Party System Change and the Quality of Democracy in East Africa

Riccardo Pelizzo and Zim Nwokora ()
Additional contact information
Zim Nwokora: Deakin University, Australia

No 17/051, Working Papers of the African Governance and Development Institute. from African Governance and Development Institute.

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to explore in greater detail the nexus between party system change and democratic qualities. In doing so, we do not simply assess whether, how and to what extent qualities of democracy in East Africa are affected by the instability of the patterns of inter-party competition (fluidity of the party system), but we also plan to show how the sub-components of party system fluidity (frequency of change, scope of change, variety of change) influence the democratic qualities. By disaggregating fluidity in its constitutive elements and by testing how each of them affects the qualities of democracy, we find that while the frequency of change has a beneficial impact on the qualities of democracy, the other sub-components of fluidity—namely, the “scope” and “variety” of system change—have a consistently negative effect on democratic quality.

Keywords: party system change; East Africa; South East Asia; fluidity; democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 D72 H00 H11 H89 O00 O10 O43 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-cdm, nep-pol and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Forthcoming in Politics & Policy

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.afridev.org/RePEc/agd/agd-wpaper/Party- ... y-in-East-Africa.pdf Revised version, 2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Party System Change and the Quality of Democracy in East Africa (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:agd:wpaper:17/051

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of the African Governance and Development Institute. from African Governance and Development Institute. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Asongu Simplice ().