Constrained Presidential Power in Africa? Legislative Independence and Executive Rule Making in Kenya, 1963–2013

Abstract

Do institutions constrain presidential power in Africa? Conventional wisdom holds that personalist rule grants African presidents unchecked powers. Consequently, there is very little research on African institutions such as legislatures and their impact on executive authority. In this article, the author uses original data on the exercise of presidential authority (issuance of subsidiary legislation) to examine how legislative independence conditions presidential rule making in Kenya. The study exploits quasi-exogenous changes in legislative independence, and finds that Kenyan presidents issue relatively more Legal Notices under periods of legislative weakness, but are constrained from doing so under periods of legislative independence. These findings shed new light on institutional politics in Kenya, and illustrate how executive–legislative relations in the country conform to standard predictions in the literature on unilateral executive action.

Government Type and Public Spending in Africa

“…this article joins others in drawing attention to formal institutions and the way they shape african politics (Opalo 2019(Opalo , 2020. a long tradition of scholarship has focused on the use of ethnicity and patronage in maintaining networks of power.…”

“…While government composition has long been a topic of interest to scholars of European parliamentary democracies, there is considerably less existing research on the effect that government composition has on outcomes, such as levels of government spending, in developing democracies. In fact, it is only quite recently that scholars of African politics have begun to consider parties to be institutional tools for building and maintaining legislative support (Ariotti and Golder 2018; Barkan 2008; Opalo 2019, 2020), and there is even less attention to the downstream consequences of using parties and legislatures in this way. The result of the dearth of research on government composition in Africa is that we know almost nothing about the relationship between government composition and levels of government spending in the context of African democracies.…”

“…As a result, the few existing studies of cabinets in Africa have focused on the strategic use of cabinets to build ethnic support in the broader population, rather than engaging with the sizeable literature on government formation originating in other world regions (Arriola ; Francois, Rainer, and Trebbi 2015). More recently, scholars have begun to consider African legislatures as credible institutional constraints on executive power (Barkan ; Opalo 2019, 2020), and analyze the strategic use of government‐formation processes to build partisan support in the legislature (Ariotti and Golder 2018; Chaisty, Cheeseman, and Power 2018; Gottlieb and Kosec 2019). Given that existing work from Europe and Latin America suggests that government attributes play a role in determining levels of government spending, a better understanding of the institutional determinants of public spending in the context of African democracies is overdue.…”

“…this article contributes to efforts to bring african democracies into broader discussions of the effects of government composition on government spending and the effects of political institutions in democracies more generally. third, i add to a growing body of scholarship that calls for a more thorough understanding of political institutions in africa and the ways in which they influence political phenomena (Opalo 2019(Opalo , 2020.…”

Presidential Unilateral Power

“…Research outside the US context typically focuses on Latin America, as the rise of decree authority in Brazil and elsewhere prompted scholars to take notice (e.g., Neto 2006, Neto et al 2003, Palanza 2019, Pereira et al 2008, Reich 2002, Shair-Rosenfield & Stoyan 2017. Treatments of Western Europe (Huber 1998, Sala & Kreppel 1998, Russia (Parrish 1998), and Africa (Opalo 2019) also apply versions of the unilateral action framework. Relatedly, a small but growing literature examines unilateral politics in American state governments (Barber et al 2019, Cockerham & Crew 2017, Sellers 2017.…”