot be interpreted as a ‘national referendum’ on the incumbents fertiliser programme.

Traditional Institutions and Decentralisation: A Typology of Co‐Existence in Sub‐Saharan Africa

In the 1990s several governments in Africa adopted policies to introduce democratic decentralisation. At the same time, governments also understood the value of recognising traditional institutions. A scholarly debate thus emerged, as many saw traditional institutions as insurmountable obstacles to democratic decentralisation. Could one have both institutions in the same society? Several case studies were conducted to answer this question. Some of these concluded by saying that traditional institutions would help bring legitimacy to the local government systems. Others warned that as traditional institutions were not downwardly accountable, one should avoid a situation where they got too much power. This article addresses the question of institutional co‐existence from a new angle. Instead of asking if different institutions should co‐exist, it develops a theoretical framework that enables us to investigate variations in how they may co‐exist. By presenting two dimensions, dependency of traditional institutions and type of decentralisation, the article presents a fourfold typology of institutional co‐existence. Malawi, South Africa and Uganda are selected as examples that illustrate the differences between the categories. The empirical study of these cases reveals that there are both strengths and weaknesses with the typologies. As the four categories are only theoretical constructs, the countries do not always fit perfectly into the strict scheme. However, the advantage is that the typology made it possible to make a well structured discussion of the similarities and differences between cases. What co‐existence means varies between countries; this needs to be stressed in all our discussions of the relevance of traditional institutions in local governance.

ALTERNATIVES TO GENDER QUOTAS: ELECTORAL FINANCING OF WOMEN CANDIDATES IN MALAWI

Gender quotas change the rules of candidate selection, reflecting a demand-side solution to womens underrepresentation in politics. In contrast, limited attention has been given in the literature to possible supply-side solutions, which would equip women with resources to make them more attractive to selectors—in conjunction with, or separate from, gender quotas. Proposing a new research frontier for quota scholars, this article examines the ‘50–50 campaign’ ahead of the 2009 elections in Malawi, in which donors and the government assisted women aspirants with financial resources and publicity. Although these elections witnessed a 9% rise in women candidates from 2004, some of the increase represented a rise in women running as independents, suggesting that the campaign failed to sufficiently address the role of weak and biased party organisations. While electoral financing can avoid certain disadvantages of gender quotas, it may not be possible to overcome negative perceptions of women in politics.

Power calculations and political decentralisation in African post-conflict states

Although many African governments introduced provisions for subnational elections in the early 1990s, there is variation in the extent to which these reforms were implemented and sustained. Our inductive analysis of three post-conflict cases – Angola, Ethiopia and South Africa – suggests that one factor explaining this variation is elite discontinuity when an insurgent group wins power in the aftermath of conflict. Systems of subnational elections adopted by new governments with an extensive social base derived from an insurgency, as in South Africa and Ethiopia, have proved relatively robust. By contrast, in Angola, where there was no change of executive power after the conflict ended, routinised subnational elections have not been implemented. The identified causal mechanism is that, for the new governments in the first two cases, subnational elections served as opportunities to mobilise party support and to consolidate control by sidelining local elites aligned with the previous regime.

Substantive Representation: From Timing to Framing of Family Law Reform in Morocco, South Africa and Uganda

This chapter argues that an essential factor affecting the prospects of successful substantive representation of women is whether or not the protagonists of family law reform are able to frame their claims in a manner that is acceptable to both the public and the ruling elite. It adopts a “thick” conception of substantive representation which takes into account how representation occurs as well as its outcome. Through a “most different” comparative strategy, the authors study how and through what mechanisms family law reforms in Morocco, South Africa and Uganda occurred. In Morocco, the 2004 family law reform was more comprehensive and closer to the original feminist demands because the process received the blessing of the Moroccan king and was pushed through in a top-down manner. In the case of South Africa and Uganda, however, the initial law reform proposal had to undergo more substantial changes in scope and content, as more veto players needed to be on board for the proposal to be successfully enacted. The analysis finds that women’s feminist claims for equality have been negotiated to gain cultural resonance through processes of framing and reframing the claims to appeal to critical audiences. Pro-women actors, such as women activists inside and outside government, took center stage in this process. Additionally, male actors—who acted as intermediaries or leveraged the key government positions they held—also played vital roles in ensuring that legislation was enacted. This indicates that while the timing of a legal reform proposal is important, the framing of the reform campaign is also critical.

Opposition parties and the decentralisation process in South Africa and Zambia

Theories of democratic decentralisation in democratising states suggest that such reforms will provide significant opportunities for parties in opposition at the national level by multiplying the arenas of political contestation. But this expected outcome may also depend on other contextual factors. This comparative study of recent municipal elections in South Africa and Zambia shows that parties in Zambia have been less likely to engage in municipal elections than those in South Africa. The article offers possible explanations for these different outcomes based on different factors that structure the competition for offices, as well as on the expected benefits of running for office. If local governments have few financial resources and limited policy jurisdictions, political and personal incentives for engaging in local politics are reduced. Hence, if there are concurrent elections, parties instead will tend to concentrate their efforts on winning offices at the national level.

Counter-mobilization against child marriage reform in Africa

Legislating a minimum age of marriage at 18 has stirred counter-mobilization in some, but not all, countries where religious or traditional institutions enjoy constitutional authority. To explore differences between states regarding likelihood of counter-mobilization, we investigate two cases in Africa. In Sudan, a government-led child marriage reform initiative has sparked counter-mobilization by conservative religious actors, while a similar initiative in Zambia has not caused visible counter-mobilization among traditional groups and has gained the support of many chiefs. With the literature on doctrinal gender status issues as theoretical background, we argue that the nature of law—codified versus living—is a factor in these distinct trajectories. We further identify variations in two mechanisms, legal power structure (centralized vs decentralized) and type of political battle (interpretation vs administration), that link nature of law to variation in the likelihood of counter-mobilization.

Gendered Citizenship: The Politics of Representation

This chapter introduces the topic of the book and discusses why representation is a relevant prism for understanding and exploring new avenues to gendered citizenship globally. We trace some of the roots of the concept of representation, focusing on the duality between representation as “standing in for” and as “re-presenting”. This duality, oscillating between the dilemmas of representational democracy and various conceptions of politics in the spheres of media, arts and culture, provides the context for the more specific investigations of representation and gendered citizenship that are to follow. We also introduce the different chapters of the book, highlighting their approaches and contributions to this problematic.

Political capital of ruling parties after regime change: contrasting successful insurgencies to peaceful pro-democracy movements

Abstract The cases of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa and the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) in Zambia show major differences in the extent to which incoming ruling parties after a regime change build strong party systems. The ANC institutionalised a hegemonic party apparatus after coming to power, while the MMD did not. These differences, we contend, are related to the ANC’s history of a prolonged struggle that included violent conflict in contrast to the MMD’s peaceful pro-democracy campaign. Theorising this contrast provides a framework for investigating causes of different outcomes in party institutionalisation after regime change.