https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9808-9095
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ABSTRACT
Traditional political systems (TPS) are an important part of the political landscape in Africa. They govern subnational communities and differ from nation states, both in their institutional set-up as well as in their legitimacy. Yet, we have little comparative knowledge on these political systems and, in particular, whether they can be described as democratic. In this article, we analyse the democraticness of TPS based on a new expert survey. Using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), we show that the more than 140 ethnic groups we analyse vary meaningfully in their democraticness. Measures of public preference input and of political process control contribute particularly to a latent measure of democraticness. Furthermore, we find some indication for regionally interdependent institutions, with slightly more democratic systems in Southern Africa and less democratic systems in West Africa. Yet, no such interdependence exists between the state and the group level. Finally, we find that more hierarchically organized political systems, kings, and chiefs, as well as those organized in segments, are on average less democratic, while the presence of elders is associated with higher levels of democraticness.
Acknowledgments
This work is part of the research projects “Traditional Political Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa” and “Traditional Governance and Modern Statehood” led by Katharina Holzinger and carried out at the Chair of International Politics at the University of Konstanz, Germany. We are grateful to Katharina Holzinger, Nadine Meidert, Casper Sakstrup, Julian Schuessler, Peter Selb, and participants at the “Political Regimes and their Correlates” Workshop at Aarhus University for helpful comments on previous versions of our paper. An early version of this paper was presented at the International Studies Association's Annual Convention 2014, where it received valuable input. The Interview data on Namibia was collected by Daniela Behr, Roos Haer, Katharina Holzinger and Daniela Kromrey. We thank Maximilian Brunn, Marcin Orzechowski and Pirmin Stöckle for helping to transcribe the interviews. We also want thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very constructive critique and helpful suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Englebert, “Patterns and Theories of Traditional Resurgence”; Logan, “Selected Chiefs”.
2 Renders, “Appropriate ‘Governance-Technology’?”
3 e.g., Logan, “The Roots of Resilience”; Osabu-Kle, Compatible Cultural Democracy; Mamdani, Citizen and Subject; Ntsebeza, Democracy Compromised; Myers and Fridy, “Formal versus Traditional Institutions”; Cummins, “Democracy or Democrazy?”
4 e.g., Acemoglu, Reed, and Robinson, “Chiefs”; Bentzen, Hariri, and Robinson, “Power and Persistence”; Wig and Kromrey, “Which Groups Fight?”
5 Coppedge et al., Varieties of Democracy; Treier and Jackman, “Democracy as a Latent Variable”.
6 Bollen, Structural Equations with Latent Variables; Treier and Jackman, “Democracy as a Latent Variable”.
7 Ethnographic Atlas.
8 Kromrey, “Traditional Political Systems”; EPR: Cederman, Wimmer, and Min, “Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel?”; see also Wig and Kromrey, “Which Groups Fight?”.
9 “Liberal Democracy”.
10 cf. Gilardi, “Transnational Diffusion”.
11 e.g., Logan, “The Roots of Resilience”.
12 See Appendix sections 5b and 8 for quantitative and qualitative evidence of institutional change, respectively.
13 Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, African Political Systems.
14 Englebert, “Patterns and Theories of Traditional Resurgence”; Logan, “The Roots of Resilience”.
15 Holzinger, Kern, and Kromrey, “The Dualism of Contemporary Traditional Governance”.
16 Huntington, The Third Wave.
17 Englebert, “Patterns and Theories of Traditional Resurgence”.
18 The term neo-liberal is commonly used in the literature on traditional systems, but it does not directly and theoretically relate to the idea of neoliberalism.
19 Mamdani, Citizen and Subject; Ntsebeza, Democracy Compromised.
20 Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.
21 Ani, “On Traditional African Consensual Rationality”; Osabu-Kle, Compatible Cultural Democracy.
22 Skalník, “Authority versus Power”; Sklar, “Premise of Mixed Government”.
23 Logan, “The Roots of Resilience”.
24 Buur and Kyed, State Recognition.
25 Baldwin and Holzinger, “Traditional Political Institutions”.
26 Ibid., 1749.
27 Skaaning, “Democracy”.
28 e.g., Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
29 e.g., Diamond, “Promoting Democracy”.
30 Coppedge et al., Varieties of Democracy.
31 Hair et al., Multivariate Data Analysis, 728–29.
32 Munck and Verkuilen, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy”; Treier and Jackman, “Democracy as a Latent Variable”.
33 Bollen, Structural Equations with Latent Variables; Bollen, “Liberal Democracy”; Treier and Jackman, “Democracy as a Latent Variable”.
34 “Democracy as a Latent Variable,” 202; see also Munck and Verkuilen, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy,” 10–12.
35 Ani, “On Traditional African Consensual Rationality,” 343.
36 see also Coppedge et al., Varieties of Democracy, 40.
37 see, in particular, Lauth, “The Internal Relationships of the Dimensions of Democracy,” 608.
38 Coppedge et al., Varieties of Democracy.
39 Skalník, “Authority versus Power”.
40 “Political Participation and Three Theories of Democracy”.
41 Schonfeld, “The Meaning of Democratic Participation”.
42 Lyon, “Political Decentralization”.
43 Baldwin and Holzinger, “Traditional Political Institutions,” 1763.
44 Two prominent dataset examples that are of direct importance to this study were generated using expert data: the V-Dem Coppedge et al., Varieties of Democracy. and the EPR dataset Cederman, Wimmer, and Min, “Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel?”.
45 Cederman, Wimmer, and Min, “Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel?”
46 As experts were free to add any ethnic groups in the survey, our final sample includes four EPR groups not coded as “relevant” at the time and two non-EPR groups. We run robustness tests excluding these groups (Appendix section 4, Table A3, models 6–7). The results are consistent with our main findings.
47 Cederman, Wimmer, and Min, “Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel?,” 99.
48 The timeliness of the information of course depends on the time our experts have last updated their knowledge or conducted fieldwork. To ensure collecting contemporary information, we communicated our interest in current institutions.
49 For details on how we aggregated experts to groups, as well as items to attributes, see the Appendix (section 2). For full dataset see Kromrey, “Traditional Political Systems”.
50 Some experts disagree on the first question if there is currently any form of traditional political system. Throughout the article, we analyse the answers for groups where more than 50% of the experts indicated that a TPS is present. In Appendix section 3 we show the distribution of the aggregate variable where we also discuss implications of expert disagreement. We provide robustness tests with a stricter definition of 100% agreement in Appendix sections 4a and 4b, Table A3, models 4 and 5. The findings are consistent with our main analysis.
51 We run reliability tests for each component and its respective items and take the average for each item for the final value of the component (for more details see Appendix section 2).
52 Yet we remove all observations with complete missingness on the democratic components and only include groups with expert agreement of ≥ 0.5 on the initial variable if the groups have TPS.
53 Hair et al., Multivariate Data Analysis, 674–75.
54 cf. Baldwin and Holzinger, “Traditional Political Institutions,” 1766.
55 cf. Osabu-Kle, Compatible Cultural Democracy, 96.
56 Ani, “On Traditional African Consensual Rationality,” 363.
57 Bentzen, Hariri, and Robinson, “Power and Persistence”.
58 Hair et al., Multivariate Data Analysis, 780.
59 We use predict after structural equation models in Stata to arrive at the index scores. See Bollen Structural Equations with Latent Variables..
60 For the same reason, we can only interpret the democraticness scores relative to each other, and the single scores have no substantive meaning beyond being positively or negatively related to the latent variable.
61 We compare the index with the indices built based on the CFA models 1 and 3. As the prediction includes the strength of the factor loadings of all single components (as weights), the indices are highly correlated and do not differ heavily from each other (see Appendix section 4b).
62 To ease interpretation, we multiplied the original scores (between 0.306 and 0.254) by 10. This does not change the interpretation, as scores are interpreted relative to each other.
63 We assess and discuss the outer bounds of our indices in Appendix section 4c using out-of-sample prediction based on the respective CFA model. In this index, none of the groups reach the outer bounds (-5.38 – 3.61).
64 Note that the normal distribution around 0 is due to the prediction after the CFA and thus the range differs from our original 1–3 scale.
65 Murdock, Ethnographic Atlas.
66 Hagmann, “Bringing the Sultan Back In”; Renders, “Appropriate ‘Governance-Technology’?”
67 Hagmann, “Bringing the Sultan Back In”.
68 Renders, “Appropriate ‘Governance-Technology’?,” 443.
69 Osabu-Kle, Compatible Cultural Democracy, 87.
70 Ibid., 88.
71 cf. Huntington, The Third Wave; Gilardi, “Transnational Diffusion”.
72 Ethnographic Atlas.
73 taken from Cederman, Wimmer, and Min, “Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel?”
74 Moscona, Nunn, and Robinson, “Segmentary Lineage Organization”.
75 Ayittey, “Traditional Institutions,” 1187.
76 Ibid., 1186.
77 “Liberal Democracy”.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Clara Neupert-Wentz
Clara Neupert-Wentz is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. Before, she was a research fellow at the University of Konstanz, where she also received her PhD. She studied Political Science in Mannheim and at the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on customary institutions, gender norms, and conflict.
Daniela Kromrey
Daniela Kromrey is Programme Director for Internationalization at the Zukunftskolleg – Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Konstanz. She has received her PhD in Politics and Public Administration from the University of Konstanz. In her research, she focuses on traditional political systems, democratization, legacies of freedom fighters in Africa and survey research.
Axel Bayer
Axel Bayer is a German diplomat currently serving at the Embassy in Pretoria. He has earned his PhD in Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz and holds a MA in Politics and Public Administration from the University of Konstanz and a MSc in Political Science from the University of Uppsala. Main research interests: electoral mobilization, indigenous authorities, intra-parliamentary networks.