Democratic Reform in Africa: The Quality of Progress (review)

More than a decade after Africa's so-called "second independence," assessments of the continent's democratic experiments have taken on a much more sober, even pessimistic, tone. While the move toward multiparty constitutions and elections is still evident across the continent, the extent to which such institutional reforms have actually changed political practices is often questionable. This edited collection is a contribution to this debate and seeks to assess "the quality of progress" toward liberal democracy.

The book is in two parts. The first starts with a general overview (by the editor) of the quality of political reform on the continent, followed by five chapters on various broad thematic issues of importance for democracy and development, including corruption, civil society, and conflict. The second part consists of case studies reviewing the experiences of Botswana, Mozambique, Nigeria, and South Africa. A final chapter by Larry Diamond assesses how "real" reform can be promoted. As with most edited books, the quality of the contributions is highly variable. The analyses in many of the thematic chapters are at a very high level of generality, producing few new insights while reproducing many commonplace conclusions. An important exception is Nicolas van de Walle's chapter on economic reform, which demonstrates superbly, through a detailed empirical analysis, how aid sustains weak governments in power while simultaneously emasculating their decision-making authority and capacity. What van de Walle regards as the three main obstacles to democracy and economic prosperity—namely neopatrimonialism, ideological hostility to economic liberalism, and low state capacity—are thus reinforced by the aid regime. Unless the donor–government relationship is reformed, he concludes, the "partial reform syndrome" may continue through a third decade of economic crisis and state decay. Some consolation follows in the chapter by Michael Bratton and Robert Mattes; based on the large-scale surveys of the "Afro-barometer," it shows how despite continued economic decline, democracy has attained wide legitimacy on the African continent. People may accordingly continue to attempt to hold their governments to account, maintaining pressures for political and social justice.

Among the case studies, Steven Friedman's analysis of postapartheid South Africa stands out as the most interesting. Friedman argues that the main threat to democracy comes from a technocratic "getting things done" mentality, which is in turn linked to South Africa's complex racial history and reinforced by the current predilection for "good governance" in the international development community. While the "ideology of delivery" assumes that citizens regard democracy primarily as a source of material benefit, Friedman argues that South Africans value democracy first and foremost as a source of self-expression and identity. On one hand, this leads to the rather despairing conclusion that the technocratic ideology of delivery will erode South African democracy in the name of getting things done. On the other, if the government were to recognize that "delivery" is currently failing due to a lack of participation and popular input, this could potentially usher in a return to the stress on inclusion, participation, and pluralism that sustained the early period of South Africa's transition.

Beyond a few individual chapters of a very high quality, this edited collection unfortunately adds relatively little to our understanding of democratic reform in Africa. It frequently neglects to probe the difficult theoretical questions and resorts instead to easy assumptions about the relationship between democracy and development/modernization. Similarly, policy recommendations are often too general, expressing nice sentiments but few practical and political guidelines. These shortcomings aside, both students and scholars may find the volume useful for its empirical documentation and overview of recent democratic developments on the continent.