Fall 2017 JPI

parties, based on the institutions that were in place before. Only using those elections is likely to
produce biased results. Thus, they use expanded data including elections from Africa’s well-established
democracies. Once again, Mozaffar and Scarritt emphasize the "distinctive" formation of African
ethnopolitical groups that result in complicated and unique cleavages in two dimensions, which they
define as fragmentation and concentration. 9 Mozaffar and Scarritt show that the result is the
dominance of a small number of large parties accompanied by some smaller parties, most of which
are able to attain only little to no representation. Once again, no single ethnopolitical group is large
enough to form a political party – thus, multi-ethnic coalitions tend to form. In addition, Mozaffar
and Scarritt find that high electoral volatility results "can be viewed as a system-clearing device that
eliminates inefficient parties" leaving behind the system they described. 10 Overall, Mozaffar and
Scarritt detail that for Africa’s emerging democracies, the remnants of authoritarian regimes are still
represented in the electoral rules for legislative elections while ethnic coalitions provide an alternative
source of information for voters. The result is the puzzling combination of low frag- mentation and
high volatility that they present.
However, the claims from these two papers have met with significant rebuttals due to errors
in their methods of data analysis. Most notably, Golder et al. claim that MSG use interaction models
in which they do not include all constitutive terms, interpret constitutive terms as unconditional
marginal effects, and fail to calculate marginal effects and standard errors over a sufficiently large range
of modifying variables. 11 They argue that although MSG made an attempt to include interaction terms,
they did so without accounting for all of the base variables, which would render their models
inaccurate. Thus, GBC (Golder et al.) replicate MSG’s 2003 study interpreting the effects of
fragmentation and district magnitude on the number of parties with the previously omitted interaction
terms of (Fragmentation x log(Magnitude)) and (Concentration x log(Magnitude)), among others. They point
out that by omitting these variables, MSG made a key assumption without justification. A further
problem is that even with the revised model on hand, MSG did not provide any analysis on the
marginal effect of ethnic fragmentation, and there is no way of determining whether its marginal effect
is statistically significant since they did not provide any standard errors. BCG find that using the
revised model, "ethnic fragmentation does reduce the number of parties when concentration is zero." 12
However, of the observations for which group concentration was zero, almost all of them had only a
single ethnopolitical group where ethnic fragmentation could not have been the cause. Thus, the
authors reject MSG’s claim about the effect of ethnic fragmentation.
Finally, another notable complaint is aimed at Mozaffar and Scarritt’s 2005 paper instead.
Bogaards complains that the puzzle of low fragmentation and high volatility may be jumping to
conclusions since Mozaffar and Scarrit did not control for regime type as other existing literature has
in similar studies. 13 Bogaards points out that in investigating the party systems of Africa, Mozaffar and
Scarritt use indicators based on data from the entire continent instead of controlling for varying factors
of each country, as Africa’s political climate varies greatly from country to country. Bogaards
emphasizes that Mozaffar and Scarritt use the average effective number of legislative parties across all
elections to measure the presence of dominant parties in the system, but don’t go into further
dimensions that may also vary, such as a measure of dominance or time. Thus, Bogaards performs an
9 Ibid, 400.
10 Ibid, 417.
11 Brambor, Thomas, William Roberts Clark, and Matt Golder. "Are African party systems different?" Electoral Studies 26, no. 2 (2007): 315-323.
12 Ibid, 6.
13 Matthijs Bogaards "Dominant Party Systems and Electoral Volatility in Africa A Comment on Mozaffar and Scarritt." Party Politics 14, no. 1 (2008):
113-130.
JPI Fall 2017, pg. 53