About Us
Picture: Gavin Barker/BackpagePix
The PPA project seeks to improve the quality of information about political parties that is available to citizens, policy makers and the academic community. We do this by collecting data, developing online resources, providing analysis, and partnering with organisations and researchers around the world.
The Project
Political parties are a vital element in the quality of representative democracy, and with democracy in retreat in many countries around the world, it is now more essential than ever to understand the role they play in enhancing accountability, supporting democracy, and reining in populism. Despite being home to over a quarter of the world’s countries, however, little attention has so far been paid to the quality, role, and impact of political parties on democracy in Africa, leaving academics and civil society unclear about the best ways to support their development and strengthen good governance.
The Political Parties in Africa (PPA) project is the first large-scale study of political party organization and activity in Africa, providing vital information, data and analysis to support accountability and democracy strengthening initiatives on the continent. Central to this is the development of a new cross-national dataset on African political parties, containing information on their formal rules, their organization and activities at a national and subnational level, and their interactions with citizens. Therefore, as the PPA we are:
- Establishing an active network of researchers across Africa, Europe, and North America
- Strengthening empirical social science research capacity in African institutions
- Collecting data on political parties across the African continent
- Collaborating with existing international data collection projects
- Disseminating research on political parties in Africa
- Co-ordinating with policy makers and civil society to support democracy promotion efforts
Collaborations
We are currently collaborating with two major cross-national data collection projects, the Political Parties Database (PPDB) and the Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project (DALP).
Together with the PPDB, we advance the study of party-based representative democracy in Africa by collecting data on the formal rules governing political parties in Africa (e.g., information on party structures, institutions, resources, events, decision procedures and their outcomes) as well as data on the broader legislative and electoral environment. In Round 2 the PPDB collected data for a total of 51 parliamentary and presidential democracies, and the PPA contributed information for 12 African countries (26 political parties): Botswana, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The data were collected from 2017 to 2020 and cover rules and events immediately prior to the data collection (roughly 2014-2020).
We also collaborating with DALP as partner for the data collection in sub-Saharan Africa. This project focuses on leadership accountability in polities with multi-party elections. The five core modules of the DALP Survey II (2020-2021) focus on 1) organisation of political parties, 2) exchange mechanisms & organisation of that effort, 3) local promoters who organise & distribute benefits to voters, 4) party policy positions, and 5) the generalised comparison of modes of party competition. DALP as a whole is currently collecting data for the second wave of the project with the aim to conduct surveys with experts from more than 95 electoral democracies. As part of this effort, we contribute data on 13 African countries, including Angola, Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The PPA project is hosted at the University of Cape Town
