Learning from Global Democratic Challenges and Innovations Mini-Conference III: Democracy in Francophone Africa: Enduring Challenges and Paths Forward

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In the last four years, there have been 8 coups in Francophone Africa including two different coups in both Mali and Burkina Faso, which raise many questions about future governance trajectories for this understudied region. This panel explores governance, political economy, and citizen behavior across a range of countries in Francophone Africa. It touches on challenges facing countries in the region including informal economies and underemployment as well as accountable governance, but also pockets of democratic resilience. In doing so it highlights the tremendous variation in regime trajectories and citizens’ relationship to those regimes to highlight the distinct challenges and paths forward in a few different countries.

Elischer’s paper provides a useful overview of the recent coup wave in West Africa drawing on descriptive statistics, process tracing, and CSQA to compare causes and consequences of military interventions in Mali, Guinea, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso, and Gabon. He shows that while all ruling juntas would like to put a presidential candidate in office, those that are most able to do so are the junta’s that share grievances with the broader military.

Diebire and Bleck offer in-depth analysis of country cases with a specific focus on citizens’ attitudes and behavior. Diebire explores the role of ethnicity in contemporary Burkina Faso and argues that citizens who prioritize ethnic identity over national identity are more skeptical about democratic governance and more willing to embrace authoritarian rule. Bleck explores the contradictions within Mali’s multi-party era by drawing on focus group data with members of more than 60 tea-drinking social clubs – mostly young, urban men. She highlights a perceived distance between citizens and elected officials, but the robust deliberative culture within Mali society as well as strong connections between citizens and non-elected forms of authority – such as religious leaders and traditional elites. Both papers offer insight into popular support for ruling juntas in countries which have boasted strong, pro-democracy popular movements in the past.

Finally, Gottlieb and Bhandari explore citizen preferences in a Francophone country that has not been touched by the coup wave, but has been rocked by waves of protest: Senegal. They compare owners of formal and informal firms to see the conditions under business owners might vote for programmatic policies instead of clientelist appeals. They use an information experiment in the lead up to Senegal’s 2022 elections and show that formal firms and informal firms that think they might formalize are more likely to support programmatic candidates than informal firms. The paper offers important lessons about voters in Senegal, but also those throughout this region – dominated by the informal economy.

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Individual Presentations

• Toward Praetorian-Led Electoral Authoritarianism? Coups in Francophone Africa - Sebastian Elischer, University of Florida

• Tribe or Nation: Ethnicity’s Grip on African Political Ideology - Samira Diebire, University of Essex

• Desires for Accountability and Obstacles to Democracy in Mali - Jaimie Bleck, University of Notre Dame

• Private-Sector Support for Programmatic Candidates: Evidence from Senegal - Abhit Bhandari, Vanderbilt University; Jessica Gottlieb, University of Houston

• Aid and the Unraveling of Civil Society in Guinea and Sierra Leone - Michelle Reddy, University of California Berkeley

Chair

• Aili Mari Tripp University of Wisconsin, Madison

Discussant

• Scott Straus University of California, Berkeley