Political parties play an important role in mobilizing public opinion and articulating ideas that make their way into policy. In a competitive political environment, parties use their identity to carve out a distinct position in the public policy space. In the established democracies in Western countries, this space is defined in left–right terms and is shaped by underlying socio-economic factors. The relative constancy and stability of the party system has long characterized mainstream Comparative Politics research on the subject. This connection between ideology, party organization, and the emergence of a durable party system is less applicable to the African situation because countries there lack the social base that holds the party system in check. This chapter examines how political parties in African countries, like in other developing and democratizing regions, suffer from a low level of party institutionalization because political parties tend to be either just personalized factions or dominated by a single organization with little interest in opening space for other parties. Elections may occasionally produce changes in who holds power, but they rarely reflect real differences in policy. Instead, the consequence of political change is no more than a rearrangement of communities of consumption competing for access to power and government resources. Political parties do not need ideology to attract followers. Party strategies in Africa therefore are built around finding individuals with the qualities to serve as champions of as many consumption communities as possible. Where state capture, as in Africa, is the prime objective, party politics easily becomes both transactional and authoritarian. This form of politics that has been a dominant feature of African countries since independence sets limits on a democratic transition. Above all, it slows down the emergence of a political culture infused with democratic values.

In Chapter 3, the political playing fields of the postwar reform period in Norway and Germany are analyzed with a focus on the structural and organizational dimensions of cleavages. To shed light on the distribution of power resources, election results, government participation, financial resources, and membership numbers of the main actors are compared. Even though the Norwegian political left was somewhat more powerful, the differences in the distribution of power resources between the left and the right do not seem great enough to preclude a more similar political development in the two cases. The social base of the relevant political parties and teachers’ organizations is also examined. The analysis illustrates that many of the social groups organized by the Norwegian center parties, such as farmers, the rural population, and people with a strong Christian identity, including religious women, were found within the ranks of the CDU in Germany. Primary schoolteachers in Germany were divided into different organizations by denomination, while primary schoolteachers in Norway were more united. These findings are analyzed against the backdrop of the cleavage structures.