Fall 2017 JPI

The Puzzle of Ethnopolitical Fragmentation and Party
Systems in Africa
Alina Zheng
INTRODUCTION
Africa has long been recognized as one of the most ethnically diverse continents in the world.
Scholars have found that Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest number of ethnic groups, and level of
ethnic fractionalization in any region by a significant margin. 1 Africa’s ethnopolitical groups also have
the highest levels of geographic concentration in the world. 2 Yet there still remains much debate as to
how this ethnic diversity affects the political composition of African countries.
In previous research, many have shown that both district magnitude and ethnic fragmentation
increase party system size. 3 In countering this, Mozaffar et al. recently published research claiming the
exact opposite, concluding that “high ethnopolitical fragmentation is likely to reduce the number of
parties." 4 Researchers found that both district magnitude and ethnopolitical group concentration
negatively correlate with the number of political parties in Africa. In this paper, party fragmentation
is defined as how many parties are in a system and their relative size. Thus, "a party system is
fragmented if it contains more than two parties, none of which comes close to obtaining an absolute
majority in the representative assembly." 5 MSG (Mozaffar et al.) theorize that high levels of
fragmentation stimulate the growth of intergroup coalitions that in turn reduce the number of parties
in the system. MSG propose that when ethnopolitical fragmentation is high enough—as is the case in
Africa—a large number of small parties exist that are unable to win enough votes individually, thus
pushing them to form coalitions and reach a multiethnic base. They argue for a joint explanation
where both electoral institutions and ethnopolitical cleavages (divisions/splits) contribute to the
explanation of party concentration and fragmentation. It is important to note that MSG’s theory has
one caveat: the geographic concentration of Africa’s ethnopolitical groups. They state that geographic
concentration has the opposite effect but that "geographic concentration by itself, however, is unlikely
to overcome the reductive effect of high fragmentation due to the presence of large numbers of small
ethnopolitical groups." 6
Notably, Mozaffar and Scarritt published another paper two years later with an additional
reinforcement of low fragmentation in African party systems, but in the context of high volatility. 7
According to Mozaffar and Scarritt "the Mozaffar et al. (2003) explanation relies on cross-sectional
data on 62 elections only in Africa’s emerging democracies and does not take into account how
strategic choice and institutional legacies affect party formation in the first place." 8 The transition from
a different, or more autocratic regime into a democratic one can impact the formation of political
1 James D. Fearon "Ethnic and cultural diversity by country." Journal of Economic Growth 8, no. 2 (2003): 195.
2 Robert Gurr Minorities at risk. US Institute of Peace Press, 1993.
3 See Neto, Octavio Amorim, and Gary W. Cox. "Electoral institutions, cleavage structures, and the number of parties." American Journal of Political
Science (1997): 149-174; Riker, William H. "The two-party system and Duverger’s law: an essay on the history of political science." American Political
Science Review 76, no. 04 (1982): 753-766; Powell, G. Bingham. Contemporary democracies. Harvard University Press, 1982.
4 Mozaffar, Shaheen, James R. Scarritt, and Glen Galaich. "Electoral institutions, ethnopolitical cleavages, and party systems in Africa’s emerging
democracies." American political science review 97, no. 03 (2003): 379-390.
5 Lauri Karvone "Party System Fragmentation." SAGE Reference. 2011. Accessed December 21, 2016.
http://sk.sagepub.com/reference/intlpoliticalscience/n419.xml.
6 Ibid, 381.
7 Mozaffar, Shaheen, and James R. Scarritt. "The puzzle of African party systems." Party Politics 11, no. 4 (2005): 399-421.
8 Ibid, 407.
JPI Fall 2017, pg. 52