Democracy in Africa: Women Need Not Apply?

No Shortcuts to Power: African Women in Politics and Policy Making, Anne Marie Goetz and Shireen Hassim, Editors. (London: Zed Books, 2003). 256 pp. $25.

Africa has just barely been swept up in what historian Samuel P. Huntington coined the "Third Wave" of democracy that has overtaken much of the world in the last thirty years. According to the Financial Times, of the continent's fifty-four countries, only sixteen are even nominally democratic. But in too many of those countries, liberal democracy has yet to institutionalize itself in a truly functional way: elections are often staged exercises designed to appease international donors and legitimize the ruling party, and freedom of the press, though codified, is subverted by self-censorship. And while several enduring warlords have been deposed, countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are still struggling with the effects of ethnic fragmentation and systematic state pillaging. As my own organization, the International Republican Institute (IRI), witnessed first hand, hopeful signs of democratic progress such as Kenya's efficient and equitable 2002 elections were followed by Nigeria's poorly executed polls early this year.

Among the most glaring failures of representative democracy in Africa has been its inability to markedly increase the number of women in government and consistently articulate women's interests into relevant, effective policy. The conventional wisdom, which has guided United States Agency for International Development (USAID) policy for much of the past decade, has been that decentralization would do both. Although decentralization has had a substantial impact on empowerment and on delivery of social services in rural communities, its success in increasing female representation and incorporating women's interests into policy has so far been disappointing.

Anne Marie Goetz and Shireen Hassim's new anthology No Shortcuts to Power: African Women in Politics and Policy Making, is thus an important contribution to a nascent theoretical debate that has wide policy implications. And while the narrative is at times poorly structured and somewhat redundant, the argument is no less compelling. One of the book's strengths is its relevance to the fields of political science, international development, and African and gender studies; indeed, the book should be read by academics and practitioners of all four disciplines.

Goetz and Hassim's central argument, and one that IRI's experiences in Africa affirm, is that while the structure of the state and party systems can advance women's political participation and representation, the durability of gains made is ultimately contingent upon the strength of society's general interest in gender equality. Furthermore, in an intriguing extension of the ongoing agency-institution debate, Goetz and Hassim conclude that the structure of a political system's electoral mechanisms does indeed affect the ability of the political system to channel women's representation into policy.

Goetz and Hassim build their arguments around the experiences of the African countries of South Africa and Uganda. Indeed, they choose their case studies for this analysis well: South Africa and Uganda, two countries with very different histories and political systems, are widely acknowledged to have made more progress in incorporating women into their political systems than any other African countries, with women having achieved some 30 percent representation in both national and local political institutions.

The authors begin their argument with an analysis of the impact of regime design, electoral mechanisms, and internal party dynamics on women's access to power in South Africa and Uganda. Goetz and Hassim contrast the implications of the Proportional Representation-List (PR-List) electoral system used in South Africa with the single member districts and gender-benevolent clientelism of Uganda's "non-party system." Both systems have significantly increased women's access to power. In Uganda, rather than force women to compete against men in single candidate constituencies, President Yoweri Museveni enlarged local and national legislatures by 30 percent to include positions designated for women. In South Africa, on the other hand, the ruling ANC requires that...