The chapter argues that voting behaviour and public opinion are deeply influenced by official controls applied by the entrenched ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. Popular voting behaviour in Zimbabwe is associated with an assortment of political, cultural, and economic views. In regard to the ruling ZANU-PF’s series of electoral triumphs, leading considerations are whether persons trust traditional leaders as a guide to vote choice, the extent to which they think the economy has been administered properly, and whether they fear retribution for not voting for incumbent political elites. However, the chapter further argues, to best appreciate Zimbabwean voting behaviour, scholars must pay significant attention to Zimbabwe’s acute hyper-partisan polarization. Zimbabweans are more divided politically than in any other African country in which party affiliation has been systematically measured. Ruling and opposition parties are divided by mutual distrust, conflicting standpoints on policy debates, and over electoral choice. Polarization is partly a construction by Zimbabwean political elites, but it also has substantial traction amongst ordinary citizens who have accepted partisan loyalty as an important facet in their range of identities.

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Power sharing is often offered as a strategy to resolve political crises. In contrast to power capture and power division, power sharing entails exercising power in cooperation with rival groups. The outcome of power sharing largely rests on the purpose and context of the agreement. Power sharing has proven effective at attenuating political violence and providing stability when enacted to guide a transition from white-minority to black-majority rule in former settler states (e.g., South Africa) or to bring persistent civil wars to an end (e.g., Sierra Leone and Burundi). However, in the context of an election dispute, power sharing fails to solve the underlying concerns that contribute to election-related conflict. Although power sharing may attenuate or end violence, the outcome is poor reconciling election winners and losers and deepening democratic practices (e.g., Kenya and Zimbabwe). Recognizing the failure of power sharing after election disputes, external mediators—particularly in West Africa (e.g., Côte d’Ivoire and The Gambia)—have tended to emphasize maintaining normal constitutional processes rather than power-sharing settlements.

This chapter examines efforts to introduce multi-party politics into Sub-Saharan Africa during the 1990s. It first considers regime changes in the region and shows that they result from the ‘conjuncture’ of various forces. Some of these forces are structural—such as the decline of African economies, the end of the Cold War—but political actors produce others, like incumbents’ concessions, opposition protests, and military withdrawals from politics. With reference to various African examples, the chapter emphasizes the important role played by certain structural conditions in transitions to democracy during the 1990s, but suggests that outcomes more often hinged on purposive political action. It also analyses the quality of resultant African regimes and concludes by identifying several fundamental constraints on further democratization including endemic poverty and weak states.

Abstract Knowledge about mass political attitudes and behavior derives mainly from studies of established Western democracies. But do populations under autocracy engage in the political process and, if so, do they support or challenge the status quo? Much depends on the nature of political regimes. To the extent that spaces for political expression are closed under autocracy, citizens face an unpalatable choice between political acquiescence and violent protest, with all the risks that such options impose. A key question for researchers is whether participants in authoritarian politics are active citizens or mobilized subjects. Survey evidence suggests that some people may be willing to grant legitimacy to strong leaders and to trust the institutions of a dominant state. Others nevertheless find ways to engage in conventional political behaviors such as discussing public affairs, taking collective action, and turning out to vote in elections, especially under hybrid competitive authoritarian regimes. Under what conditions do citizens sometimes rebel against entrenched authority? Regime type again seems to matter, with popular protest more common under open than closed systems. With reference to prodemocracy social movements, like the Arab Spring of 2011, analysts debate whether people take to the streets principally for reasons of rational self-interest or propelled by emotions like anger. And scholars explore the effects of new information and communications technologies, finding mixed results for political mobilization. As emphasized in the literature on contentious politics, the displacement of autocratic regimes from below is likely only if social movements build strong and sustained political organizations.

This article examines the political crisis in Mali, 2012-2013, to test the impact of violent conflict on public attitudes to democracy. In post-conflict situations, democracy building depends on interim steps to restore trust among citizens and to address national reconciliation and transitional justice. According to the results of a custom-designed opinion survey, recent experiences of violence and displacement in Mali have undermined both interpersonal and interethnic trust as well as public confidence that elected governments can resolve national conflicts. While internal displacement is frequently accompanied by violence against property, violence against persons increases popular demand for a retributive brand of transitional justice. Nonetheless, the Malian experience suggests that citizens in post-conflict societies - including those displaced from their homes - still yearn to live in a peaceful and unified country and have not abandoned a widespread preference for democracy.

This paper explores the feasibility of using social surveys to detect electoral manipulation in authoritarian regimes. It compares official results from the July 2013 elections in Zimbabwe with findings from a nationally representative pre-election survey. The comparison confirms that the dominant incumbent party won the elections but by far smaller margins than officially reported. This discrepancy provides analytic leverage to identify the possible presence of coercive mobilization and vote suppression and to pinpoint their geographic location. The election results are re-estimated using a set of voting simulations based on novel proxy indicators and an original list experiment designed to reveal the political preferences of fearful voters. The paper concludes by discussing why autocrats manipulate elections and whether or not they succeed in their objectives.

Journal of International DevelopmentVolume 28, Issue 4 p. 640-641 Book Review Review of Danielle Resnick, Urban Poverty and Party Populism in African Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Michael Bratton, Corresponding Author Michael Bratton mbratton@msu.edu Michigan State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Michael Bratton, Corresponding Author Michael Bratton mbratton@msu.edu Michigan State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 April 2016 https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.3225Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume28, Issue4May 2016Pages 640-641 RelatedInformation

Where are African countries headed politically? How resilient are Africa’s governments, regimes, and states? What are the characteristics of political risk? This paper is motivated by a desire to discover whether it is possible to identify early-warning indicators of risk to African political systems. We suggest that Afrobarometer survey data may be used to systematically track trends in mass political support – such as approval for incumbent governments, satisfaction with political regime performance, and the popular legitimacy of state institutions. Where trends in dimensions of popular disapproval turn sharply upward, we infer increasing political risk. The paper is anchored empirically with 15 years’ worth of public opinion data for selected African countries and offers interpretations of what these observations might mean. The analysis is both retrospective – connecting empirical trends to known episodes of instability in Mali, Kenya, and Zimbabwe – and prospective – raising red flags for countries like Ghana, among others, once considered stable but currently facing new political strains.

Competitive elections are becoming institutionalized in Africa. But elections have proven an uncertain mechanism for guaranteeing the accountability of political leaders. One reason is that political accountability has numerous attitudinal, behavioral and institutional requirements, of which popular participation in open elections is only one. Instead, we propose a framework of four elements that together comprise a holistic system of political accountability: (a) demand for vertical accountability; (b) supply of vertical accountability; (c) demand for horizontal accountability; and (d) supply of horizontal accountability.The article measures each of these elements using data from Afrobarometer Round 5 (2011–13). On one hand, we find that the weakest link in the chain of accountability remains the vertical one between largely passive electors and evasive legislative agents. On the other hand, we find that the African citizens surveyed think that elections strengthen the institutional autonomy of parliament, thus enabling a greater measure of horizontal accountability. But this pattern of accountability begs several lingering concerns. We wonder whether citizens have sufficient information to accurately monitor the relationship between president and parliament under a democratic constitution, and we find that the quality of elections, along with the partisan predispositions of electoral winners, condition the effect of elections on popular perceptions of accountability.

If you ask any lay person—or most scholars of comparative politics—about the motivation for party formation in Africa, they are likely to offer the same answer: ethnicity. In a welcome antidote to this orthodoxy, Sebastian Elischer argues that African political parties and party systems are much more diverse than that. He relies upon seminal analysis by Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther to propose a typology of five ideal varieties: the mono-ethnic party, the multi-ethnic alliance, the catch-all party, the programmatic party, and the personalistic party. While the first two types arise from ethnic foundations, the last three are distinctly non-ethnic. If nothing else, this book will discourage future analysts from lazily conflating all forms of party organization in Africa under an ethnic label. Elischer's detailed empirical analysis covers all effective parties across all election periods in three African countries between 1990 and 2009. He discovers that non-ethnic parties prevail in Ghana, as does a mixed-party system in Namibia; in Kenya, by contrast, he finds that ethnic parties persist. Across 28 observations of election periods, 16 parties are ethnic and 11 are non-ethnic (though non-ethnic parties enjoy greater electoral success), a situation confirmed when analysis is extended (in less depth) to 7 additional countries and 25 extra parties. Moreover, the data reveal a tendency for parties to reach out and to become less narrowly ethnic over time. Elischer accordingly claims that multiparty competition does not automatically harden intercommunal relations in Africa and that ethnic parties can contribute to democratization, for example, by performing conventional party functions such as aggregating popular interests and providing voters with a choice of leaders.

Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa. By Roger Southall. Woodbridge, UK: James Currey, and New York: Boy dell Brewer, 2013. Pp. 384. $80.00.In this imposing opus, Roger Southall offers a comprehensive comparative account of the rise to power and subsequent slow death of liberation movements (NLMs) in South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. Once harbingers of hope and freedom, the African National Congress (ANC), the South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO), and the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) lost their moral compass once they acceded to governmental power. Instead of fulfilling the movements' hybrid promises of liberalism, nationalism, and socialism, the incumbent political class in every country instead constructed machine-like party-states that now specialize in elite self-enrichment, while systematically undermining development, democracy, and the rule of law.What explains the NLMs' fall from grace? The author's account begins with settler colonialism, which endowed the Southern Africa region with a relatively advanced, but highly unequal, structure of industrial capitalism. Forced to accept transitional settlements with white property owners as the price of political power, incoming leaders saw that the transformation of inherited economies required the to capture the commanding heights of the Thus they deployed cadres throughout the public bureaucracy using criteria of political loyalty rather than technical competence that, fusing race and class, contributed to the rise of a new black bourgeoisie. As the global tide turned from socialism to neo-liberalism in the late twentieth century, former liberation movements became little more than party machines for accumulating public and private resources, to be redistributed via patronage to the faithful and denied to enemies of the state. Because each country's constitution was often seen as too respectful of minority rights, it was readily circumvented in the process of what was described, in a tired Marxist rationalization, as a national democratic revolution.While this common narrative illuminates the similarities across the cases, the author emphasizes cross-national differences, especially between South Africa and Namibia on one hand, and Zimbabwe on the other. The latter country underwent the deepest political and economic crisis, culminating in hyperinflation, cholera, and electoral violence in 2008. Moreover, ZANU-PF's hostile relations with the private sector stand in stark contrast to the unholy alliance between government and business in the other two countries. By the same token, Robert Mugabe has been far less constrained than Jacob Zuma by a liberal constitution, an independent court system, or a culture of constitutionalism. In addition, South Africa's political settlement was indigenously negotiated whereas transitions in Namibia and Zimbabwe were externally imposed (by the UN and UK respectively). Southall also notes the varying degrees to which nationalism was a unifying force: the range runs from the ANC's inclusive message of racial reconciliation, through SWAPO's efforts to disguise Ovambo domination in a cloak of Pan-Africanism, to the exclusive racial and ethnic nationalism enforced by ZANU-PF rulers in Zimbabwe. …