A Changing of the Guards or A Change of Systems? BTI 2020 - Regional Report Sub-Saharan Africa

Contrary to media depictions of sub-Saharan Africa, in many countries political change has tended to occur gradually. From 2015 to 2019, the general pattern has been for the continent’s more authoritarian states – such as Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, and Rwanda – to make little progress towards democracy and in some cases to become incrementally more repressive. At the same time, many of the continent’s more democratic states – including Botswana, Ghana, Mauritius, Senegal, and South Africa – have remained “consolidating” or “defective” democracies, with very few dropping out of these categories to become “authoritarian” regimes. Overall, only 16 countries saw their ranking in any one of the categories between the last two rounds of the BTI: this represents just 12% all cases, given that the BTI reviews 44 countries across three main categories. The main exceptions to this rule are countries that have suffered a rapid escalation of conflict (such as South Sudan in 2013), or the sudden collapse of the government (such as Burkina Faso in 2015). The current reporting period from February 2017 to January 2019 also saw significant, if not transformative, developments in a number of states including Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe – although in few of these cases was here a change to the underlying character of the political system. While Cameroon, Chad, Kenya and Tanzania have moved further away from lasting political and economic transformation, Angola, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe initially appeared to be making progress towards it. However, in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe this impression did not last beyond the end of the BTI reporting period, and the new governments of both countries now stand accused of committing similar human rights abuses to their predecessors. As this brief overview suggests, at a continental level the trajectories of different states have by and large cancelled each other out. Positive trends in some cases were wiped out by negative trends in others. Consequently, sub-Saharan Africa as a whole has witnessed no significant changes to the overall level of democracy, economic management and governance – the three main areas of performance covered in this report. Between BTI 2018 and BTI 2020 the overall level of democracy declined by just -0.04, a small shift on a 1-10 scale. There was an identical change in the status of economic transformation, and an even smaller shift in the average quality of governance of +0.01. Overall, these figures demonstrate remarkable continuity at the continental level. In almost all cases, positive trends were recorded in countries where leadership change generated hope for political renewal and economic reform. This includes Angola, after President José Eduardo dos Santos stepped down in 2017, Ethiopia, following the rise to power of Prime Minister Abiy, and Zimbabwe, where the transfer of power from Robert Mugabe to Emmerson Mnangagwa was accompanied with promises that in future the ZANU-PF government would demonstrate greater respect democratic norms and values. Sierra Leone also recorded a significant improvement in performance following the victory of opposition candidate Julius Maada Bio in the presidential election of 2018, while Nigeria has continued to make modest but significant gains in economic management since Muhammadu Buhari replaced Goodluck Jonathan as President. The significance of leadership change to all of these processes is an important reminder of the extent to which power has been personalized in many African states. It is important to note, however, that subsequent events since the end of the period under review in 2019 have cast doubt on the significance of these transitions. Most notably, continued and in some cases increasing human A Changing of the Guards or A Change of Systems? — BTI 2020 Report Sub-Saharan Africa | Page 5 rights abuses in countries such as Nigeria, Tanzania and Zimbabwe suggest that we have seen “a changing of the guards” rather than a genuine transformation of political systems. If we turn our attention to those countries that recorded negative trends, we see a very different pattern: deteriorating performance typically occurred in countries in which established leaders felt the need to adopt increasingly repressive strategies to retain control, and to subvert economic management to serve political ends as part of this effort. In some cases, this was in response to a strong challenge from the opposition (Kenya, Zambia), while in others it reflected an increase in popular unrest (Chad), and secessionist challenges to the legitimacy of the state itself (Cameroon). The only country to witness a significant decline in overall status in the absence of growing opposition was Tanzania, where the fall in the quality of governance under President John Magufuli appears to reflect more his personal leadership style and refusal to tolerate dissent than any actual increase in support for political rivals

Blondel’s African Presidential Republics:proof presidentialism can perform even in the most challenging contexts?

The debate on the ‘perils of presidentialism’ has been raging for over 30 years andgone through at least three waves. It began with the influential work of Juan Linzand most recently has seen the emergence of a rich literature on coalitional presiden-tialism, which has demonstrated the capacity of presidents to manage fragmentedmulti-party legislatures, and hence overcome the dangers of political deadlock.Jean Blondel’s last book (African Presidential Republics, Oxford, Routledge, 2019)belongs to this latest wave in the sense that he argues that presidential systems canovercome their limitations, and that certain aspects of the presidential models actu-ally give them an advantage over parliamentary equivalents. This article reviewsBlondel’s argument against the latest developments in African politics. I suggestthat there are fewer instances of positive presidentialism today than Blondel hopedfor, in part because democratic progress has often proved to be particularly vulnera-ble to later autocratization due to a tendency not to entrench gains via constitutionalreforms. Despite this cautionary note, however, I conclude that Blondel is right toreject the idea that African cases provide support for the ‘perils of presidentialism’.This is not only because Blondel highlights a number of presidents who played abenign or positive role in their country’s political development, but also because thecoalitional presidentialism literature suggests that there is little evidence that parlia-mentary systems would perform significantly better

Five lessons for researchers who want to collaborate with governments and development organisations but avoid the common pitfalls

The appeal of collaborating with a government agency, or an organisation funded by one, seems obvious. It provides researchers with much needed resources and information, while also offering practitioners and policymakers a way of generating the evidence needed to design better programmes. In practice, however, it's not always easy to make collaborative research work well. Susan Dodsworth and Nic Cheeseman outline some simple lessons for those looking to collaborate while avoiding the common pitfalls. Ensure the benefits are felt by all involved, maintain a degree of distance and objectivity, protect the quality of consent and your publishing rights, and always choose your partners carefully

Foreign aid withdrawals and suspensions:Why, when and are they effective?

In this introduction to the special issue, “Foreign Aid Withdrawals and Suspensions: Why, When and Are They Effective,” we both summarize the current state of the literature and outline a robust new agenda for studying aid suspensions and withdrawals. A common contribution of the papers in this special issue is that they emphasize that donors and aid-recipient states have more options available to them than previous literature has allowed and that it is the creative ways in which aid recipient governments seek to discipline their donors that make the effective use of conditionality so challenging. In this introduction, we not only summarize what we know about aid suspensions and withdrawals but also begin to unpack the complex decision-making that underlies aid suspensions, providing a simplified decision tree that can guide future research. Overall, we emphasize that, far from being a niche issue, aid suspensions and withdrawals are a fundamental part of the political economy of foreign aid and that much more work is needed to understand how recipient governments make decisions about how to respond or not to respond to (threats of) aid suspensions and withdrawals and how donors factor such political calculations into their initial or subsequent decision-making. The article highlights both the challenges and the opportunities of unpacking the complex decision-making behind aid suspensions and withdrawals

Decentralisation in Kenya : the governance of governors

Kenya's March 2013 elections ushered in a popular system of devolved government that represented the country's biggest political transformation since independence. Yet within months there were public calls for a referendum to significantly revise the new arrangements. This article analyses the campaign that was led by the newly elected governors in order to understand the ongoing disputes over the introduction of decentralisation in Kenya, and what they tell us about the potential for devolution to check the power of central government and to diffuse political and ethnic tensions. Drawing on Putnam's theory of two-level games, we suggest that Kenya's new governors have proved willing and capable of acting in concert to protect their own positions because the pressure that governors are placed under at the local level to defend county interests has made it politically dangerous for them to be co-opted by the centre. As a result, the Kenyan experience cannot be read as a case of ‘recentralisation’ by the national government, or as one of the capture of sub-national units by ‘local elites’ or ‘notables’. Rather, decentralisation in Kenya has generated a political system with a more robust set of checks and balances, but at the expense of fostering a new set of local controversies that have the potential to exacerbate corruption and fuel local ethnic tensions in some parts of the country

War and democracy:the legacy of conflict in East Africa

AbstractThe historical literature on statebuilding in Europe has often portrayed a positive relationship between war, state making and long-term democratisation. Similarly, a number of large-n quantitative studies have concluded that war promotes democracy – even in cases of civil war. Against this, a growing area studies literature has argued that violent conflict in developing countries is unlikely to drive either statebuilding or democratisation. However, this literature has rarely sought to systematically set out the mechanisms through which war undermines democracy. Contrasting three ‘high conflict’ cases (Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda) with two ‘low conflict’ cases (Kenya and Tanzania) in East Africa, we trace the way in which domestic conflict has undermined three key elements of the democratisation process: the quality of political institutions, the degree of elite cohesion, and the nature of civil-military relations. Taken together, we suggest that the combined effect of these three mechanisms helps to explain why Kenya and Tanzania have made significantly greater progress towards democratic consolidation than their counterparts and call for more in-depth research on the long-term legacy of conflict on democratisation in the African context.</jats:p