In the last decade, a consensus has emerged that we are now witnessing a global democratic decline. The democratic backsliding consensus is also extended to the African continent. Reflecting global trends, African incumbent leaders have strategically used the law and courts to control the contestation for power and participation, and also used sovereigntist claims to shield themselves from external scrutiny and pressures. But, three decades into the continent's multiparty era, politics in the region reflect a status quo: Democratic levels have largely remained the same since the 1990s. Seeking to explain this equilibrium of partial democratization, we revisit the arguments of "democratization by elections" and link the focus on elections to the study of social movements. Addressing cases that have experienced episodic challenges of autocratization, we argue that the routinization of elections has contributed to building democratic resilience against the autocratic ambitions of incumbents. Competitive elections provide a formal mechanism for translating the demands of social movements into political change, fostering greater accountability and institutional adaptability. Our analysis shows that social movements emerge in response to these episodic challenges of autocratization and that they - in doing so - strategically borrow from past movements while employing symbolic resonance to mobilize and sustain participation.

Since the 1990s, African incumbents have engaged in forms of rule-bending that weaken democratic institutions. The democratic backsliding witnessed weaponises law through processes of autocratic lawfare. However, civil society and the opposition may challenge the incumbent's attempts at autocratisation through the use of law and, in so doing, resist processes of democratic backsliding. We refer to processes where civil society actors and opposition politicians seek to defend pluralism through legal mobilisation as democratic lawfare. We explore the responses to autocratic lawfare by pro-democracy actors in five African common law countries: Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Our analysis shows that across the common law system countries, court decisions have secured space for political debate and protest, particularly in relation to elections. In the countries with the strongest pluralist traditions (Kenya, Malawi and Zambia), court actions have often succeeded in preventing incumbents from tilting the electoral playing field and reigning in parliament. Even in the most autocratic settings, as the cases of Uganda and Zimbabwe, courts have provided some protection to opposition candidates. To understand resistance to autocratisation, it is necessary to analyse the opportunities inherent in the institutional context and the resources - organisational, strategic and normative - that different actors bring to these contests.

When are politicians willing to liberalize abortion laws? While restricted access to legal abor- tion affects millions of women around the world, there is relatively little understanding of the factors shaping the views of politicians who craft or uphold such restrictive laws. This study examines the impact of a public health framing commonly employed by activists to persuade politicians to reform abortion laws. We provide evidence that politicians' preferences toward abortion reforms are shaped by the intersection of gender and wealth. Drawing on a survey experiment conducted among more than 600 politicians in Zambia, we show that only women politicians from less wealthy backgrounds are more likely to support policy liberalization after being exposed to a public health framing. These findings underscore how economic inequal- ities can affect the substantive representation of women's interests and provide a baseline for further research on the use of framing strategies in other developing country contexts.

Elections are increasingly judicialized in many multiparty regimes. The ability to challenge flawed elections in independent courts can be crucial for democratization, may deter irregularities, and may prevent post-election violence. However, litigating against the elections of opposition candidates can also enable ruling parties to consolidate control following narrow electoral victories. In executive-dominated systems, such a strategy may be facilitated by how uneven access to resources may make litigation particularly attractive for ruling-party candidates and by how judges may feel pressured to nullify opposition victories, triggering by-elections that ruling parties are likely to win. We investigate these expectations using a novel dataset of electoral petitions from the 2011, 2016, and 2021 Zambian elections. We show that losing candidates from the party gaining or retaining control over the executive were more likely to litigate against their losses. However, we find no evidence that judges tended to favor these candidates relative to other petitioners.

Understanding why citizens are willing to finance public goods is central to development and state capacity. Taxation can contribute to the common good, yet particularly in developing contexts, citizens may not benefit - or contribute - equally from such resources or across their lifetimes. How do taxpayers link solidarity to the practice of paying taxes? Taxation makes solidarity visible, but taxation practices also produce and shape solidarity. To enable further scrutiny of the perceived linkages between taxation, ideas around redistribution, and solidarity we develop a framework of imagined solidarity, which differentiates between affective and calculative solidarity on the one hand, and personal and generalised solidarity on the other hand. Using data from focus groups with formal sector workers in Namibia, we illustrate how taxpayers link solidarity to the practice of paying taxes along these dimensions; demonstrating the usefulness of this framework for the further study of fiscal interconnectedness, also beyond Namibia.

Abstract Contrary to broad claims regarding democratic backsliding across sub-Saharan Africa, our study of democratic processes indicates no such trend. We find instead that the region’s democratic experience over the past two decades largely reflects status quo politics, meaning neither substantial progress nor regression in advancing political and civil liberties since the initial transitions of the early 1990s. This seeming stagnation in African democratization belies ongoing efforts by incumbent leaders to actively undermine key actors (e.g. civil society) or structural conditions (e.g. growing urbanization) that might otherwise lead to greater liberalization. To account for the uneven progress in democratization, despite growing political participation across the region, we argue that Africa’s incumbent leaders have sought to contain democratizing pressures through two interacting processes largely overlooked in the existing literature: legal institutions and international relationships. First, incumbent leaders have relied on the law and courts to curtail the ability of domestic actors to mobilize against them. The strategic use of the law with the aim of holding onto office and strengthening executive powers has undermined other institutions. Second, incumbent leaders have been able to manipulate their international relationships to neutralize the democratizing influence of external actors such as foreign donors and transnational civil society. This includes the strategic use of sovereigntist claims against external intervention in domestic politics.

Abstract International linkages provide key mechanisms that shape the balance between democratizing and autocratizing forces across Africa. Since independence, African incumbents have signaled their compliance with global norms by selectively adhering to various policies. At the same time, at critical periods, civil society actors have been able to utilize international funding and support mechanisms to challenge incumbents. The chapter discusses the complex interplay between international actors and incumbent African governments, as well as civic associations and opposition forces. It demonstrates how key episodes of autocratization can be linked to sovereignty claims made by incumbents toward the international community. External pressures on African incumbents have changed significantly and Africa’s external relations have reinforced the position of incumbent governments in negotiations with international actors. The declining influence of Western international donors, as well as their waning commitment to democracy assistance, have again opened the door for incumbent elites to employ sovereigntist claims as a shield against domestic challenges and contestation for power.

Zambia experienced an episode of distinct democratic backsliding between 2011 and 2021. Autocratisation resulted from the deliberate use of legal mechanisms to enhance executive power. Tracing key legal changes through legal documents, press reports and informant interviews, the article examines this recent episode of autocratisation as a consequence of a poorly institutionalised party system in a fledgling and unconsolidated presidential democracy. We show that under PF rule, autocratisation resulted from the deliberate use of legal mechanisms to enhance executive power, stifle the opposition, muzzle the press and undermine civil society forces. The election of opposition candidate Hakainde Hichilema in August 2021 may have ended this episode of backsliding as for the third time in the country & PRIME;s history, power changed peacefully through the ballot box. But, to what extent the 2021 elections will move Zambia away from this authoritarian trend is uncertain as the state of the country's political institutions, hereunder a poorly institutionalised party system in an unconsolidated presidential democracy, may leave it vulnerable to further episodes of backsliding. The main contribution of this paper is the documentation of the role of lawfare in processes of autocratisation, and how integral it has been to the decline of democracy in Zambia.

The literature on democracies in the developing world paints a picture of rampant vote buying. A growing research field has shed light on how politicians decide whom to target, how individuals view vote buying, and the consequences of such practices. Yet, most research compares support for candidates offering handouts to those who do not. It fails to explore how offering handouts compares to other campaign strategies - promising future targeted goods or community goods, explicitly eschewing vote buying cam-paign tactics, or garnering support based on ethnic or local social ties. In this study, we employ a conjoint experiment fielded in Malawi (n =1,166) to examine the relative power of vote buying versus other cam-paign tactics. Our experimental results reveal that respondents view candidates who promise community service provision or criticize vote buying more positively than those who offer handouts. We also find that the magnitude of the effects for community service provision and anti-vote buying campaigns are greater than that of platforms associated with coethnicity and local social ties. These findings are both substantively and theoretically important. Policymakers and practitioners engaged in voter education efforts may counter vote buying by informing candidates of the potential electoral benefits to champi-oning anti-vote buying platforms and providing community services. Likewise, scholars can better under-stand elections, representation and democracy by further exploring how different types of voters respond to various campaign appeals in Africa.(c) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Party switching among legislative candidates has important implications for accountability and representation in democratizing countries. We argue that party switching is influenced by campaign costs tied to the clientelistic politics that persist in many such countries. Candidates who are expected to personally pay for their campaigns, including handouts for voters, will seek to affiliate with parties that can lower those costs through personal inducements and organizational support. Campaign costs also drive candidate selection among party leaders, as they seek to recruit candidates who can finance their own campaigns. We corroborate these expectations with an original survey and embedded choice experiment conducted among parliamentary candidates in Zambia. The conjoint analysis shows that candidates prefer larger parties that offer particularistic benefits. The survey further reveals that parties select for business owners as candidates—the very candidates most likely to defect from one party to another.

Hybrid political regimes are characterized by fractured political opposition, suppression of independent media, and a loyal but less competent public bureaucracy. Does retrospective voting -- the bread and butter of electoral accountability -- still occur under such informational environments? Identifying policy failure, policy success, and political responsibility can be extremely difficult under these conditions. We argue that local economic development predicts local electoral results. Local development, as opposed to national fortune, is observable by individual voters independently of information from the media or politicians. Furthermore, we argue that economic development is more important to urban voters than rural ones, in particular because the latter are more detached from the national economy and political discourse. We propose to test our hypotheses using a novel dataset on geolocated polling station results following the 2011, 2016, and 2021 Zambian elections.

Abstract The chapter confronts a key paradox of political participation in Africa´s multiparty era: Political mobilization among African citizens has not led to greater democratization. Across countries, citizens have not only continued voting at high rates, but they are also increasingly confronting their governments through street-level protests. The youth, in particular, have become critical actors in making democratic claims on political space. Nevertheless, despite the surge in political participation seen in many African countries, their democratic progress has stalled. We explain this paradox by describing how incumbent leaders have responded to increased political mobilization by strategically clamping down on key arenas of citizen participation in politics, thereby insulating their regimes. We show that incumbents seek to constrain three interrelated arenas where mass participation is most often mobilized: the realm of rights-promoting civil society organizations (the civil society arena), the realm of elections (the contestation arena), and the realm of information technology (the digital arena).

Incumbency advantage and corruption are persistent features of Malawi politics, yet the incumbent Joyce Banda lost the 2014 elections. Drawing on national public opinion surveys and focus groups, we explore why incumbency advantage did not accrue to Banda. We argue that faced with a major corruption scandal, "Cashgate," Banda paid a heavier price than male incumbents facing corruption scandals before and after her. Her electoral fate is consistent with studies demonstrating that women holding political offices are scrutinized more heavily than men, and when they transgress female gender stereotypes of incorruptibility, they are judged using a higher standard.

Analyzing civil society resistance to elite-led democratic backsliding in Africa, the article argues that the non-militant, civil society-based transitions experienced in the 1990s left a legacy of a pro-democracy cleavage that is mobilized when central constitutional rights are threatened. Building on insights from social movement theory, the paper argues that the conduct of multiparty elections at regular intervals provides an opportunity for contestation over constitutional rules, and the historical legacy of pro-democracy movements provides a mobilizing structure for civil society to organize for the protection of constitutional rights. The theoretical argument is illustrated by a comparison of the democratic trajectories in Zambia and Malawi. In both countries, incumbent elites' have attempted to remain in power through constitutional revisions. However, processes of executive aggrandizement have been stalled by civil society mobilization that again have resulted in incumbent defeat and electoral turn-overs. Recent waves of democratic backsliding suggest that the autonomy of civil society from political parties may be a key factor for the ability of civil society to challenge autocratization. Malawi's civil society has maintained a high degree of autonomy but in Zambia, the close cooperation between civil society and the Patriotic Front (PF) and the resulting cooptation of key civil society actors have resulted in a process of autocratization.

Chapter 2 examines whether women face fundamentally different challenges as they seek to become political leaders in Zambia. The chapter demonstrates that women largely use the same strategies as men to succeed in politics but face distinct costs due to their gender. The chapter provides a nuanced assessment of how women’s experiences differ from men’s across distinct political stages, from initial entry into politics to actual campaigning. The chapter shows, contrary to existing theories, that women candidates report the same sources of encouragement and equivalent qualifications as men. Women are also found to pursue the same partisan strategies as men when seeking a spot on the ballot. The chapter shows, for example, that women are as likely as men to use bribes during the nomination process. However, the chapter also reveals that women candidates are significantly less likely than men to give public speeches or participate in rallies during campaigning.

Incumbency advantage is a key characteristic of African politics. Since the reintroduction of multiparty elections in 1994, corruption has been a persistent feature of the various administrations in Malawi. From this perspective, the incumbent president Joyce Banda of the People’s Party’s (PP) loss of the presidency after two years in office is a puzzling outcome of the 2014 elections. The paper explores why the incumbency advantage did not accrue to Banda, drawing from national public opinion surveys and focus group discussions conducted after the 2014 elections. We argue that, while faced with a major corruption scandal, ‘Cashgate’, Banda paid a heavier price than male incumbents facing corruption scandals before her. Her electoral fate is consistent with studies demonstrating that women holding political offices are scrutinized more than men and, when they transgress female gender stereotypes of incorruptibility, they are judged to a higher standard.

Politicization refers to the process by which a social phenomenon becomes the basis of mobilization by societal and political actors, who turns it into an issue of major political significance, as a subject of heated public argument, mobilization and conflict. Across Africa, homosexuality has become an issue of political contestation and conflict. The chapter analyses the forms and content of politicized homophobia in Africa and explains the rising politicization of nonheteronormative sexuality and gender identity that has marked much of the continent in the past decade and the role of law in this process. Providing examples from across the continent, the chapter argues that politicization varies in time and space, reflecting a complex combination of external and internal factors and the sociopolitical context in a given country or region.