Party Footprints in Africa: Measuring Party Presence with Public Opinion Surveys

• In Event: Party Behavior in Africa

Abstract

The development of effective, institutionalized parties is often seen as a crucial milestone in the development of democracy (Bértoa 2016; Frantz and Kendall-Taylor 2017; Downs 1957). Despite broad agreement that party institutionalization is important, however, there is significant disagreement over how best to measure it, with most scholars relying on electoral variables, such as the stability of voting patterns, and overlooking harder to measure elements such as party organization on the ground. While voting patterns clearly matter, effective political parties should be more than simply voting options on election day. Rather they should be organizations that give life to democracy, by engaging with voters and drawing them into the political process on an ongoing basis. To assess this dimension of party activity, we develop a new measure of party presence, using survey data from over 30 African countries to account for the interactions citizens have with political parties both between and during elections. We then use this new measure to explore two enduring question in the literature: to what extent are political parties in Africa institutionalized?; And what effect does this have on the political behaviour of citizens? We find that levels of party institutionalization across the continent actually look very different when on-the-ground party behaviour is taken into account, and show that this has significant implications for both citizen trust and the voter turnout.

Authors

• Robert Britt Mattes, University of Strathclyde

• Matthias Werner Krönke, University of Cape Town

• Sarah Jane Lockwood, Columbia University