Document Library

A Comparative Analysis of Political Parties in Kenya, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo

Author: S Carey
Date: 2002
Size: 19 pages

Access full text: via document delivery

Summary

What were the strategies of interest aggregation and representation of the main political parties in these countries? How did these differences influence the current state of democratisation? This article, from the journal Democratization, compares the characteristics and development of the main political parties in Kenya, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, considering the period from their independence in the 1960s up to the late 1990s. It offers an exploratory analysis of the differences and similarities that might have lead to the, more or less, successful establishment of political parties and democratic regimes in these countries. The main question this article addresses is why these three countries, with a shared number of characteristics at the outset, have ended up with such different political regimes. The parties are compared along four dimensions: Colonial heritage, the saliency of ethnicity, political communication between the party elite and the periphery, and their link to civil society.

Political structures inherited from their colonial pasts encouraged exploitation of both ethnic and regional links, and strengthened patronage networks. The colonial heritage in all three countries enforced the role and importance of ethnicity, regionalism and local patronage in the political process of interest aggregation and representation. Other key findings include:

• In recent years, political parties have used ethnicity as a strategic tool to strengthen their position of power. The more central the issue of ethnicity is to the political process, the less democratic the political parties involved are likely to be
• The less active political communication is in a country, the more difficult it is to achieve a multi-party system.

It is suggested that a country with relatively weak links between the party centre and the electorate, but with a broad and educated elite, has the most democratic potential. Therefore, it appears that although an active link between the party elite and its base is necessary, the nature of the base also plays a crucial role in determining the odds of democratic consolidation. Policy implications that can be drawn from this paper include:

• It is not enough to have a vibrant civil society. Civil society needs to be independent from the state and from its supervision, to have its main actors centrally located in urban areas and to include an educated middle class
• It is crucial that civil society has a powerful representation that is united, strong in both numbers and in the degree of institutionalisation, and that it develops independently from the government. Only such an opposition seems to have the potential to successfully challenge an incumbent regime
• Civil society based on traditional groups can represent an obstacle to the establishment of political parties and democracy. Civil society’s commitment to democracy needs to be actively fostered in this set of circumstances.

Access full text: via document delivery

Source: Carey, S. C. 2002, 'A Comparative Analysis of Political Parties in Kenya, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo', Democratization, vol. 9 no. 3, pp. 53-71
Author: School of Politics and International Relations, http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/politics