Part of review forum on “The Autocratic Voter: Partisanship and Political Socialization Under Dictatorship.”

Natalie Letsa’s The Autocratic Voter: Partisanship and Political Socialization Under Dictatorship draws inspiration from the Columbia and Michigan Schools of political behavior studies, which focused on political socialization and argued that partisanship is strongly connected to an individual’s family background, and their social networks and relationships. Letsa argues that in African countries, strong convictions from childhood and adolescence and growing up in a partisan household (126–28) can strongly influence one’s partisanship, as does who you socialize with later in life. Partisanship becomes like a social identity, or lens through which people see the world. Letsa documents the phenomenon of political socialization in Cameroon and argues that “partisanship as social identity” has distinctive implications and effects in autocracies (80–81). In such settings, partisanship manifests in polarization on the issue of incumbent regime’s legitimacy, and on the legitimacy of the system itself. An important function or role of opposition parties (or having a partisan opposition, whatever its particular ideology or banner) in such settings is keeping hope alive for electoral turnover and calling out autocratic abuses of the state.

This description certainly fits in the Cameroonian case, where a single party has held power for many decades and strong, regionally concentrated opposition movements have existed continuously but morphed over time as the nature of opportunity and repression have fluctuated. There is a strong geographic aspect to Letsa’s story, both in terms of the regional base of the opposition parties and in terms of party IDs at the micro level. In Cameroon, an individual’s location goes far not only in predicting, but also (possibly) in determining their partisan identity. In one of many fascinating aspects of the analysis, Letsa takes the administrative unit ( département , or district) as a geographic unit of analysis and provides some evidence that an individual’s partisan ID changes when they relocate to a locality that lies in a different partisan stronghold. Letsa rightly frames her approach as a critique of ethnic voting models, which link partisan identity to ethnic identity and are, she says, “so far the only sociological lens used to understand political behavior in Africa” (20). This critique holds for Cameroon, she argues, where ethnicity (in her reading of the literature) has been the primary lens for understanding politics.

Letsa’s argument is a refreshing contribution to the literature on party and electoral politics in African countries, as well as to the study of electoral autocracy, and thus of relevance to an ever-widening array of countries around the world. In Letsa’s theory, having stable parties over a long period of time is a scope condition, but she defines this as a long-standing ruling party and an “opposition” which could consist of a fluid array of parties and nonparty organizations (such as social movements or civil society organizations). One may ask how far the argument about “partisan” identity travels to the opposition. The book also raises questions about the over-time dimension: In Cameroon, the “political socialization” also happens under autocracy (as the book’s subtitle implies), but does this mean that the theory does not apply to (or where) people are socialized in a nonautocracy, and then confront autocracy?

Letsa’s evocation of models of voter behaviour and socialisation forged in the US context in the 1950s and 1960s also challenges both the author and readers to engage the critiques and limitations of the original models. Much like work on US politics decades ago, Letsa’s analysis does not tell us why parties differ, or why there is an opposition in Cameroon. If partisanship is due to the voter’s parents and social networks, then what causes the parties and the people in some networks to support the opposition? In this sense, Letsa’s work reproduces some of the limitations of the Michigan Model of the American voter, for example, which was weak on its analysis of what divided the parties, often defaulting to culturalist (nonpolitical) explanations and downplaying the political salience of ideology, issues, voters’ experiences, government performance, events, and social class. The presence in Cameroon of a regional secessionist movement which has been the target of the government’s “indiscriminate violence against civilians” (15) for decades seems hard to ignore, given its possible salience and implications for the book’s methods, theory, and findings. More intensive use of the large literature on regionalism in Cameroonian politics would have enriched the analysis. That said, I look forward to future rounds of debate and discussion of this work, focusing on Letsa’s provocative theory and how well (and where) it travels, as well as on implications for the political future of Cameroon.