The one‐party regimes in Africa: reconsiderations
- 1 December 1967
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Government and Opposition
- Vol. 2 (4) , 491-509
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.1967.tb01181.x
Abstract
‘When the market is buying, sell, and when the market is selling, buy.’ This Stock Exchange maxim might be equally productive applied to academic fashions; and that it has been fashionable to extol the ‘single or single-dominant party system’ in Africa is undeniable.One way of questioning this fashion – and a fruitful one – is to examine the very concept of a ‘single or single-dominant party’. Its very clumsiness discloses the difficulties of conceptualization, when states in which only one party is legal are classed together with others where one party has succeeded in winning an overwhelming preponderance of seats, or where states whose governments have seized every chance to harass opposition elements are lumped together with others where little or no such pressure has been applied. Not only that. The word ‘party’ itself requires further definition. In what sense was the (now defunct) PDD of Dahomey a ‘party’? Or the FLN of Algeria? The party in Mali or in Guinea is quite clearly a very different animal from the party in Malawi. And so is the style of politics.Keywords
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