The Historical Roots of African Political Parties

• In Event: Poster Session: Predicting Political Preferences & Civic Engagement
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Predicting Political Preferences

Abstract

Africa's first post-colonial rulers came to power under a variety of circumstances. While some faced an organized opposition, others were able to unite the elites behind them. The power differential of many post-colonial rulers has its roots in the electoral competition process that unfolded in the colonies between the end of WWII and independence. However, recent scholarship has largely overlooked the long-lasting impact of colonial elections. And the limited quantitative research on colonial elections focuses on cross-country comparisons, missing much of the variation at the sub-state level. This paper examines how historical cleavages affected the structure of colonial party systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. I argue that cleavages that emerged in the pre-colonial and colonial eras shaped political mobilization patterns in the late colonial period. Groups with a history of pre-colonial statehood had strong incentives to mobilize regionally. However, I posit that these identities only became mobilized when the group had vested economic interests derived from its participation in the commodities trade. The incentives for regional mobilization changed with the expansion of the franchise. For elites whose regional base limited their mobilizational capacity, a merger with inter-regional parties increased their chances of entering the governing coalition. Empirically, I exploit the uniformity of French colonial policy and the quasi-random nature of sub-state colonial boundaries to examine how structural factors affected patterns of party formation and support. The analysis relies on originally collected archival data on the 1952 and 1957 territorial elections in French colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cross-sectional analyses at the constituency level show that constituencies with a pre-colonial state group majority and which produced cash crops were more likely to see the emergence of regional parties. However, whether the party goes on to win the constituency is only explained by a high concentration of cash crop production in the region. This suggests that economic cleavages more strongly influenced voting patterns. The results only hold for the 1952 election. I link the temporal divergence to the universal expansion of the franchise in 1956. Using a difference-in-difference design, I show that regional parties were more likely to dissolve by merging into more established parties following the expansion of the franchise. By identifying the cleavages that affected the formation and support for regional parties in colonial Africa, this paper helps explain the structure of the coalitions that took power at independence.

Author

• Maria Jose Murias Munoz, ETH Zurich