The institutionalization of political parties is said to be important for democratic development, but its measurement has remained a neglected area of research. We understand the institutionalization of political organizations as progress in four dimensions: roots in society, level of organization, autonomy, and coherence. On this basis we construct an Index of the Institutionalization of Parties (IIP), which we apply to 28 African political parties.The IIP uses extensive GIGA survey and fieldwork data. Initial results reveal a more differentiated degree of institutionalization than is commonly assumed. In addition to illustrating overall deficits in party institutionalization, the IIP highlights an astonishing variance between individual parties and-to a lesser extent-between national aggregates.

Recent research has questioned the notion that ethnicity is the main determinant of party preference in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on data from representative survey polls in eight anglophone and francophone subSaharan countries, multinomial and binary logit regressions confirm that ethnicity counts but does not explain party preference as a whole. More importantly we find that the relevance of ethnicity varies substantially from country to country. Looking at possible effects, there is little evidence that 'ethnicized' party systems harm democracy; discussing possible structural, institutional and historical determinants of the role of ethnicity in party politics, tentative results suggest that specific integrative cultural features, low ethnic polarization, one-party dominance and a historical non-mobilization of ethnicity might thwart the politicization of ethnicity. Future research should focus on the interaction of several factors and how processes of ethnic mobilization evolve historically. IntroductionPolitical party preference and voting behaviour in Africa's multiparty regimeswhether democratic or hybrid -is still an under-researched topic, although they form a classical field of political science. 1 To explain party preference in general, various socio-structural, socio-psychological, or rational choice models are usually applied. For African societies, voting has largely been explained by factors such as ethnicity, personal ties, and clientelism. 2 The focus of this explanation is in the tradition of Lipset and Rokkan's social structural model. 3 This model has been used to argue that ethnicity provides the basic social cleavage for voting behaviour and the formation of parties and party systems in Africa. 4 The all-inclusive relevance of ethnicity for an understanding of African politics, in general, was emphasized in a recent collection on ethnicity and democracy in Africa. 5 However, empirical evidence for this claim is far from clear-cut. Recent Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 21:24 01 December 2014 studies find limited and sometimes contradictory evidence; 6 in focusing on anglophone Africa, most studies -using the Afrobarometer surveys -neglect francophone Africa. 7 The present contribution reassesses the link between ethnicity and party preference in Africa by drawing on representative survey polls in four anglophone and four francophone countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Tanzania, and Zambia. In a second, more novel, analytical step, we tentatively investigate the possible determinants (and consequences) of the politicization of ethnicity and respective differences in our eight cases.We proceed as follows: the following section reviews the literature on ethnicity as a determinant of party preference. After presenting the design of the survey polls and the empirical strategy, we discuss the results of multinomial and binary logit regressions for the eight countries. Exploiting differences in levels of ethnicization between the countries, we then engage i...

This article proposes a relational approach to studying judicial politics in non-Western societies—a framework for the systematic analysis of informal relations between judges and other actors, within and outside the judiciary, based on common political interests, ideas, social identity, and even clientelistic obligations. We reflect on how these relations might help explain a variety of outcomes of interest, such as the organization of courts, judicial behavior, and judicial reform. We also highlight some of the methodological challenges of this approach in collecting and analyzing comparative data. In doing so, we seek to build an agenda for research on informal judicial politics beyond Western democracies.

Though African party systems are said to be ethnic, there is little evidence for this claim. The few empirical studies rarely rely on individual data and are biased in favour of Anglophone Africa. This paper looks at four Francophone countries, drawing on representative survey polls. Results reveal that ethnicity matters, but that its impact is generally rather weak and differs with regard to party systems and individual parties. 'Ethnic parties' in the strict sense are virtually absent. In particular, the voters' location seems more important than ethnic affiliation. Other determinants such as regional ties, elite strategies, cross-cutting cleavages, and rational preferences deserve more attention in the future study of voting behaviour in Africa.

This paper assesses the extent to which elected power holders informally intervene in the judiciaries of new democracies, an acknowledged but under-researched topic in studies of judicial politics. The paper first develops an empirical strategy for the study of informal interference based on perceptions recorded in interviews, then applies the strategy to six third-wave democracies, three in Africa (Benin, Madagascar and Senegal) and three in Latin America (Argentina, Chile and Paraguay). It also examines how three conditioning factors affect the level of informal judicial interference: formal rules, previous democratic experience, and socioeconomic development. Our results show that countries with better performance in all these conditioning factors exhibit less informal interference than countries with poorer or mixed performance. The results stress the importance of systematically including informal politics in the study of judicial politics.