This chapter examines how informality shapes the selection and appointment processes of judges to African regional economic communities (REC) court benches. We posit that informalities may condition the role and potential influence of REC judges in multi-level governance processes. We first discuss the conceptual relevance of relationships between formalities and informalities for international court appointments in Africa based on the integrative approach of this volume (see introduction). We then identify the formal rules governing the appointment processes to highlight how thin they are across the continent, and illustrate our approach to multi-level scenarios of informality in IC appointments with African REC courts. Thirdly, we zoom into the case of the East African Court of Justice as an example of how informalities can fill regulatory loopholes and shape the courts' composition. We demonstrate how these informal appointment politics impact on the court’s collective power. We conclude with general observations about why and how we should study informalities in judicial appointments.

This book analyses key aspects of the informal dimension of courts as political actors. It explores a variety of human activities that take place as part of the organization and functions of courts, but outside the formalities that govern how courts work. In this introductory chapter we introduce the book’s central themes and the theoretical perspectives that guide the volume. We first offer a broad view of current scholarship that guides the study of informality and courts. Next, we discuss the informal-institutional and relational-sociological perspectives. Finally, we analyse how this volume’s contributions are linked to key themes relevant to the comparative study of informality and courts.

Since the 1980s, local self-organization and local self-governance are seen as the core elements for autonomously organized rural transformation. Against this background, it is surprising that both elements hardly have been analysed together. Neither have local councillors as formally, the key actors of local democracy, gained particular research interest. We will tackle this research gap drawing on the institutional arrangement in rural Ghana and examine the multiple entanglements of self-governance and self-organization through the prism of rural councillors. Their interfaces with state, external, and self-organized local actors unearth the mutual instrumentalization and legitimation of local self-organization, the state, and outside entities. We can hardly delineate the individual agency of these actors. On the one hand, the councillors have a relatively weak political influence over the local administration. On the other hand, their formal political roles and social relations offer them the chance to act as brokers for external development actors. The councillors’ brokerage remains vital for both self-help groups and the local administration, despite occurring in the twilight of local autonomy and state control.

The leftist traces of Thomas Sankara, Africa's Che, in Burkina Faso and beyond is undeniable. The recent insurgency that overthrew Blaise Compaore and his long-standing government framed itself as a second revolution, referring extensively to Sankara, whose image proved to mobilize many young protesters. Political parties that identify as Sankarist have opposed Compaore over decades and managed not to fade away despite the increasing temporal distance from the first revolution led by Sankara between 1983 and 1987. This contribution argues that Sankarism survived in Burkina Faso's party system because partial political liberalization allowed Sankarist politicians to compete against Compaore, and because Sankarism adapted to a changing institutional environment and turned away from socialism to become social democratic by trend. In other words, contingently emerging pockets of liberal democracy have let Sankarism survive.

This special issue concentrates on the years when international socialism sank into crisis, which were primarily the 1980s and 1990s. The works in this issue highlight and interrogate the reactions...

Current development assistance prioritizes results and evaluative schemes used to generate them as the most effective way of delivering aid by presenting these results as evidence of accomplishment. Aid recipients and donors respond with a crafty tactic, which we term the "numbers game." They generate results to satisfy assessment expectations irrespective of actual service delivery or satisfaction of the local population. This tactic yields both external and internal legitimacy: recipient countries legitimize their access to external funds while external actors sustain the aid enterprise that is under persistent scrutiny. In-depth interviews, observation, and existing data on everyday life of municipal councils in Ghana lend support to the preeminence given to results-based aid (RBA) in the numbers game. Startlingly, the expected impact targeted by the scheme is strategically set aside so that more capacity gaps are created and hence the need for more RBA resources to address. A delicate balance between results and on-the-ground impact is required for such intervention to have effect.

Field research enables interaction between a researcher and research participants, offering an opportunity for the discovery of primary empirical data. As exciting as field research can be, for a novice researcher or research in unfamiliar terrain, community field research can also be daunting. These challenges may include, but are not limited to, the determination of community entry strategies, identification of potential respondents, as well as dealing with the non-availability of respondents. Based on field experiences, this research note offers practical suggestions on how to deal with these challenges within the realm of political science fieldwork. The experiences from a Voter Turnout research in Ghana shared in this note are of particular relevance to field research designs in the subject area of voter participation, focusing on voters as informants rather than experts or members of a professional network. Keywords: Field Research; Political Science; Field Strategies; Voter Turnout.

"Burkina Faso: A History of Power, Protest, and Revolution." Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 53(3), pp. 508–509

This special issue proposes a relational approach to the study of judicial politics outside of Western democracies. The articles illuminate how common political interests, ideas, social identity, family and professional ties and even patron–client obligations between judges and other actors shape a variety of phenomena of interest to the study of judicial institutions, in terms of how the judiciary is organised and administered, how judges are appointed and make decisions, and the prospects for judicial reform. Collectively, the articles explore the informal dimension of judicial politics in a systematic fashion, through rich empirical case studies in very different contexts. Thus, they help structure a new comparative agenda for research on informal judicial politics outside of the West.

Democracy greatly benefits from credible courts. If context conditions make democratic consolidation unlikely, as in many African countries, credible arbitration between political actors can be essential for democracy. This article argues that informal judicial networks can critically affect a court's credibility. Network analysis of Benin's Constitutional Court using original data on major politicians and all 25 judges who have served between 1993 and 2018 provides evidence that biased judicial networks can jeopardize the crucial role of courts for democratic consolidation. In Benin, the loss of credibility under the Yayi presidency correlates with a clear political representation bias on the constitutional bench whereas socio-cultural representation remained balanced. Since executive and legislative appointment practices account for the network balance or bias, the political creation and privation of informal judicial relations emerges as an interesting avenue for studies of democratic consolidation.

This paper deals with judicial departures in consolidating democracies. It investigates to what extent and under what conditions judges in those contexts are not able to decide on their departures themselves but are rather forced to leave due to pressure from the elected branches. We undertook a cross‐regional study of individual judicial departures in six consolidating democracies with elected presidents, three of them located in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay) and three in sub‐Saharan Africa (Benin, Madagascar, and Senegal). We developed a unique data set containing information on 143 high‐court judges in office since democratisation. We classified judicial departures as due and undue, and using a survival model we estimated the impact of institutional, political, personal, and contextual factors. The results indicate that undue judicial departures occur regardless of the region, but are most probable under the rule of politically powerful executives, and where there are lower levels of democracy and development.

This paper deals with judicial departures in consolidating democracies. It investigates to what extent and under what conditions judges in those contexts are not able to decide on their departures themselves but are rather forced to leave due to pressure from the elected branches. We undertook a cross‐regional study of individual judicial departures in six consolidating democracies with elected presidents, three of them located in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay) and three in sub‐Saharan Africa (Benin, Madagascar, and Senegal). We developed a unique data set containing information on 143 high‐court judges in office since democratisation. We classified judicial departures as due and undue, and using a survival model we estimated the impact of institutional, political, personal, and contextual factors. The results indicate that undue judicial departures occur regardless of the region, but are most probable under the rule of politically powerful executives, and where there are lower levels of democracy and development.

This article proposes a relational approach to studying judicial politics in non-Western societies-a framework for the systematic analysis of informal relations between judges and other actors, within and outside the judiciary, based on common political interests, ideas, social identity, and even clientelistic obligations. We reflect on how these relations might help explain a variety of outcomes of interest, such as the organization of courts, judicial behavior, and judicial reform. We also highlight some of the methodological challenges of this approach in collecting and analyzing comparative data. In doing so, we seek to build an agenda for research on informal judicial politics beyond Western democracies.

This paper assesses the extent to which elected power holders informally intervene in the judiciaries of new democracies, an acknowledged but under-researched topic in studies of judicial politics. The paper first develops an empirical strategy for the study of informal interference based on perceptions recorded in interviews, then applies the strategy to six third-wave democracies, three in Africa (Benin, Madagascar and Senegal) and three in Latin America (Argentina, Chile and Paraguay). It also examines how three conditioning factors affect the level of informal judicial interference: formal rules, previous democratic experience, and socioeconomic development. Our results show that countries with better performance in all these conditioning factors exhibit less informal interference than countries with poorer or mixed performance. The results stress the importance of systematically including informal politics in the study of judicial politics.

The paper seeks to explain how courts in new and vulnerable democracies acquire legitimacy and thus become credible actors able to facilitate or even foster the consolidation of democracy. It analyses the case of the Constitutional Court of Benin (CCB), demonstrating that governmental appointment policies have had an important impact on the court's legitimacy. This West African country is considered to have been continuously democratic since 1991, and the court was established by consensus during the transition. The findings suggest that perceptions of fair representation on the bench matter more for credibility than professional qualifications and the quality of adjudication. And contrary to the widespread narrative that African politics is basically shaped by ethnicity, short-term political affiliations appear to matter more than communalistic representation. Network analysis using original social data on the major politicians and all 25 CCB judges since the court's creation in 1993 provides the evidence for this argument. The paper ultimately argues that the appointment-policy-driven delegitimisation of an established and largely credible political arbiter can put democratic consolidation at risk. Ruling elites therefore play a major role in maintaining or eroding this consolidation.