STATE LEGISLATURES AND AFRICAN DEMOCRATIC DEVELOPMENT

By A. Carl LeVan

Introductory Chapter to

African State Legislatures: Subnational Politics and National Power

Edited by

A. Carl LeVanJoseph O. Fashagba

American University Landmark University

Washington, DCKwara State, Nigeria

Political institutions figure prominently in research on governance in Africa, including analyses exploring the effects of electoral systems, the sources of voting behavior, legislative capacity and constitutional constraints on executive authority. surveys and innovative field research offer new insights into policy preferences, political competitiveness, party hegemony and a host of other issues, signaling a shift from studies focused on the causes of democratizing reforms that began sweeping Africa over two decades ago. Despite the centrality of political institutions in these studies, state legislatures and similar subnational institutions receive little mention.

On the one hand this omission is not surprising. Arguably only a handful of formally federal political systems exist on the continent including Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa. In addition, democratization successes have been symbolized by parties and movements that displaced chief executives and ruling parties who overstayed their welcome at the center. On the other hand, the neglect of subnational legislatures is surprising given broader interests in how political patronage links urban and rural, an appreciation for the importance of elections below the national executive level, and a significant donor emphasis on decentralization. In addition, recent research on Africa’s national legislatures has argued for their importance as a cardinal institution of democratic governance. Democratization during the 1990s helped strengthen many legislatures (Boadi 1998), and a growing comparative literature links effective legislatures to democratic consolidation and associates weak ones with illiberal reversals(Fish 2006). Books by Salih (2006), Barkan (2009b), and Stapenhurst et al. (2011), and a major research effort funded by the World Bank, constitute valuable contributions in this regard. But they have been largely silent on state assemblies and similar subnational institutions. This makes it difficult to analytically distinguish between democratic quality and legislative effectiveness when comparing celebrated cases such as Botswana and Ghana alongside precarious polities such as Mali or Niger.

The essays in this volume collectively claim that a renewed interest in state, provincialand local institutions will advance our understanding of conditions that make or mar democratic governance in Africa. Politics at the center can drive subnational politicking or reflect aggregationsof local demands filtering upwards. Power-sharing arrangements or multicultural accommodations in national governmentscan emanate from ethnic and religious demands for representation, as much as they might reflect elite strategies for co-optation. Interactions between national and subnational institutions generate pertinent sources of variation relating to the degrees of power, independence, and policy-making relevance of state assemblies. These legislative bodies often face constraints such as inadequate funding and facilities, untrained or inexperienced support staff, offers of patronage that undermine assertiveness, and poor information management. The authors in this volume acknowledge the importance of these limitations. But they adopt a comparative approach that assessesthe condition and relevance of Africa’s state legislatures throughinstitutional contexts – mainly party structure, fiscal federalism, judicial independence, and constitutional “congruence.” This approach facilitates analysis within broader comparative literatures, identifies patterns of political behavior based on constraints and opportunities, and generates theoretically informed predictions where data may be scarce.

The scope of our study is first defined by federal countries, including Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa, wherenational constitutions recognize and at least formally empower subnational legislatures. Under a widely accepted definition, federal systems distinguish between national and sub-national tiers that each have certain specified areas of autonomy, meaning that certain authorities cannot be taken away(Riker 1964). This differs from unitary systems, where national government is sovereign and retains authority and legitimacy to control activities of sub-national units. In hybrid systems, common organs of the national government remain sovereign, but some independent powers are constitutionally recognized for constituent territorial units. Adapting these criteria, Norris (2008) identifies four federal, four hybrid, and 41 unitary constitutions in Africa.

Second, this volume discusses numerous examples of subnational institutions that can claim meaningful policy making authority or other powers. This enables the authors to highlight countries such as Sudan and Kenya, which show signs of moving towards federalism, while cases such as Ethiopia and South Sudan increasingly bear the hallmarks of unitary government.

Third, the essays here are not confined to countries with more experience with democracy or that score higher on the Freedom House and Polity scales. Even though various studies find a strong correlation between the level of federalism and the level of democracy (Lijphart 2012; Norris 2008), unitary government is conceptually distinct from authoritarianism. Moreover, federalism has a complex relationship with democratization as a dynamic phenomenon: Despite the centralizing tendencies of dictatorships, a variety of studies explore how federalism has coexisted with African authoritarianism (Elaigwu 1988; Amuwo et al. 2000), or constructed subnational authorities that become parts of the rulers’ bargain with various political interests (LeVan 2013; Treisman 2001). Finally, institutional changes at the subnational level may or may not be a sign of democratization. In the Americas, subnational governments in Argentina and the United States entrenched authoritarianism amidst democratization at the center (Gibson 2012), while in Mexico states formed breeding grounds for political opposition that drove democratization at the national level culminating in the defeat of a party that had ruled for 71 years (Cornelius et al. 1999; Eisenstadt 2004). In sum, the experience elsewhere in the developing world suggests that subnational legislatures are relevant across a range of liberal and illiberal regimes for a variety of reasons.

A Preliminary Research Program

As a starting point for research, LeVan and Fashagba commissioned papers for a conference at Landmark University in Nigeria that appear as chapters in this book. How does the capacity of state legislatures impact vertical relationships between governors and the national executive, or horizontal relationships between governors and other state politicians? Are moments of reform or retrenchment linked to political cycles, such as annual budget negotiations, election cycles, or political party primaries? How and when do state politicians successfully assert agenda control in the context of competing policy demands – from other parties or from public officials at other levels of government? And most broadly, what is the condition of state legislatures in Africa after nearly three decades of democratization, decentralization, and institutional experimentation?

In carrying out original research and formulating answers to these questions, the contributors were asked to consider the self-interest of state politicians. This helped determine the incentives politicians face to act independently of the governor or their political party, or to serve their constituents. This approach situates subnational politics within the context of national-level institutions, and identifies systemic factors that impact the capacity of subnational institutions. We encouragedthe authors to explore different metrics for assessing subnational legislative capacity:

(1) Autonomy within the party structure – In many countries, voters have little influence over the selection of candidates who will appear on the ballot. How much control do parties at the state or provincial level have over who becomes the party’s candidate? Do parties regulate or control other barriers to entry for candidates, such as registration fees, help with petitions to get on the ballot or other qualifiers? The chapters here utilize evidence from electoral commissions, court casesand other sources in order to document surprising variation in the control that parties at the state level possess over candidate selection.

(2) Projected career paths – building on classic scholarship from Latin America, some research explores how the career path of politicians shapes the incentives they have to challenge executives, and thereby promote inter-governmental accountability. Whether they plan to pursue the private sector, national politics, civil service appointments, or judicial positions, subnational public officials are often dependent on the goodwill of national officials. How do pressures to leave after a single term due to factors such term limits or ethnic power rotation practices, shape the behavior of politicians? Though this logic is essential for understanding the strategic basis for checks and balances, few scholars have systematically explored this within Africa. Do rules to rotate power also unintentionally strengthen (state or national) executives by limiting “institutional memory” through the constant recruitment of new politicians rather than the retention of experienced ones?

(3) Internal revenue effort – the literature has long considered countries in which states do little to internally raise their own revenue examples of weak federal systems (Lijphart 1999; Ekpo 1994). Countries with high levels of natural resource revenues adopt elaborate revenue sharing systems that redistribute federal grants to lower tiers of government. When the federal government has little discretion in determining state allocations though, does this actually enhance the political authority of state executives, ie, governors? Does it make them more powerful? Several chapters makes clear that these issues have huge implications for oil coming online in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Tanzania, and other African countries; core questions of fiscal federalism will become inextricably tied to the fate of democratization.

(4) Judicial enforcement– the courts are often asked to intervene in state disputes with federal authorities.How does judicial intervention alter the balance of power in legislative-executive relations within states, or between states and the federal government? The contributors find that few countries have the conditions that facilitate such assertiveness. This capacity can also impact the influence of local activists in civil society fighting to make decentralizationreforms a meaningful reality by enforcing constitutional guarantees of subnational authority.

(5) Institutional congruence – in some federal systems, subnational institutions largely mirror national institutions. For example, the authority of Nigeria’s states are outlined in the federal constitution and none of the states have constitutions; in Ethiopia, the provinces supposedly have constitutions, but they all mimic the federal constitution, meaning there is no variation across units (as in the American model). In other cases, subnational political units look or operate quite differently. What does the level of congruence between different levels of institutions tell us about subnational legislative capacity? The authors find that the political dimensions of interaction between the different levels of government often differ from the interactions expected by the formal, constitutional provisions: sometimes local politicians successfully claim power that they do not formally possess; more often they are denied authorities granted them by constitutions they helped create. Which outcome prevails is not simply a matter of chance, or culture. The authors link it instead to identifiable institutional characteristics that shape the probabilities of political behavior.

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

The book opens with two thematic chapters that address innovations in African accountability. Rotimi Suberu reflects on the successes and failures of Nigeria’s revenue allocation system in a chapter entitled, “Lessons in Fiscal Federalism for Africa’s New Oil Exporters.” A vast literature on the “resource curse” documents a robust inverse relationship between the level of democracy and natural resource income (Ahmadov 2013; Ross 2001). Liberated from revenue constraints, governments face weak popular challenges from citizens who pay few taxes, have few incentives to invest surplus in future development, and allocate spending according to political logic. Nigeria’sexperience managing oil income through an elaborate formula that allocates money to states and local government holds important lessons for emerging producers of hydrocarbons. Many of these countries – includingGhana, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Uganda – haveincorporated similar mechanisms for central transfers to subnational governments. This has considerable ramifications for inter-governmental relations, inter-regional equity, as well as politics, governance and institutional capacities at the regional level. These new hydrocarbon producers also share with Nigeria a centralized national framework for managing natural resources, as distinct from the more decentralized natural resource governance systems associated with mature federations like Australia, Canada and the United States.

Among the continent’s leading oil exporters today, petroleum assumed a large role in the economy during dictatorships. Angola for example endured oil production throughout a protracted civil war. And Nigeria’s oil production largely followed the collapse of the First Republic in 1966. At that time, oil contributed less than five percent of federal revenue. When democracy was restored in 1979 with the (short-lived) Second Republic, the federal government earned upwards of 70 percent of its revenue from oil exports; the democratic dispensation since 1999 has struggled to shed authoritarian atavisms financed by oil. However Africa’s new oil exporters are distinguished by experience with production post-democratization. These countries face new domestic, international, and market pressures to create regulatory mechanisms and revenue allocation systems through a more watchful public. In Ghana for example, formerpresident John Kufuor points out that aPublic Interest and Accountability Committee which includes journalists, is monitoringthe management of oil revenue. Explaining how the parliament approves oil contracts, he said “The government is committed to the highest level of transparency in the oil sector because oil belongs to the people” (Kasujja and Anguyo 2013). Such promises should not be taken at their word, but leaders in Africa’s developing democracies now face scrutiny from NGOs such as Revenue Watch and Global Witness, and foreign oil officials operate in a climate of increased enforcement of western anti-corruption laws.

Can Africa’s new oil exporters therefore avoid the natural resource curse through fiscal federalism that counterbalances illiberal impulses with subnational democracy? Suberu’s chapter starts with a theoretical discussion that examines the extent to which formal political institutions, especially fiscal federal constitutions, may help cauterize or exacerbate the corrupt neo-patrimonial practices associated with African states generally, and resource rich African countries particularly. Next, he outlines the evolution and basic features of Nigeria’s current fiscal federalism, and highlights lessons for Africa’s new oil producers. These include, on the positive side, the constitutional and legislative balancing of competing national and sub-national claims to natural resource revenues, the entrenching of considerable sub-national budgetary and policy autonomy, the judicial arbitration and enforcement of intergovernmental revenue sharing rights, nominal compliance with global fiscal transparency standards, and the incorporation of natural resource governance issues into ongoing national debates about constitutional change and institutional reform.

Nevertheless, he concludes that the negative lessons from Nigeria significantly outstrip the positives. He reports large gaps between formal transparency reforms and actual financial accountability, the over-centralized executive presidential control and manipulation of oil sector governance, the weak and corrupt management of the oil revenues sharing system, the elimination of sub-national hard budget constraints contributing to decentralized corruption, the subversion and repression of local governments by state administrations, and the development of severe inter-regional grievances. He concludes byrelating some of the Nigerian lessons to Ghana, Liberia, and Tanzania, which have instituted comparatively more accountable and transparent frameworks for resource revenues governance. These successes are contrasted alongside Angola, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sudan, which have thus far failed to develop effective institutions to manage natural resources and revenues.Across both groups of these countries, fiscal federalism has significant implications for subnational institutions and democratic development.

The next chapter in the book’s opening section explores the effect of mobile technologies on electoral officials’ constituency relations. Deji Olaore’s analysis of “politexting” as a tool to “connect the unconnected” offers a welcome contribution to the emerging literature on the effects of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). An estimated half of Africa’s one billion people now have a cell phone, and within the next few years, cheap “smart” phones will replace many of the simple phones presently in use. A triple transformation in economics, social relations, and politics is under way: Maasai pastoralists in Tanzania use smart phone “apps” to check the price of cattle so they know where to migrate and sell, and start-ups like MoWoza help poor migrant traders shuttling between Mozambique and South Africa locate customers and identify market demand. Politically, the ICT revolution has created new avenues for democratic participation through social media platforms such as Facebook, and SMS texting has been embraced as a tool to reduce electoral conflict and improve the integrity of vote counts through “parallel” tabulations. ASocial Media Tracking Center logged 70,000 incident reports in Nigeria’s 2011 elections, and the presidential election accounted for about 73 percent of the content on Twitter around the time of voting (Asuni and Farris 2011).

The initial optimism about these novel ICT adaptationsis reminiscent of radio’s rise. In the 1920s, one study sarcastically summarized the hopes generated by radio this way: “we shall take a greater interest in politics than we are wont to do, that we shall find less apathy for education, and that we shall wake up one bright morning with an international consciousness, the result of world-wide broadcast programs” (Beuick 1927, 617). Now, as then, this was followed by some sobering assessments. In Kenya, texting facilitated the organization of violence following its 2007 elections. When the electoral commission turned to the technology again in 2011 to monitor vote counts, in only 13 percent of the constituencies nationwide were 80 percent or more of the polling stations able to report their tallies, impairing the ability to provide an independent source of validation for the overall election results (Barkan 2013). Worse, recent spatial data on cell phone coverage in Africa turns out to be highly correlated with organized violent events, suggesting that cell phones often help rebels, warlords, and criminals resolve collective action problems (Pierskalla and Hollenbach 2013). Authoritarian regimes have also effectively adapted ICT for monitoring citizens and shaping public opinion (Greitens 2013). Technology may therefore best be considered value neutral, as a medium that can be used for good governance or for enabling dictatorship. Despite expectations that inexpensive cell phones would transcend economic barriers to political participation, level of education is by far the most significant driver of usage. Initial evidence from Round 5 of the Afrobarometer surveys show that regular use of a cell phone is significantly correlated with political interest, and with “political competence,” meaning that they provide unrepresentative samples of attitudes and behavior. Frequent users are more likely to participate in protests or attend community meetings. Overall there is no correlation with the likelihood of voting – suggesting that new technologies deter rather than complement conventional forms of political participation (Bratton 2013).