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Electoral Institutions, Ethnopolitical Cleavages, and Party Systems in Africa's Emerging Democracies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2003

SHAHEEN MOZAFFAR ,
JAMES R. SCARRITT  and
GLEN GALAICH
SHAHEEN MOZAFFAR
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science at Bridgewater State College and Research Fellow of the African Studies Center, Boston University. Address: Department of Political Science, Bridgewater State College, Bridgewater, MA 02325 ([email protected]).
JAMES R. SCARRITT
Affiliation:
Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Faculty Research Associate in the Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado at Boulder. Address: Department of Political Science. 333 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0333 ([email protected]).
GLEN GALAICH
Affiliation:
doctoral candidate in Political Science, University of Colorado at Boulder. Address: 38 Westgate Way, San Anselmo, CA 94960 ([email protected]).
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Abstract

Do electoral institutions and ethnopolitical cleavages shape the structure of party systems separately or jointly? We examine the independent, additive, and interactive effects on the number of electoral and legislative parties of two institutional variables (district magnitude and proximity of presidential and legislative elections), one intervening variable (effective number of presidential candidates), and two new measures of ethnopolitical cleavages based on constructivist specification of ethnopolitical groups (fragmentation and concentration). Ethnopolitical fragmentation independently reduces the number of parties but, interactively with ethnopolitical concentration, increases it. However, the additive and interactive combinations of both measures with electoral institutions explain the largest amount of variance in the number of parties. These results emphasize the importance of ethnopolitical cleavages in mediating the effects of electoral institutions on the structure of party systems, with important implications for the stability of Africa's emerging democracies in which parties are weak and multiethnic coalitions are fluid.The National Science Foundation provided financial support (Grant SBER-9515439; Shaheen Mozaffar, Principal Investigator) for the larger project from which this article is drawn. Scarritt supervised the data collection on ethnopolitical groups and Mozaffar supervised the data collection on elections, electoral systems, and party systems. Adrian Prentice Hull of Jackson State University and Michelle Camou and Eitan Schiffman of the University of Colorado at Boulder provided invaluable assistance in the coding of ethnopolitical groups. For many helpful comments on early drafts, the authors thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers, as well as Fabian Camacho, Gary Cox, Ted Gurr, Richard Katz, David Leblang, Arend Lijphart, Tom Mayer, Susan McMillan, Kathleen O'Doherty, Dan Posner, Donald Rothchild, and members of the Globalization and Democratization colloquium at the Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado at Boulder. Mozaffar thanks the Boston University African Studies Center for continued research support. The data set for the article is available at http://webhost.bridgew.edu/smozaffar/. Final responsibility for the article rests with the authors.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 97 , Issue 3 , August 2003 , pp. 379 - 390
Copyright
© 2003 by the American Political Science Association

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