This dissertation examines variation in campaign strategies in Africa's nascent democracies with a focus on political parties in Ghana and Kenya. The research methods involve both a content analysis of campaign appeals covered in newspapers as well as interviews with political elites in Ghana and Kenya. I argue two main points. First, variation in campaign strategies is largely due to differences in the ethnic makeup of parties' bases of support. Parties that draw a majority of their support from a single large ethnic group are more likely to develop campaign strategies that emphasize clear proposals for national public goods. I argue that these parties use such strategies to counteract fears among the electorate of domination and exclusion by the large ethnic core of the party. Second, I argue that when party systems are more fragmented and volatile, politicians are more prone to rely on intermediaries, such as ethnic elders and community spokesmen, to recruit voters. This approach leads to a higher frequency of overt ethnic appeals during campaigns. Alternatively, when party systems are more institutionalized, party elites choose to work through grassroots party structures rather than ethnic intermediaries. Campaign discourse is then dominated by party officials pursuing national agendas rather than narrower ethnic agendas. The findings contribute to the scholarship on ethnic politics, political parties in new democracies, and the politics of public goods provisions.

This title was first published in 2001. The central characteristics of political ethnicity and its dysfunctional attributes in African politics is vexing to Africa's policy makers. Moreover, as a conflictive ideology in national and international politics, many political actors would rather avoid it. In the past, nationalists have blamed ethnic chauvinists for fanning the embers of ethnicity, but today they realize they may have underestimated its prominence in African politics.

Why do ethnic politics emerge in some ethnically diverse societies but not others? Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, Dominika Koter argues that the prevailing social structures of a country play a central role in how politicians attempt to mobilize voters. In particular, politicians consider the strength of local leaders, such as chiefs or religious dignitaries, who have historically played a crucial role in many parts of rural Africa. Local leaders can change the electoral dynamics by helping politicians secure votes among people of different ethnicities. Ethnic politics thus can be avoided where there are local leaders who can serve as credible electoral intermediaries between voters and politicians. Koter shows that there is widespread variation in the standing of local leaders across Africa, as a result of long-term historical trends, which has meant that politicians have mobilized voters in qualitatively different ways, resulting in different levels of ethnic politics across the continent.

This book is more than just a study of ethnic politics in Kenya and Nigeria. The two countries are a microcosm of the entire continent: the problems it faces, its successes and failures, and the hope and despair of hundreds of millions of its people whose aspirations have been frustrated by decades of corrupt leadership that has skilfully exploited one of Africa's biggest weaknesses -- tribalism. But the people themselves are also responsible for that. They have allowed tribalism to flourish and destroy the countries. And they have allowed unscrupulous politicians to use and abuse them -- without storming the Bastille. What they are not responsible for is dictatorship African leaders instituted to perpetuate themselves in office by exploiting tribalism. These despots have been so good at it, and have done it for so long since independence, that many African countries are now on the brink of collapse, with the people at war against themselves.

In South Africa, Michael Neocosmos

This book models the trade-off that rulers of weak, ethnically-divided states face between coups and civil war. Drawing evidence from extensive field research in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo combined with statistical analysis of most African countries, it develops a framework to understand the causes of state failure.

A useful collection for students as the interest in the politics of ethnicity continues.

Africa's long-ruling incumbents stay in power because opposition politicians struggle to secure the finances required to build electoral coalitions.

This book presents a theory to account for why and when politics revolves around one axis of social cleavage instead of another. It does so by examining the case of Zambia, where people identify themselves either as members of one of the country's seventy-three tribes or as members of one of its four principal language groups. The book accounts for the conditions under which Zambian political competition revolves around tribal differences and under which it revolves around language group differences. Drawing on a simple model of identity choice, it shows that the answer depends on whether the country operates under single-party or multi-party rule. During periods of single-party rule, tribal identities serve as the axis of electoral mobilization and self-identification; during periods of multi-party rule, broader language group identities play this role. The book thus demonstrates how formal institutional rules determine the kinds of social cleavages that matter in politics.