African Legislatures and Accountability During Government Crisis

• In Event: African Legislatures and Horizontal Accountability

Abstract

Despite increased political competition in the last 20 years of African democracy, African legislatures have generally remained conspicuously weak. As legislatures and other political institutions have been largely ineffective in their role to exert horizontal accountability and oversee the powers of the executive, African democracies have been vulnerable to democratic backsliding and executive corruption. Individual MPs generally lack the political, economic, and institutional resources to effectively challenge the powers of a powerful executive. Yet, anecdotal evidence suggests that pockets of resistance from within the parliament have often emerged during times of executive crisis. However, we still know little about the incentives and structures that enable individual MPs to actively pursue executive accountability. In this paper, we study the parliamentary behavior of MPs in the Malawi parliament to identify and explain active legislative opposition in times of executive crisis. The analysis is based on a unique dataset of parliamentary debate transcripts in the period of 2000-2015. Using machine learning and sentiment analysis, we identify the characteristics of activist legislators both within the opposition and within the ruling party. The quantitative analysis is complimented with qualitative data from interviews with activist MPs to uncover the incentives that promote active opposition.

Authors

• Michael Wahman, Michigan State University

• Peter A. VonDoepp, University of Vermont

• Nikolaos Frantzeskakis, Michigan State University