The Dynamics of State Capacity and Democratic Breakdown in Africa

• In Event: Democratic Reversals and Breakdown in Africa

Abstract

Notwithstanding the significant progress made in the democratic project worldwide, the recent waves of democratic backsliding, erosion, and breakdown have raised some skepticism among scholars researching democratic regimes. These democratic relapses have manifested in instances where some political leaders deliberately subvert democratic norms for self-aggrandizement, mostly common among populists or cases where there is a grip on power through term limit extensions or what has been described as ‘constitutional coups’. The most common over the years is where the military interferes with the politics of a country by removing democratically elected governments for one reason or another. Although the recent wave of democratic breakdown is widespread, its surge on the African continent is nerve-wracking. Recent developments reveal a total of thirteen coup attempts between 2020 and 2023 especially within the Sahel region, with eight successful cases: Sudan, Guinea, Mali, and Chad in 2021; Burkina Faso and Guinea Bissau in 2022; Gabon and Niger in 2023. Surprisingly, most of these coups had throngs of people take to the streets to celebrate, with most exercising their displeasure at democratic leadership failure and poor governance.
Why do democracies collapse? Extant literature from structural thinkers like Lipset, Przeworski, and Acemoglu among others often cited income inequality, economic crisis, and low economic development as the cause of regime democratic breakdown in third-world countries, especially in Africa. Juan Linz, Scott Mainwaring, and Pérez-Liñán have also provided actor-based explanations that show how incumbent leaders and disloyal opposition actors capitalize on an existing crisis to undermine democratic norms and in the worst-case scenario induce its eventual breakdown. Furthermore, other notable scholars like Huntington, Feaver, Desch, Horowitz, and Barany have also attributed most military coups in Africa and other regions of the world to poor civil-military relations.
Despite the potency of these theorizations, the dynamics of state capacity and its impacts on democratic regimes remain largely under-research. Coincidently, international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have overly cited State weakness as the cause of poor governance and developmental deficits in most developing countries and also linked to the recent coup contagion in Africa. How does state capacity induce democratic breakdown? I argue more broadly in the forthcoming paper that democratic regimes with weak administrative capacity are bound to break down using Burkina Faso and Mali as case studies. This research highly rely on a Comparative Historical Analysis (CHA) research design approach to unravel the dynamics and causal mechanisms at play.

Author

• Baffour Agyeman Prempeh Boakye, University of Delaware