Political Parties and Democracy in Africa

This is a collaborative project between Robert Mattes (University of Strathclyde), George Bob-Milliar (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana), Sarah Lockwood (University of Bristol), and Matthias Krönke (University of Reading), together with our project partners, Afrobarometer, as well as the Jean Golding Institute (University of Bristol)  and the  Bristol Digital Futures Institute.

The project is funded by an ERC Synergy Grant (€9.9 million) from 2026-2032.

Democracy in Africa is in decline. Indeed, according to reports by leading democracy watchdogs such as Freedom House and V-Dem, political freedom in Africa has experienced widespread decline over the past decade, resulting in a significant weakening of democratic institutions across the continent. And many observers have pointed to the continent’s political parties as one of the chief culprits in this regard, highlighting the ways in which weak, clientelist parties, particularly in opposition, permit and even encourage this destruction of democratic institutions and practices.

At the same time, however, some political parties do act to stem this worrying tide – at least in some places. Far from undermining democracy as is often claimed, therefore, there is evidence that several parties in Africa are acting to promote democracy in the region.

To answer these questions, we will focus on understanding and collecting data around four critical activities of parties:

(1) Aggregating preferences and developing policies. By identifying, contacting, listening to, and aggregating voters with similar values and preferences, parties provide citizens with meaningful choice at the ballot box, and enhance the competitiveness of the overall system.
(2) Mobilizing citizens. By identifying, contacting, and mobilising citizens to vote (or between elections, to take part in collective action), parties give citizens a sense of participation and ownership, and enhance the legitimacy of the system.
(3) Conveying information. By engaging voters between elections and acting as conveyor belts of information they communicate citizen preferences to elected leaders and inform citizens about government policy, they link the grass roots with elected incumbents and provide voters with a sense of representation and enhance the overall responsiveness of the system.
(4) Holding office holders to account. By monitoring and critiquing government policy, and by presenting convincing counterarguments, both opposition and governing parties provide voters with alternatives and enhance the overall accountability of the system.

By triangulating data from national headquarters down to local branches and individual citizens, the project validates insights across multiple levels, and provides unprecedented opportunities to test hypotheses regarding the consequences of party behaviour across a range of regime types.
In short, by providing access to both the formal rules and the everyday behaviours of 80 African parties, the PPADEM dataset allows researchers to rigorously test assumptions about the divergence between theory and practice in developing democracies.