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25 I think democracy should aim at raising and improving the economic situation of the people in Tanzania. Democracy is useless to me if our living conditions remain backward. Household interview, poor household Kinondoni District November 2000 1 Introduction Democracy and poverty reduction have been two of the most used concepts in the development discourse since the late eighties. “Democracy” is regarded as both a value in itself, and since the mid-nineties, as the best mechanism for achieving “development” and poverty reduction. This thesis aims at exploring the challenges for the consolidation of a substantive democratisation process in Tanzania, in connection with the elections in 2000 and 2005, as it is perceived by various stake-holders. My personal interest for a long time has been to explore the assumed and taken for granted mutually reinforcing relationship between neo-liberal economic and administrative reforms and the democratisation process. This interest has been inspired by the debate between the proponents of Liberal democracy and Substantive democracy, and the old debate on whether political rights or social and economic rights are the most fundamental. That is, whether the form or the substance/outcome of the democratic process defines if a country is democratic or not.This discussion has also been central in the post-colonial development debate in Africa, and in Tanzania. In an effort to narrow down the debate, this thesis focuses on the challenges for the democratisation process within the political sphere, and explores to what extent democracy has been consolidated in Tanzania.1 1 The study is based on interviews with various stakeholders at national level. Interviews and field studies in two districts, Kinondoni in Dar es Salaam and Pangani a poor rural district, also inform the study. The materials from the local field studies are only touched upon in this text. However, the input from these two local field studies has greatly benefited my understanding and analysis of the process at the national level. 26 JONAS EWALD CHALLENGES FOR THE DEMOCRATISATION PROCESS IN TANZANIA 1.1 The ambiguous“transition”to democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa A large number of countries in Africa made the transition to “multi-party democracy ”, after the “third wave of democracy” started to sweep across the continent in 1989 (Hydén and Bratton, 1992; Bratton and van de Walle, 1997; Diamond, 1997; 1999; Cowen and Laakso, 2002). The number of countries holding competitive legislative elections quadrupled between 1990 and 2005 (Lindberg, 2006). The reason behind the rapid change to multiparty democracy was a combination of external and internal factors (Diamond and Plattner, 1999; 2000; Bratton and van de Walle, 1997; Rakner, 2001; Sandbrook, 2000; Widner, 1994). Democracy and democratisation have since 1989 been promoted and endorsed by the international development cooperation community as an effective strategy for enhancing good governance, economic growth and poverty reduction—as well as post-conflict development. The usual difference in perspectives between the World Bank, UN organizations, bilateral donors and NGOs, and private sector investors, appeared somehow to have vanished in the unanimous endorsement of “democracy” as a development strategy (Craig and Porter, 2006). At the same time internal pressure mounted against the first and second generation of post-colonial rule in Africa that had resulted in various degrees of stagnated economic development and authoritarian rule. Democracy became not only a goal in itself, but was regarded as a fundamental instrument to bring about transformation of societies, institutions and cultures to break the structures that uphold poverty and create development. However, the development towards democracy has met a number of challenges and problems. The rapid rate of positive change towards (liberal) democracy has declined in recent years, and even backlashed in a number of states in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (Joseph, 2008; 2003; Basedau et al., 2007; Bogaards, 2009; Diamond, 2003; Erdmann, 2011; Menocal et al., 2008). Authoritarian forms of rule continue, or even increase, but within a framework of formal democracy with regular elections. The simplistic notion of “transition” from authoritarian to (liberal) democratic rule in stages along the lines of earlier modernisation theory, was challenged by the rapidly growing literature, both in and outside Africa, pointing at its strong ideological foundation in liberalism and modernisation theory, an ideology named “transitology” in the literature (Olukoshi, 1998; Lumumba-Kasongo, 2006; Musoni, 2003; Nasong’o, 2007). The simplistic “transitology ” or “transition” paradigm was also questioned by western researchers within the liberal paradigm (Carothers, 2002). According to Herbst (2008), the inevitable question is: whether democratization...

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