In 200 words, sum up the main thesis and arguments of two readings on ‘The Aftermath of Dictatorships: Varieties of Transitions’. 2) In 200 words, make and support one point.ODonnellandSchmit

r NEOPATRIMONIAL REGIMES

AND POLITICAL TRANSITIONS IN AFRICA

By MICHAEL BRATTON and NICOLAS VAN DE WALLE *

INTRODUCTION: COMPARING POLITICAL TRANSITIONS

THE current wave of scholarly studies of democratization and political transition is not fully comparative. Conceptually, these studies employ

models of political change that are useful in explaining the demise of bureaucratic forms of authoritarianism but cannot account for transitions from more personalistic types of rule. Empirically, entire regions of the world are excluded. Whereas most studies of democratization have focused on Latin America and Southern Europe and latterly on Eastern Europe, Africa has received much less attention. In this article, we examine recent patterns of political change in Africa and on that basis propose revisions to the theory of political transitions.

Africa is not immune from the global challenge to authoritarianism. Between 1990 and 1993 more than half of Africa's fifty-two governments responded to domestic and international pressures by holding competitive presidential or legislative elections. The dynamics and outcomes of these transitions have been highly variable: in some cases, a competitive election has led to an alternation of political leaders and the emergence of a fragile democratic regime; more often the transition has been flawed (with the incumbent stealing the election), blocked (with the incumbents and oppo- sition deadlocked over the rules of the political game), or precluded (by widespread civil unrest).1 While democratization is clearly incomplete in Africa, it has already discredited military and one-party regimes, few of which are likely to survive intact. And recent African experience poses

* This article was prepared with support from National Science Foundation Grant no. SBR- 9309215 and an All-University Research Initiation Grant from Michigan State University. Van de Walle gratefully acknowledges additional support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Research assistance was provided by John Davis and Sangmook Kim. Useful comments on earlier drafts were received from Robert Ayres, Naomi Chazan, Larry Diamond, Rene Lemarchand, Dean McHenry, Donald Rothchild, and Richard Snyder. Any remaining errors can be attributed to the authors.

1 Of the 18 presidential elections held in Africa between 1990 and March 1993, 9 were vouchsafed as "free and fair" by international observers, and 8 resulted in the peaceful replacement of the incum- bent ruler. In all cases where the incumbent survived, the opposition charged electoral fraud. See Michael Bratton, "Political Liberalization in Africa in the 1990s: Advances and Setbacks" (Paper pre- sented at a donors conference on Economic Reform in Africa's New Era of Political Liberalization, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C., April 14-15,1993).

World Politics 46 (July 1994), 453-89

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interesting general questions: Why do some regimes undergo transitions from authoritarian rule while others do not? Are there different paths of transition? Why do some transitions occasionally result in democracy but others fall short? Why, in Africa, are transitions to democracy generally problematic?

In this article, we argue that the nature of the preexisting regime shapes the dynamics and outcomes of political transitions. Our thesis is as follows: contemporary political changes are conditioned by mechanisms of rule embedded in the ancien regime. Authoritarian leaders in power for long periods of time establish rules about who may participate in public deci- sions and the amount of political competition allowed. Taken together, these rules constitute a political regime. Regime type in turn influences both the likelihood that an opposition challenge will arise and the flexibil- ity with which incumbents can respond. It also determines whether elites and masses can arrive at new rules of political interaction through negoti- ation, accommodation, and election, that is, whether any transition will be democratic.

We cast the argument comparatively in order to highlight differences among political regimes, initially between Africa and the rest of the world and subsequently among African countries themselves. First, we compare African transitions with those in Latin America and Southern Europe and find that transition dynamics in Africa have been distinctive. We attribute this to the neopatrimonial nature of African authoritarian regimes, which we contrast to the corporatist regimes that democratized in Southern Europe in the mid-1970s and in Latin America in the mid-1980s. Thereafter, we compare transitions within Africa. Based on the degree of political participation and contestation tolerated under the ancien regime, we distinguish several regime variants under the general rubric of neopat- rimonialism and show that here, too, regime characteristics can help explain transition processes. The argument, though driven by African examples, can be generalized to neopatrimonial regimes elsewhere.

Especially for Africa, the scholarly study of political transitions has vac- illated between ideographic case studies (with detailed description of events and actors) and abstract ruminations about principles of democracy supported by little systematic evidence. This article makes a modest effort to bridge the gap between these two extremes. We emphasize political institutions in a bid to develop midlevel generalizations and to help make the study of regime transitions more comparative.

The article is divided into four sections. The first section argues that the literature on political transitions has focused excessively on the contingent interactions of key political actors and underestimated the formative impact of political institutions. A second section defines neopatrimonial-

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NEOPATRIMONIAL REGIMES 455

ism as a regime type and describes its characteristic features in Africa. Third, we discuss how the features of neopatrimonialism are likely to mold transitions in patterns quite different from those observed in transitions from other regime types. A fourth section distinguishes variants of the neopatrimonial regime, which we use to explain transition dynamics and outcomes observed recently in sub-Saharan Africa. A conclusion extends the argument about the distinctiveness of transitions from neopatrimonial rule and discusses its implications.

REGIME TYPE AND POLITICAL TRANSITION

Are there relationships between regime type and the likelihood, nature, and extent of political transition? Scholars have so far only scratched the surface in understanding political transitions in terms of the structure of the preceding regime. Karen Remmer argues that once one recognizes the "enormous range of variation concealed within the authoritarian (and democratic) categor(ies)," political outcomes vary systematically with regime type.2 From recent Latin American experience she proposes that inclusionary democracies tend to collapse as a result of intrigue among the political elite, whereas exclusionary democracies are more likely to suc- cumb to pressure from below. Moreover, once inclusionary regimes have held power, the reimposition of an exclusionary regime requires heavy doses of state coercion.3 It is unclear, however, whether Remmer's gener- alizations apply to the demise of autocracies as well as to the breakdown of democratic rule.

Huntington's analysis of "third wave" democratic transitions in thirty- five countries finds little overall relationship between the nature of the incumbent authoritarian regime and the pattern of political transition.4

He contends that whereas political transitions are most likely to be initi- ated from the top down, such dynamics are equally likely in one-party military or personalistic regimes. Nevertheless, leaders of one-party and military regimes are somewhat more likely than personal dictators to engage the opposition in a negotiated transfer of power. Indeed, person- alistic regimes are more susceptible than other regime types to collapse in

2 Remmer, "Exclusionary Democracy," Studies in Comparative International Development 20, no. 4 (1986), 64-68.

3 Ibid., 77-78. 4 Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Huntington classifies transitions into three main types: trans- formation, replacement, and transplacement. These labels are unnecessarily jargonistic; we prefer to speak of three routes—top-down, bottom-up, and negotiated political change—distinguished accord- ing to whether state elites, opposition forces, or both take the lead in pressing transition forward. On this theme, see Dankwart A. Rustow, "The Surging Tide ofDemocracy," Journal of Democracy 3, no. 1 (1992), 119-22.

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the face of a popular protest. Huntington notes that dictatorial leaders usually refuse to give up power voluntarily and try to stay in office as long as they can.5

The notion of an underlying structure to regime transitions runs counter to the most penetrating and influential contemporary work on this subject. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter eschew the possibility of systematic causality and instead advance what can be termed a contingent approach to transitions. They argue that transitions are abnormal periods of "undetermined" political change in which "there are insufficient structural or behavioral parameters to guide and predict the outcome."6 Compared with the orderliness of authoritarian rule, transi- tions are marked by unruly and chaotic struggles and by uncertainty about the nature of resultant regimes. Analysts cannot assume that the transi- tion process is shaped by preexisting constellations of macroeconomic conditions, social classes, or political institutions. Instead, formerly cohe- sive social classes and political organizations tend to splinter in the heat of political combat, making it impossible to deduce alignments and actions of any protagonist. Political outcomes are driven by the short- term calculations and the immediate reactions of strategic actors to unfolding events.

There is much merit in this contingent approach, which captures well the chaotic nature of regime transitions, but we remain dissatisfied with the open-ended implication that any one transition process or outcome is just as likely as any other. The excessive voluntarism of O'Donnell and Schmitter's framework has been criticized by other commentators. Nancy Bermeo notes that "the authors' emphasis on individual actors . . . consti- tutes a most significant challenge to the structuralist perspectives that have dominated . . . (comparative) political science scholarship."7 Terry Lynn Karl makes a case for what she calls structured contingency, an approach "that seeks explicitly to relate structural constraints to the shaping of con- tingent choice."8 In her words:

Even in the midst of tremendous uncertainty provoked by a regime transi- tion, where constraints appear to be most relaxed and where a wide range of outcomes appears to be possible, the decisions made by various actors respond to and are conditioned by the types of socioeconomic structures and political institutions already present.9

5 Huntington (fn. 4), 588. 6 O'Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about

Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 3. See also Guiseppe Di Palma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

7 Bermeo, "Rethinking Regime Change," Comparative Politics 22 (April 1990), 361. 8 Karl, "Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America," Comparative Politics 5 (October 1990). 9 Ibid., 6; emphasis added.

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NEOPATRIMONIAL REGIMES 457

We agree that there are potentially fruitful avenues for research at a "meso" level between individual choice and structural determinism.10 To date, most propositions in the transitions literature concern the effects of deep socioeconomic structures. For example, Bermeo posits that "author- itarian regimes do not seem to collapse during periods of relative prosper- ity";11 Karl suggests that democratic consolidation depends on "the absence of a strong landowner elite engaged in labor-repressive agricul- ture." Important as the condition of the economy and the formation of classes may be, we feel that these propositions focus on structures that are too deep. There are more proximate, political institutions—which togeth- er constitute a political regime—that are likely to have a direct bearing on transitions.

The argument that the political institutions of the preceding regime condition historical transitions is of course not novel; it runs through the historiographic literature, notably on revolutions.13 But the recent transi- tions literature has not grappled with regime types, in part because the universe of relevant country cases has displayed a relatively uniform set of dominant political institutions.14 It has tended to assume the presence of the corporatist institutions that predominated in the bureaucratic author- itarian regimes of Southern Europe and Latin America.15 In Africa, how- ever, political institutions have on the whole evolved within neopatrimo- nial rather than corporatist regimes, forcing us to assess the impact of regime type.

10 For general theoretical discussions of this point, see Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: An Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1984); and Michael Taylor, "Structure, Culture and Action in the Explanation of Social Change," Politics and Society 17, no. 2 (1989).

11 Bermeo (fn. 7), 366-67. 12 Karl (fn. 8), 6-7. 13 This central point is made in relation to the French Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville, The

Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955); and in a comparison of the Russian and German revolutions by Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1978), 357-75, where differences in outcomes are linked to differ- ences in the strength of political institutions.

"Interestingly, two recent comparative studies of regime change are based on the analysis of polit- ical institutions. Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

15 Not all extant analyses assume corporatist institutions and ignore regime variations. See Robert M. Fishman, "Rethinking State and Regime: Southern Europe's Transition to Democracy," World Politics 42 (April 1990); and Terry Lynn Karl and Philippe Schmitter, "Modes of Transition in Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe," International Social Science Journal 2% (May 1991). See also the interesting analyses of the role of political parties as an explanatory factor in Brazil's transition in Scott Mainwaring, "Political Parties and Democratization in Brazil and the Southern Cone," Comparative Politics 21 (October 1988); and idem, "Brazilian Party Underdevelopment in Comparative Perspective," Political Science Quarterly 107 (Winter 1992).

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458 WORLD POLITICS

NEOPATRIMONIAL REGIMES

In the main, African political regimes are distinctly noncorporatist. Leaders of postcolonial African countries may have pursued a corporatist strategy to the extent that they promoted an organic ideology of national unity and attempted to direct political mobilization along controlled chan- nels. But African leaders have rarely used bureaucratic formulas to con- struct authoritative institutions or granted subsidiary spheres of influence to occupational interest groups within civil society. Contemporary African regimes do not display the formal governing coalitions between organized state and social interests or the collective bargaining over core public poli- cies that characterize corporatism. At best, African efforts to install corpo- ratist regimes have been a "policy output" of an ambitious political elite rather than a reflection of organized class interests within domestic society.

Rather, the distinctive institutional hallmark of African regimes is neopatrimonialism. In neopatrimonial regimes, the chief executive main- tains authority through personal patronage, rather than through ideology or law. As with classic patrimonialism, the right to rule is ascribed to a person rather than an office.16 In contemporary neopatrimonialism, relationships of loyalty and dependence pervade a formal political and administrative sys- tem17 and leaders occupy bureaucratic offices less to perform public service than to acquire personal wealth and status. The distinction between private and public interests is purposely blurred. The essence of neopatrimonialism is the award by public officials of personal favors, both within the state (notably public sector jobs) and in society (for instance, licenses, contracts, and projects). In return for material rewards, clients mobilize political sup- port and refer all decisions upward as a mark of deference to patrons.18

Insofar as personalized exchanges and political scandals are common in all regimes, theorists have suggested that neopatrimonialism is a master concept for comparative politics. Theobold argues that "some of the new states are, properly speaking, not states at all; rather, they are virtually the private instruments of those powerful enough to rule."19 And Clapham maintains that neopatrimonialism is "the most salient type (of authority)"

16 Max Weber, Economy and Society (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968). See also Robin Theobold, "Patrimonialism," World Politics 34 (July 1982).

17 Samuel N. Eisenstadt, Traditional Patrimonialism and Modern Neopatrimonialism (London: Sage, 1972); Christopher Clapham, ed., Private Patronage and Public Power (London: Frances Pinter, 1985); and Richard Snyder, "Explaining Transitions from Neopatrimonial Dictatorships," Comparative Politics 24, no. 4 (1992).

18 See Richard Joseph, Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of the Second R£public (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. chap. 5. On the recent evolution of these phenomena, see the excellent analysis in Rene Lemarchand, "The State, the Parallel Economy, and the Changing Structure of Patronage Systems," in Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan, eds., The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988).

"Theobold (fn. 16), 549.

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NEOPATRIMONIAL REGIMES 459

in the Third World because it "corresponds to the normal forms of social organization in precolonial societies."20

We draw a finer distinction, namely, that while neopatrimonial practice can be found in all polities, it is the core feature of politics in Africa and in a small number of other states, including Haiti, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Thus, personal relationships are a factor at the margins of all bureaucratic systems, but in Africa they constitute the foundation and superstructure of political institutions. The interaction between the "big man" and his extended retinue defines African politics, from the highest reaches of the presidential palace to the humblest village assembly. As such, analysts of African politics have embraced the neopatrimonial model.21

Neopatrimonialism has important implications for the analysis of polit- ical transitions. On the one hand, one would expect transitions from neopatrimonial rule to be distinctive, for example, centering on struggles over the legitimacy of the discretionary decision making by dominant, per- sonalistic leaders. On the other hand, one would also expect the dynamics of political change to be highly variable, unpredictably reflecting idiosyn- cratic patterns of rule devised by strongmen. Hence the need to emphasize both the commonalities and variations in transition dynamics and out- comes. Bearing this in mind, let us now turn to our central questions: how does neopatrimonialism influence whether transitions ever begin, how they unfold, and how they turn out?

COMPARING REGIMES AND TRANSITIONS

The recent literature on democratization in Europe and Latin America22

converges on a modal path of political transition. The transition begins when a moderate faction within the state elite recognizes that social peace and economic development alone cannot legitimate an authoritarian regime. These soft-liners promote a political opening by providing

20 Christopher Clapham, Third World Politics: An Introduction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 49.

21 John Waterbury, "Endemic and Planned Corruption in a Monarchical Regime," World Politics 25 (July 1973); Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Thomas Callaghy, The State-Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Richard Sandbrook, The Politics of African Economic Stagnation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Joseph (fn. 18); Jean Francois Bayart, L'Etat au Cameroun (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale de Sciences Politiques, 1985); and idem, L'Etat en Afrique (Paris: Fayard, 1989).

22 In addition to works already cited, see Enrique A. Baloyra, ed., Comparing New Democracies: Transitions and Consolidation in Mediterranean Europe and the Southern Cone (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987); James M. Malloy and Mitchell A. Seligson, eds., Authoritarians and Democrats: Regime Transitions in Latin America (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987); Robert A. Pastor, ed., Democracy in the Americas: Stopping the Pendulum (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1989); Karen L. Remmer, "New Wine or Old Bottlenecks? The Study of Latin American Democracy," Comparative Politics 23 Qulyl991).

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improved guarantees of civil and political rights and later conceding the convocation of free and fair elections. The greatest threat to democratic transition comes from a backlash by elements of a hard-line faction, most commonly when the military executes a reactionary coup. To forestall hard-liners and complete the transition, government and opposition lead- ers meet behind the scenes to forge a compromise "pact" to guarantee the vital interests of major elite players.

We propose that political transitions in neopatrimonial regimes depart from this modal path in the following major respects:

1. Political transitions from neopatrimonial regimes originate in social protest. As is well known, the practices of neopatrimonialism cause chron- ic fiscal crisis and make economic growth highly problematic.23 In addi- tion, neopatrimonial leaders construct particularistic networks of personal loyalty that grant undue favor to selected kinship, ethnic, or regional groupings. Taken together, shrinking economic opportunities and exclu- sionary patterns of reward are a recipe for social unrest. Mass popular protest is likely to break out, usually over the issue of declining living stan- dards, and to escalate to calls for the removal of incumbent leaders. Unlike corporatist rulers, personal rulers cannot point to a record of stability and prosperity to legitimate their rule.

Endemic fiscal crisis also undercuts the capacity of rulers to manage the process of political change. When public resources dwindle to the point where the incumbent government can no longer pay civil servants, the lat- ter join the antiregime protesters in the streets.24 Shorn of the ability to maintain political stability through the distribution of material rewards, neopatrimonial leaders resort erratically to coercion which, in turn, further undermines the regime's legitimacy. The showdown occurs when the gov- ernment is unable to pay the military.

Przeworski has argued that the stability of any regime depends not so much on the legitimacy of a particular system of domination as on the presence of a preferred opposition alternative.25 It may be true that a pow- erful autocrat can coerce unwilling popular compliance over very long peri- ods of time if he retains control over the executive and military bureaucra- cies. But regimes built on personal loyalty rather than bureaucratic author- ity are susceptible to institutional collapse when patronage resources run

23 See Sandbrook (fn. 21); and Callaghy (fn. 21). 24 Thus, Allen argues that "in failing to pay salaries [the Kerekou regime in Benin] . . . signed the

death warrant it had drafted by its own gross corruption, for it led to the actions of 1989 that in turn caused the regime's collapse." See Christopher Allen, "Restructuring an Authoritarian State: Democratic Renewal in Benin," Review of African Political Economy 54 0uly 1992), 46.

25 Adam Przeworski, "Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy," in Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 51.

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