Political parties in the Global North have long been seen as organisations that fulfil crucial functions in political systems. In Africa, however, the prevailing wisdom has for too long been that African parties perform few, if any, of these functions. More recently, however, new evidence has provided a more nuanced understanding of party activities and their political impact across the continent, challenging many of these long-standing assumptions. This chapter provides an overview of some of this new evidence with a particular focus on three areas. First, it discusses the role of political parties in clientelism, patronage, and vote-buying; second, party institutionalisation and organisational capacity; and third, African parties on the campaign trail. This entry is intended to serve as a starting point for scholars and enthusiasts seeking a solid foundation in the study of African political parties, which we hope will encourage more research on the topic.

Since the era of decolonization, political parties have played a crucial role in shaping the national political landscape of independent Africa. They have served as vehicles for mobilization, governance, and opposition; provided platforms for the expression of diverse ideologies, aspirations, and interests; channeled patronage and resources; and attempted to hold governments accountable. Despite playing such a crucial role, however, the study of political parties in Africa has lagged significantly behind its counterparts in North America, Europe, and many parts of the Global South. In the immediate post-independence period of the 1960s, scholarly work largely assessed the continent’s nascent political parties through functionalist typologies, examining issues such as interest articulation, aggregation, and recruitment. Reflecting the rapid closing of democratic spaces, however, those who studied parties in the 1970s and 1980s came to assess them, where they still existed, as institutions of mobilization, development, and legitimation. Following the new democratic openings of the late 1980s and early 1990s, scholars scrambled to (re)assemble the concepts and analytic tools that had been evolving in the Global North since the early 1960s. Parties in the region have long been assumed to be weak, with many taking their ethnic nature and lack of organizational capacity as given. However, a newer literature has started to push back on some of these long-held assumptions and claims, questioning, for example, whether parties can really be weak if they possess the capacity to distribute gifts or coordinate government decisions with electoral considerations. Other works, similarly, have focused on the activities of opposition parties and the ways in which they have acted to stem the decline of democracy. Still others have complicated the relationship between parties and patronage. It is at this critical moment in the study of political parties in Africa that we offer this annotated bibliography—encompassing a range of classic and cutting-edge literature, and seeking to act as a guide to the state of the field today. It is important to note, however, that this bibliography is not intended to be exhaustive but rather to serve as a starting point for scholars and enthusiasts seeking a solid foundation in the study of African political parties. The selected resources are drawn from a diverse range of disciplines, including political science, African studies, sociology, and history, and cover a range of regions and electoral system types. Ultimately, this bibliography on political parties in Africa hopes to stimulate further research, analysis, and discourse on this crucial subject.

Since the early 1990s, African states have been democratizing. Political parties now dominate the public spaces in many African democracies. The past 26 years have witnessed the growth and consolidation of “party democracy” in Africa. This is the longest period of uninterrupted growth of electoral politics in many countries on the continent. Recent Afrobarometer surveys show that almost two-thirds (63%) of Africans support pluralistic politics. Party identification in sub-Saharan Africa has also been on the rise. Across 16 states Afrobarometer surveyed, a majority of Africans (65%) claim they “feel close to” a political party in their country. The mass public who identified with a particular political party increased by 7 percentage points between 2002 and 2015.

Political parties are the vehicles for citizens to engage in party activism. The women and men who join a political party become the party activists. Party activists are the lifeblood of the party organization. And political party activism in sub-Saharan Africa is geared toward the election of the party and its candidates into office. Consequently, party activism is a continuum of high-intensity and low-intensity political activities. Party activists vary in their levels of involvement. Thus, it is a mixture of fanfare and aggressive participation. Political party activism is a multifaceted process where party members undertake any of the following political activities: display a poster, donate money, help with fund-raising, deliver election leaflets, help at a party function, attend party meetings, undertake door-to-door campaigning, and run for party office. The involvement of party members usually varies from active engagement to passive attachment to the party. There were several motives for party activists getting involved in “high-intensity participation.” Because of the crucial role party activists play in the intra- and inter-party competition, the parties provide some incentives to get members commitment. At the organizational level, party activists present themselves for election into party offices at the grassroots, regionally or nationally. They devote their time and financial resources in furtherance of the party agenda. In return, party activists expect the party to reward them with selective incentives when power is won. That said, more research is required at the country level to enable us to construct the profile of the African party activists.

African legislators both resemble and differ from the societies they claim to represent in important ways. Based on a unique survey of representative samples of parliamentarians in 17 countries, we find that legislatures are representative of national publics in terms of ethnicity and religion. At the same time, compared to ordinary African citizens, African MPs possess far higher levels of education and are far more likely to be older, male and to come from professional or business backgrounds. Besides coming from higher social and economic status backgrounds, many MPs also previously held senior posts in the state and national government, or leadership positions in their political party. Does this mean that African legislators constitute a coherent, self-interested, social, economic and political ‘power elite’ detached from the interests of the voters? In the legislatures under investigation, we find little evidence of this effect. Markers of social, economic or political privilege and power overlap irregularly and in a non-cumulative way. For example, while MPs are significantly older than the average voter, we find that most African legislators are in their first term of office. Thus, far from comprising a slowly changing, cohesive and self-interested elite, characterised by overlapping and cumulative markers of social and political influence, Africa’s legislators come from a plurality of social and political backgrounds, and are relative legislative neophytes.

Scholars and policymakers widely view identity as a key driver of African citizens’ political engagement. In doing so, however, they have emphasized ethnicity and largely sidelined other identities, including gender, local origin, shared residency, and partisanship. In this paper, we explore which identities drive political engagement and why they do so. We employ an original survey experiment that includes various identities and other incentives that may drive citizens’ participation around Zambia’s 2021 national elections. We find that partisanship most influences individuals’ stated willingness to campaign for a candidate or meet with an MP, while ethnicity and social incentives play less significant roles. Finally, we explore the mechanisms underpinning these results and find that citizens anticipate sanctions if they fail to support a co-partisan but not a co-ethnic candidate. These findings have important implications for understanding political engagement and democratic development throughout the region.

Campaign rallies serve as arenas of political communication where candidates present their campaign messages face-to-face in order to gain votes. This article suggests that rallies are one of several forms of campaign visits along with official business stops, courtesy calls to local notables, and personal interactions with constituents. Drawing on an original dataset of campaign visits in Ghana’s 2016 and 2020 elections, we find that a significant political learning process took place between the two races for candidates of the two major parties, as candidates diversified their strategies beyond the rally-intensive campaign. Candidates extended the communicative and representative elements of the traditional rally through socially embedded practices by relying on occupational groups like market associations and fisherfolk to mobilise voters. By explaining the meaning behind different forms of campaign visits, we conclude that campaign rallies and other visits are embedded in social realities that shape political mobilisation.

Political parties are a vital element in the quality of representative democracy, playing a crucial role in mobilization, competition, governance, and accountability. Despite their importance, however, we currently know relatively little about how political parties in Africa are organized, with most evidence restricted to journalistic accounts or country-specific scholarly accounts. This symposium, which comes out of a conference on political parties held at the University of Cape Town, takes a closer look at the development of party structures and organization across the continent. It seeks to answer a number of critical questions including: What affects the organizational structure of parties? How do party primaries affect party-building and electoral success? And what effect does the shrinking of open political space have on the ways in which parties organize? Taken as a whole, this symposium brings together established and emerging scholars, to systematically explore, for the first time, what party organization looks like on the African continent, and how it affects critical issues of governance, mobilization, and accountability.

The conventional view of Africa’s political parties holds that they are organizationally weak, with little presence at the grass roots. Yet, few studies are based on systematically collected data about more than a handful of parties or countries at any given point. In this paper, we attempt to remedy this situation, by focusing on one crucial aspect of party organization – the local presence that enables political parties to engage with and mobilize voters during and between elections – and developing the first systematic, survey-based measure of the extent of this presence across 35 countries. We draw on a wide variety of data to demonstrate the validity and reliability of this new index, and in the process showcase its ability to be calculated at a number of different levels. Finally, we illustrate its utility by applying it to a key substantive question in the literature.

The impact of political context on a political party’s organizing and mobilizing strategies has been noted in the literature. Opposition political parties operating in autocratic contexts look for different ways in which they can communicate, organize, and mobilize their members. Advances in digital technology and, in particular social media, have created such spaces in which political parties can communicate and mobilize their members. In Tanzania, the state has imposed repressive political restrictions against opposition parties. In this context, it would be assumed that opposition political parties would turn to social media as an alternative means for mobilization and communication due to restrictions in traditional spaces such as mainstream media and rallies. This article argues that, in Tanzania, the opposition political parties’ levels of institutionalization and resources determine their use of social media more than the repressive political context. The study compares the Twitter use of two opposition parties—Chadema and ACT-Wazalendo—in two periods between 2016 and 2020, which is the period of increasing authoritarian tendencies in the country. The study deploys a qualitative research methodology using a case study approach and collection of data from the parties’ practices in their official Twitter accounts as well as key informant interviews.

I ask where African opposition parties organize. Party-building is communicative; it involves persuading people to become activists. The literature suggests that opposition parties organize where people are receptive to their messages and build outwards from there. I study Chadema’s opposition party-building through site-intensive fieldwork. Chadema organized primarily in such receptive areas, but also in four unreceptive constituencies. I use these deviant constituencies to refine the literature. Prior theory neglects the heterogeneity of party-building. I decompose party-building into three modes as follows: by touring leaders, branches and concentrating leaders. Concentrating leaders dedicate their organizing to single places. They employ small rallies which afford interactive, individualized and iterative communication. This personalized communication enables them to overcome initial unreceptiveness to their messages. I conclude that opposition parties can organize in unreceptive areas, but only through the personalized methods of these ‘lone organizers’. Altogether, I show how and through whom opposition parties organize in hostile environments.

Why do political parties implement primary elections? With multi-party elections firmly established, political parties in many young democracies have begun to democratize internally by adopting mass primaries. Previous work argues that parties institute primaries to select for high quality candidates, incentivize campaigning effort, and reduce intra-party conflict. In this paper, I theorize that parties also implement mass primaries to open up the political elite while protecting their most senior members. Consistent with this hypothesis, using original data from Botswana’s ruling party, I find that primaries facilitate a limited and controlled turnover, decreasing the likelihood of re-nomination of long-term incumbents in favor of political newcomers while still protecting senior ministers. Combined with qualitative and historical evidence, these results suggest that electorally successful political parties may implement mass primaries to replace unpopular and entrenched leaders.

A large body of literature exists around the study of elections. What often goes unnoticed, however, is that elections take place between and within parties. While the former has received significant attention, the latter has not. This is true of African elections generally, and Tanzanian elections specifically. This study examines one important aspect of intra-party democracy – the process of candidate selection. Particular attention is paid to the electoral outcomes of selection methods in two purposively selected political parties in Tanzania, the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) and the opposition Chama cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (CHADEMA). Based on an examination of party nomination rules, electoral observation reports, the media, and stakeholder interviews, I argue that candidate selection methods in both parties are, by design, undemocratic. Non-restrictive candidacy requirements, exclusive selectorates, centralised selection and appointment, rather than democratic voting procedures, dominate selection processes. Undemocratic candidate selection has affected the share of votes and seats received by both parties in elections.

This article examines the use of populist discourse in South African politics. We investigate speeches of leaders from the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and opposition parties, the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). We find that the EFF consistently employs populist appeals, while both the incumbent ANC and official opposition DA largely refrain. Our longitudinal analysis allows an examination of fluctuation across party leaders and electoral cycles, and illustrates that neither the ANC nor the DA have modified their political discourses in light of a rising populist challenger. However, there is some evidence that the two most dominant parties have reformed their programmatic offerings and behaviour in an attempt to compete with the EFF’s popular appeal. The South African case offers important insights into the study of oppositional populism on the African continent, and a window into how major political parties may respond to emerging populist contenders.

The level of political trust in a country is an important factor for the survival of its political system. Many democratic states have experienced declines in political trust. In Ghana, lack of trust in opposition parties and many public institutions is widespread. Ghanaians trust religious organizations and traditional authorities more than political parties and state institutions; it is, however, political parties that govern and implement public policy. So, what generates trust in Ghanaian parties and political trust more broadly? This article draws on ethnographic data and Afrobarometer survey data to answer this question. We argue that political trust in Ghana is strongly linked to a high degree of party loyalty and political partisanship, and therefore trust largely follows party affiliation. At the same time, factors such as economic performance in government and internal politics and fractions influence the generation of trust. Our analysis shows that political trust in Ghana largely reflects party loyalty but is influenced by a democratic ethos relating to government performance vis-à-vis citizens and internal party politics. This means that the understanding of political trust in Ghana (and elsewhere) must take into consideration the particular histories of political parties, as well as their relationship to power and control of public institutions, and not focus solely on government performance.

On October 23, 2019, Botswana held its twelfth free and fair election. For the first time in the history of Botswana’s electoral democracy, a former president (Ian Khama) defected from the ruling party and supported the opposition. The opposition coalition, working informally with Khama, mounted a spirited campaign against the well-oiled machine, the incumbent and long-ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP). Seabo and Nyenhuis reflect on the 2019 general election, analyze the outcome, and consider the implications for the future of Botswana’s electoral democracy. They argue that barring other factors, the BDP’s resounding victory was mainly a result of Batswana’s rejection of former president Ian Khama.

This article investigates populist rhetoric in the 2019 South African elections. I argue that both Julius Malema and Dr. Pieter Groenewald consistently employed populist appeals. Although populism is mostly confined to smaller opposition parties, I demonstrate that all major leaders utilised populist rhetoric to some degree. I briefly investigate the consequences of the EFF’s populism, and contend that their campaign rhetoric has largely been mirrored in their behaviour between elections, challenging South Africa’s democracy. Lastly, both populists made explicitly racialised appeals, albeit to different constituencies, contravening the country’s political norm of nonracialism, seen as underpinning its political stability.

The staying power of the Nkrumahist minor parties in an institutionalised two-party system is the specific puzzle that underlies this paper. It argues that post-election opportunities for party patronage remain important despite the persistently unsuccessful electoral strategies of the Nkrumahist minor. In national elections minor parties’ salience has declined. Nevertheless, the competitiveness of elections sometimes calls for the support of a third-party to win elections. The paper reports that the Nkrumahist parties activated their ‘coalition potential’ during open presidential races. The few members winning legislative seats used their ‘blackmail potential’ to gain influence in the government parties. More significant, however, are the post-election patronage opportunities provided by winning parties, involving public sector employment and other forms of recognition.

Socio-environmental conditions influence party organizations and political behaviour in the different ecological zones of Africa. Party-branded sheds serve as a lens for understanding electoral politics in Ghana. Sheds are local spaces of political contestation and forums of political representation. They connect party and community symbolically by demonstrating the different ways the party will represent the people. The framework of the politics of place allows this paper to delineate the forms of informal political behaviour mediated by territoriality to explain party activism at the grassroots. It argues that political behaviour at the grassroots is affected by the character of the local environment as well as a number of sociocultural and economic factors. The paper draws on in-depth interviews with party activists and ethnographic observations to analyze political behaviour. It finds that locality affects party organizations; activism in the sheds is informal, transient and structured by personal ties; inter- and intra-party disputes are common among the sheds; and male-dominated shed culture is typical of the northern savannah belt and other migrant-dominated Muslim communities in southern Ghana.

Within the literature, there is growing concern about how competitive politics are contributing to electoral violence in Africa. The focus of scholars has been on large‑scale organized political violence, referred to here as high‑intensity electoral violence. This article fills a gap in the literature and introduces a “new” concept I call low-­intensity electoral violence by youth activists affiliated with political parties. The article is based on youth activists affiliated to political parties in Ghana. Ghanaian parties mobilize these rank and file party members, who are commonly known as party foot soldiers. I argue that politics in Ghana functions within a clientelism environment where the party in government uses state authority to dispense patronage. Political parties recruit and use foot soldiers to commit electoral fraud in order to win elections or to maintain their control over state resources. On the basis of an original dataset built using event catalogs and in-­depth interviews, the key argument of this article is that the normative logic of the winner-­take‑all electoral politics is that the winner of a presidential election monopolizes all state power. It further argues that this logic contributes to what I call low-intensity electoral violence. The aggressive behavior of the party foot soldiers is also linked to structural and partisan factors such as youth unemployment, unfulfilled electoral promises, and the survival strategies of elite groups within parties. The article concludes that as party foot soldiers begin to play an important role in the capture of power by political elites, they view a change of regime as the right time to claim political opportunities. On the whole, however, acts of aggression committed by youth party foot soldiers are the low intensity kind.

Competition for the executive leadership of a political party and the distribution of state patronage in Ghana is influenced by factional alignments and group interests. In December 2008 the National Democratic Congress (NDC) regained political power, and within months rifts appeared over the allocation of ministerial portfolios. The intra-party murmurings became public when two factions supported rival candidacies for the party’s presidential nomination. The pro-Rawlings faction supported the candidacy of Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings, and the anti-Rawlings bloc backed President John Evans Atta Mills. Drawing on Boucek’s (2009) typology of factionalism, this article argues that factionalism within the NDC is a dynamic and complex process of informal groupings competing and jockeying for power to satisfy members’ interests. It draws three conclusions: party factions are ad hoc groupings that are nurtured into a power bloc, and are constellated around particular individuals; factional conflicts are not rooted in ideology, but are based on differences in policy goals, interests and patronage; and, finally, factionalism fluctuates between cooperative and competitive phases.

With the increasing consolidation of her democracy, Ghana has, once again, become a cause for celebration and a source of pride in Africa. This newfound status as the bellwether state of African democracy makes Ghana ripe for a critical analysis of her democratic institutions. This article places the handling of parliamentary primaries by the two leading political parties in Ghana – the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) – under the microscope for closer scrutiny. The article interrogates the nature of these primaries, the procedures that govern their conduct, the factors that determine whether or not they are held, and the extent to which these parliamentary primaries have satisfied or deviated from democratic norms. It concludes that, while tremendous progress has been made in the candidate selection process by both major parties, there is plenty of room for improvement to ensure that the process is sufficiently empowering of voters in the constituencies and, hence, genuinely democratic.

This article analyses the factors that influence some Ghanaians to join a political party and become active in the party. It seeks to illuminate the multi-dimensionality of the motivational basis of party activism in Ghana by exploring the following problematics: Why join the National Democratic Congress (NDC)/New Patriotic Party (NPP)? and Why be active in the NDC and NPP? Based on interviews, it argues that some Ghanaians signed up for the membership of political parties and became party activists because of the selective incentives the parties dispense to their members. The decision to join a party is thus part of a survival strategy and serves practical ends, immediate or remote, social and individual.

Since the era of decolonization, political parties have played a crucial role in shaping the national political landscape of independent Africa. They have mobilized citizens; provided platforms for the expressions of diverse ideologies, aspirations, and interests; channeled resources; and helped citizens try to hold governments accountable. Despite their playing such a crucial role, however, the study of political parties in Africa has lagged significantly behind its counterparts elsewhere, with key moments of citizen interaction — such as campaign rallies and canvassing — often dismissed as simply avenues for clientelism and vote buying. In this chapter, we draw on a wide range of data to show that the behavior of African parties is far more complex than often claimed, particularly when it comes to their interactions with citizens. Indeed, far from primarily engaging in clientelism and vote buying, we show that parties across the continent engage in campaign strategies and citizen interactions that would be recognizable to scholars elsewhere in the world, and that campaigns in particular are important moments in which citizens learn about office holders, candidates, policy platforms and government performance. Ultimately, we argue that parties in Africa function as important parts of civil society, without which democracy across the continent would be severely weakened.

The authors provide evidence that partisan identification exists in African polities, though its extent varies considerably across countries. Moreover, the authors find that partisanship helps people organize their political world. It shapes the way they vote, and also exercises important influences on citizens’ propensity to become involved in a wide range of democratic politics, whether during or between elections. Finally, the authors produce several nuggets of evidence which suggest that partisanship in Africa constitutes, at least for many voters, a ‘standing choice’ rather than a fixed identity. That is, while voter support for ruling parties is shaped by ethnicity (and other demographic background factors), it is not determined by them. Voter evaluations of the overall direction of the economy, national economic trends, and government responsibility for those trends, matter. Moreover, aggregate levels of identification with the ruling party, or what other scholars have called ‘macropartisanship’, have undergone important, and in some cases dramatic, shifts over time. And in some cases, partisanship moves in close correlation with shifts in voter sentiment. All of this should be seen as evidence of an important, little-appreciated dimension of vertical accountability in Africa’s multi-party regimes

Canvassing is an important way in which political parties around the world raise awareness and connect with voters. Despite this, the literature on parties in new democracies, and Africa in particular, has tended to overlook this form of activity, focusing instead on vote buying, mass rallies, and meetings. In this paper, we use public opinion survey data from Afrobarometer and the Comparative National Elections Project to show that overall rates of canvassing in Africa are similar to other new, as well as many established, democracies. The data also challenge several dominant views of party campaigns in the Africanist literature. First, African parties do not concentrate primarily on turning out their base, rather than reaching across the partisan divide. Indeed, the opposite is the case. African parties expend more energy contacting nonpartisan independents and cross-partisans, and thus make a potentially meaningful contribution to the supply of multiparty competition. Second, the vast majority of contacts occur without any clientelist exchanges of material goods between parties and individual voters. And third, while incumbent parties enjoy canvassing advantages over opposition parties in around one-third of the surveyed countries, opposition parties (viewed collectively) match the party in power in terms of the ground game in another third, and enjoy higher rates of contact in yet another third.
At the country level, we find that people are more likely to be contacted in societies with higher rates of grassroots party structures. While parties are more likely to canvass citizens who live in neighbourhoods with good roads, they also contact at higher rates in rural, less developed, and more violent and less secure neighbourhoods. Within these neighbourhoods, parties are likely to contact citizens who are more visible in terms of their participation in community-level politics. Finally, while parties contact people who are already more likely to vote, we show that contact increases the odds of voting even further, by around one-third.