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1 Elites, Institutions, and the Varied Trajectories of Africa’s Third Wave Democracies Peter VonDoepp and Leonardo A. Villalón In the early 1990s, Africa was swept by an apparent wave of democratization that generated dramatic changes in the political map of the continent. Pressed by novel international demands for “good governance,” and confronted by newly emboldened domestic voices for change, regimes in virtually every African country were forced to undertake political reforms in the name of democracy. From the outset, it was quickly apparent that the nature of these changes would be highly varied. In some countries, political reform was quite limited, as long-standing autocrats developed new strategies for holding power in the altered national and international contexts brought forth with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Still other cases degenerated into tragic patterns of state collapse and civil violence, after initial pressures for political liberalization had surfaced (see Reno 1999; Villalón and Huxtable 1998). Yet in a select number of countries, democracy appeared to make significant inroads . Most often, this was witnessed in the successful conducting of multiparty “founding” elections that brought new elites to power (Bratton 1998). These initial advances offered at least limited hope that democratic regimes might emerge, survive, and even prosper on a continent that heretofore had proven inhospitable to them. Indeed, the apparent successes of these transitions called into question certain earlier assessments suggesting that the prospects for democratic development in Africa were dim (Huntington 1984; Jackson and Rosberg 1985a). Breaking the pervasive pattern of authoritarian and personal rule of the previous two decades, by 1994 a significant number of countries in Africa had made transitions and were undertaking what Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle (1997) labeled “experiments” in democratic rule. More than ten years since the inauguration of these new democratic experiments, students of African politics confront the important and intriguing challenge of as1 sessing and explaining the fates of the continent’s “third wave” democracies. To what extent did these changes actually constitute democratic transitions? How durable have been the democratic regimes that emerged in the early 1990s? What is the character of those democracies that endure into the present day? And perhaps most importantly, how do we make sense of the varied experiences of these countries that, at least initially, took parallel steps along the same democratic path? As even the casual observer of African affairs must recognize, Africa’s third wave democracies have realized widely differing degrees of success and/or failure. The time is right to comparatively analyze the course and progress of democratization experiments on the continent. This volume is dedicated to undertaking this challenge. It comparatively examines the fates of ten countries—a distinct and important group consisting of those that initially appeared to make successful democratic transitions during the early 1990s. The set of countries under examination are highly varied. They represent Portuguese-, French-, and English-speaking Africa and are geographically dispersed across the continent. They represent countries that have received considerable attention in Africanist scholarship, but also several that are understudied . Most importantly, writing over a decade after the “third wave” swept Africa, we see extreme variations in the extent to which anything resembling a functional democratic system persists in these countries. Yet, together they represent those countries that, at the start of the decade, constituted a newly emerging democratic trajectory on the continent. Our task is to illuminate the forces and processes that have shaped the varied experiences of these regimes. In addition to focusing on a clearly defined set of countries, this volume also uses a distinctive analytical approach to explore these countries’ experiences. In a purely formal sense, democracy can be characterized as a system in which institutions constrain the behavior of political elites. Building from this premise, the central focus of this volume is to pinpoint and highlight the varied evolution of relations between elites and institutions in Africa’s new democracies. Studying the interactions between elites and their institutional environments, we maintain, provides an effective starting point for understanding the experiences of these regimes. In terms of the actual case studies in the volume, the emphasis on elites and institutions provides a framework both to describe regimes comparatively and to explain their specific experiences. With respect to the former, interactions between elites and their institutional environments reveal a great deal about the character of contemporary African democracies, thus providing a basis for characterizing these regimes. The extent to which elites variously...

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