Following the independence of African countries in the 1960s and 1970s, many newly minted politicians and political scientists who studied them directed their attention to the effects of ethnic identities, heterogeneity, rivalries, and alliances on African politics. In the aftermath of colonial violence and social engineering, ethnic competition contributed to violent secessionist movements, and ethnic hatred sometimes fueled genocide. Many African governments expelled minorities and banned ethnic parties, established federal institutions, and at times adopted nationalist rhetoric to punish rivals or mitigate the deleterious outcomes of ethnic conflict. As Christof Hartmann summarizes, “political regulation of ethnicity has been a core dimension of state-building in Africa” (“Managing Ethnicity in African Politics,” in Nic Cheeseman, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Politics, 2019: 1).
Even with the expansion of multiparty politics across the continent in the 1990s, the “ethnic question” has continued to inform election strategies, policymaking, and approaches to the study of politics in Africa. In many countries, the ethnic landscape provides a good shorthand for determining which candidates voters will support. National politicians also rely on ethnic appeals to mobilize voters, and they employ the efforts of political brokers and traditional authorities to capture the electoral support of ethnic groups in rural areas. Political scientists then draw on these circumstances and other examples of ethnic alliances and discord to explain why many political parties in Africa are “clientelist” or why elites favor co-ethnics with goods and services. (e.g., see Nic van de Walle, “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss? The Evolution of Political Clientelism in Africa” in Herbert Kitschelt and Steven I. Wilkinson, eds., Patrons, Clients, and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition, 2007; Janina Beiser-McGrath, et al., “Who Benefits? How Local Ethnic Demography Shapes Political Favoritism in Africa,” British Journal of Political Science, 51(4), 2021).
Despite constituting a cottage industry in the literature on the politics of Africa, ethnic competition surprisingly makes little appearance in the books by Tom Goodfellow, Michaela Collord, and Catherine Boone reviewed here. In Goodfellow’s Politics and the Urban Frontier (2022), ethnic politics takes a back seat to the ways in which associational power, aspirations of social legitimacy, informal negotiations and networks, and expressions of infrastructural influence shape urban development in three East African cities. Similarly, Michaela Collord’s Wealth, Power and Authoritarian Institutions (2024) attributes strong or weak legislatures in electoral authoritarian regimes such as Tanzania and Uganda not to the demands produced by ethnic competition, but to the nature of “politicized accumulation,” that is, the patterns of wealth creation shaped by political elites. Although these patterns and their eventual impact on parliamentary power have ethnic dimensions, Collord’s causal framework explains legislative strength by analyzing the different economic pathways taken by political leaders during “critical junctures” in their political history, the diverse construction of patron–client networks, and contrasting approaches to party building.
Whereas ethnic alliances and rivalries sit on the periphery in the analytical approaches of Goodfellow and Collord, their explanatory power is directly challenged in the paradigm-shifting work of Catherine Boone. Anchoring her work in the classic study of cleavages and political parties by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan (Party Systems and Voter Alignments, 1967), and studies by other scholars working in the Comparative Political Economy (CPE) tradition, Boone’s core claim is that contemporary political rivalries in Africa are rooted in regional economic disparities and administrative arrangements established during the colonial period and reproduced over time. Colonial officials identified regions according to their economic potential and designed administrative units such as provinces and districts to govern them. Subsequently, the architecture of contemporary electoral politics not only reflects but also reinforces these territorially bounded, economically differentiated units. Underlying what political scientists have previously framed as ethnic rivalries are political struggles over the control and distribution of regionally generated rents.
How might we explain why three recent studies, each of which explores different contexts, tackles multiple themes, and operates at diverse scales, marginalize or even repudiate the contribution of ethnic competition to their outcomes of interest? Does ethnic contestation play a marginal role in the work of Collord and Goodfellow because it is simply orthogonal to the themes of urbanization and parliamentary power they discuss, the cases they select (Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Rwanda), or the contexts in which they situate their studies (electoral autocracies)? Does Boone’s research offer a more persuasive explanation of contemporary political economy in Africa than those that rely on the mobilization of ethnic identities? This review tackles these questions by examining the theoretical claims of each book and the evidence used to support their claims. It considers their topics, cases, and units of analysis. It identifies their contributions and the debates their research resolves or provokes.
All three studies use the language of comparative political economy to analyze material disparities, institutional arrangements, power structures, and policies over time. All three recognize that economic conditions and the interests that wield economic power also shape the form and function of contemporary political institutions, and policies regarding land use, redistribution, infrastructure, and natural resources. Although the three studies are firmly situated in a similar literature, they nevertheless work at different scales and the outcomes of interest they explain are vastly different.
Legislative Strength and Patterns of Capital Accumulation
Speaking to a new wave of scholarship on legislatures in authoritarian countries, Michaela Collord assesses the strength of the national legislature in several electoral autocracies in Africa. She situates her argument at a national scale and substantively compares Uganda and Tanzania. She also illustrates the generalizability of her argument through a comparison with Kenya and Rwanda. Drawing on 158 interviews, attendance at legislative committee meetings, and site visits to the constituencies of parliamentary members, Collord’s core theoretical claim is that the strength of national legislatures vis-à-vis the executive branch is rooted in choices regarding the socio-economic construction of elite power. Where ruling parties allow more opportunities for the private accumulation of wealth, we should expect to see greater legislative strength. This should be the case, even if, for example, the same ruling party under the same leader has been in power for decades, like the National Resistance Movement (NRM) and President Yoweri Museveni in Uganda. Alternatively, where the state centrally determines access to productive and distributive opportunities, as has been the case in Tanzania until recently, then a strong executive typically overshadows a weak legislature.
Legislative strength consists of two components: first, the existence of rules and regulations that give it more or less power in contrast to the executive, and second, its performance, which can reinforce or weaken existing rules. In Tanzania, where the legislature has been historically weak, members of parliament appear to exercise little control over the substance of tax reform, matters of the budget, or the prosecution of scandals. In contrast, the Ugandan Parliament “has proved a relatively consistent thorn in the executive’s side” (p. 226) and has been more effective at passing fiscal measures.
The causal logic that ultimately links the means of wealth accumulation to legislative weakness or strength is a complex one. During transitional moments or “critical junctures” such as independence, a coup, or a conflict, new political leaders must decide which types of economic models they will follow. They may decide to use the state to centrally control economic production and distribution, as occurred in Tanzania during the socialist period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Alternatively, the political leadership may allow private actors to accumulate capital as long they are allied with the state, which typified Uganda after Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986. The choice between these different economic models then influences whether patron–client relations are more centralized or more factionalized, and the nature of such networks then shapes the features of the ruling party. Where ruling parties are characterized by factional squabbling and bargaining, legislatures are likely to assert more autonomy in relation to the executive. Where ruling party discipline is greater, legislatures often serve at the pleasure of the executive.
The theory plausibly explains why legislatures are weaker in Tanzania (at least until 2015) and Rwanda, and more active and strong in Uganda and Kenya. However, several aspects of the argument require greater clarification. First, it would have been useful to have more information on which groups benefit and which groups lose as a result of the modality of “politicized accumulation” preferred by the leadership. For example, Collord states that policies adopted by the Kenya African National Union (KANU) leadership just after independence “favoured the expansion of an African capitalist elite” (p. 80). Yet the reader is left wanting to learn more about the composition of the elite; whether the sources of their wealth rest in agriculture, services, or manufacturing; what their foreign linkages are; and how the process of accumulation occurs.
Second, causality seems to run in both directions at times. For example, Collord argues that whether “politicized accumulation” is overseen by the state or oriented by market forces is often decided during a “critical juncture,” usually in the heady days following independence or after a major conflict such as occurred in Uganda and Rwanda. In several instances, however, the narrative suggests that the party in power is determinative of the path chosen, not that socio-economic foundations precede the creation of patron–client networks. This alternative logic would suggest that the economic base of the movement or party determines the leadership’s preferences regarding the path of politicized accumulation, which then affects legislative strength. Collord’s causal framework might have been more persuasive if the narrative had spent more time analyzing initial economic endowments before independence or moments of conflict. In the case of Uganda, a greater focus on such endowments and who controlled them might have explained why Museveni, although professing attachments to Marxism, had to abandon it after coming to power in 1986.
Relatedly, the book leans on the political settlements literature, to inform its explanatory framework regarding the formation of networks and coalitions. This literature assesses the ways in which domestic elites bargain and negotiate to determine the economic and political rules of the game, but it could pay more attention to the role of external actors and institutions in the policy choices and preferences of African elites. Transnational capital flows and international transactions occupy an important role in the economies of African countries, and thus the ways in which they shape patterns of capital accumulation require more evaluation.
Despite these limitations, Wealth, Power, and Authoritarian Institutions offer a worthy addition to a small, but insightful literature on representative institutions in Africa and a burgeoning cross-regional body of work on the capacities of legislatures under authoritarian conditions. The book extends the pioneering work of Joel D. Barkan (ed., Legislative Power in Emerging African Democracies, 2009) and complements the historical institutionalist approach to the study of legislative development in Africa undertaken by Ken Opalo (Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies, 2019). Furthermore, it brings empirically grounded cases from Africa into conversation with broader theoretical debates in political science regarding the origins, autonomy, and performance of legislatures under autocratic conditions. Finally, by systematically examining the material basis of asymmetries in legislative power in authoritarian regimes, Collord demonstrates the analytical power of CPE approaches—a quality that her work shares with that of Boone.
Economic Cleavages, Political Power, and Policy Choice
One of the contributions of Catherine Boone’s book is that it distinguishes clearly the causal chain underpinning arguments about ethnic competition in contrast to her own focus on the political effects of subnational variation in economic endowments. The model of ethnic competition is the following: to gain or sustain power, African elites manipulate ethnic identities, and in doing so, reproduce patterns of ethnic clientelism. Boone’s causal chain is different. She hypothesizes that contemporary political cleavages and policy debates are rooted in highly unequal, spatially differentiated economic endowments governed by regionally specific administrative institutions. During the colonial period, officials demarcated zones in each colony for cash crops such as tea, cotton, or sugar; gold or copper mines; or labor reserves. Accordingly, they established subnational administrative units at the provincial and district levels to govern their economic projects.
Following independence, these economic zones and the attendant colonial institutional arrangements remained largely unchanged, thereby serving as the base on which post-independence governments would rest. As the CPE literature has found in other parts of the world, Boone observes that economically advantaged zones also tend to be politically powerful. This was largely the case when one party states governed African countries just after independence and it continued when African countries democratized in the 1990s. In 9 out of 12 sampled countries, winning candidates in Presidential elections after the transition to multiparty politics either came from or were in alliance with, wealthier regions in the country.
However, as Lipset and Rokkan theorize, different cleavages characterize the coalitions that politically compete against each other at the national level. According to the CPE literature (e.g., Peter Gourevitch, “The Reemergence of ‘Peripheral Nationalisms’: Some Comparative Speculations on the Spatial Distribution of Political Leadership and Economic Growth,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 21(3), 1979), an archetypal cleavage is one where two highly polarized and relatively economically advantaged blocs compete against each other. Boone details its features in the case of Malawi, where two strong producer regions linked to urban areas compete against each other. In some cases, as in Kenya, a core or dominant region that initially gains wealth through colonial cash crop production and then later both diversifies and directs the revenue toward improvements in education and health, competes against a much poorer periphery. Zambia is illustrative of a case where the Copperbelt region, which is the heart of the Zambian economy, competes politically against, and sometimes with, the Southern region, which is the home of commercial agriculture. Finally, the case of Uganda defies theoretical expectations because here the periphery manages to politically dominate the core.
Not surprisingly, these different alignments also define policy preferences expressed by parties. Although the conventional wisdom on parties in Africa sees them as nonprogrammatic and clientelistic, Boone liberally illustrates the tug of war between regions that would prefer a more centralized state over a decentralized one, or policies that favor (or do not favor) redistribution. At least since independence, these regional preferences have played out all over Africa and can be seen, for example, in the positions of parties or movements in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa that favor devolution.
Boone’s argument and the wealth of evidence she relies on such as archival records, election results, nighttime luminosity data, and extensive secondary literature, effectively challenge several longstanding assumptions regarding the political economy of Africa. Notably, she eviscerates theories that locate national political rivalries in ethnic differences, showing instead that political competition is driven by regional economic inequalities designed during the colonial period. Ethnic identity still plays a role in political conflicts and coalitions, but it is a fig leaf for a larger set of political differences that originate in “uneven economic geography” (p. 92).
Furthermore, Boone demonstrates that framing political parties as programmatic or clientelist insufficiently captures the considerable stakes at play during electoral competition. Disparate economic endowments generate the cleavages and substantive policy demands that define national politics. Finally, by illustrating the applicability of broader theories of CPE to the context of Africa, Boone puts to rest assumptions about African exceptionalism. The economic cleavages, electoral alignments, and policy demands that scholars have documented elsewhere can be broadly generalized to Africa.
That the book will become a classic in the CPE and African political literature does not mean it is without flaws. First, because differences in regional economic endowments are so determinative of patterns of political competition, there is not much space for the push and pull of ordinary politics. Social movements, displacement because of climate change, or widespread migration seem to have little role to play in affecting political outcomes. Second, it is not clear how Boone’s theory maps onto differences in the strength of national political institutions such as legislatures identified by Collord or judiciaries. Perhaps future research can determine for example whether we should expect to see stronger or weaker legislatures where economically advantaged blocs win political power.
Third, much of Boone’s theory and evidence demonstrate the persistence over time of cleavages that are regional and predominantly rural in nature. Since Africa is undergoing rapid urbanization, this process potentially challenges her claims. As Boone herself acknowledges, “… when fundamental restructurings of economic geography do happen, they will impact political alignments and territorial cleavages in African countries” (p. 236). To explore whether Africa’s rapid rate of late urbanization constitutes such a fundamental restructuring, we turn to the work by Tom Goodfellow.
Urban Transformation and Its Drivers
Goodfellow’s book comparatively examines the three cities of Addis Ababa, Kampala, and Kigali in East Africa, “the least urbanized but fastest urbanizing region in the world” (p. 10). Although East Africa is still 72% rural, the rate of urbanization in the last quarter century has averaged just over 4% per year (p. 18); rates of urbanization in Addis, Kampala, and Kigali are amongst the highest on the continent. Besides the demographic growth, cities, particularly capital cities, also seem to be economic growth engines. Goodfellow notes that Kampala contributes a third of Uganda’s GDP and contributes 65% of non-agricultural GDP (p. 122). Kigali contributes 40% of Rwanda’s GDP. While we do not have comparable figures for Addis, a boom in manufacturing driven by foreign capital has generated hundreds of thousands of jobs in, around, and beyond the capital.
Goodfellow aims to explore the causes of variation and convergence in the developmental trajectories of the three cities. Speaking to a variety of literatures spanning political science and urban and development studies, he is particularly interested in explaining four outcomes: the grandiose visions that fuel urban imaginaries in Africa and the urban infrastructure projects that actually get constructed; commercial and residential property development or what he calls “urban propertyscapes”; urban markets and trade; and the types of popular mobilization by urban residents that affect urban space.
What Goodfellow documents across the three cities certainly sounds like “fundamental restructuring.” Guided by master plans and futuristic designs, all three cities have undertaken large-scale infrastructure projects and have experienced real estate booms, though not without significant corruption and cost overruns. With most of the investment coming from the Chinese, the Ethiopian government constructed both a railway from Addis to Djibouti and a light rail transit system in Addis. Following the destruction associated with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the extensive rebuilding of Kigali, again with foreign support, aims to make it an attractive tourist and conference destination for the region. Besides a new airport, the government has constructed an iconic convention center, several hotels, and a museum. Construction in Kampala does not approximate the scale of Kigali or Addis, but the Chinese have funded an expressway from Kampala to Entebbe to the tune of 350 million US dollars.
Along with flows of investment and people, markets and commerce have grown, and these constitute the main economic activities of urban life in Africa. Unlike Europe, urban growth in Africa has not followed in the wake of industrialization, except perhaps in the case of Ethiopia. Thus, as Goodfellow tells us, we should not expect to see jobs spawned by manufacturing or lifestyles linked to steady employment. Rather, the bulk of urban livelihoods consist of vendors selling food or clothing out of stalls in markets, or street traders hawking everything from cell phones to rice snacks. Central governments have experienced varying degrees of success attempting to manage and regulate these activities, at times razing markets to the ground if they occupy valuable real estate or are overcrowded; at other times relocating them; and at other times simply engaging in forbearance. Finally, Goodfellow shows that popular responses by urban residents also condition urban change. This attention to the agency of ordinary people could have received more attention in the work of Boone. Whereas protest and political opposition are common in Kampala, more muted responses are evident in Kigali where the regime more forcefully projects its power.
Goodfellow attributes the trajectories of urban development to the ways in which “associational power” is configured in the three countries and the formulas of social legitimacy employed by political elites. Like Collord, he draws on political settlement literature for theoretical inspiration. Regarding Uganda, a case they share, their arguments about the fractious nature of Ugandan politics largely overlap. They also align with respect to Rwanda which both depict as highly centralized and hierarchical.
As Goodfellow convincingly argues, those who control the state engage in different means to project their legitimacy—be it through fantasy projects or real transformation. Equally, they use their coercive power or, their “infrastructural” power as termed by Michael Mann (“Infrastructural Power Revisited,” Studies in Comparative International Development, 43 (3–4), 2008), and even actual infrastructure such as roads, to condition urban development, penetrate civil society, and regulate the actions of those who reside and work in the city. Yet since elites do not have a monopoly on power or legitimacy, informal institutions and informal means of engagement also play a role in the urban outcomes Goodfellow seeks to explain. These may include the growth and spread of informal settlements across urban spaces to the forms of protest that residents may adopt to challenge policies with which they disagree.
Goodfellow’s book offers a sustained and careful engagement with the multiple drivers of urban transformation in Africa’s fastest-growing regions. His grasp of the historical legacies that underpin the cases is comprehensive and his comparison of their similarities and differences is methodical. He offers vivid illustrations of the contemporary urban projects that governments have embraced. That being said, some of the support for the claims could have been strengthened. For example, it would have been helpful to have more information about the percentage of the public budget that goes to urban areas and a more sustained evaluation of whether states actually realize social legitimacy through their urban initiatives. As with Collord’s work, it would have been useful to systematically unpack the composition of associational power, particularly its ethnic dimensions, if any, across the three cases. In addition, the nature of the relationship between foreign investors, domestic business, and the state deserved more attention. At times, associational life seems largely to consist of ruling parties and allied elites pitted against a mass of poor urban residents struggling to mitigate conditions of precarity.
Goodfellow’s findings do not undercut Boone’s claims so much as they offer an urban complement. As Boone does for rural areas, Goodfellow dwells on the ways in which previous historical moments including the precolonial and colonial periods have shaped processes of urbanization. Boone is right that from a demographic perspective, African countries are still predominantly rural, but as Goodfellow suggests, economic advantages seem to have shifted to urban areas. This generates a puzzle regarding whether ruling parties now engage in tradeoffs between catering to more economically productive urban areas or to the interests of more populous rural regions, and under what conditions such tradeoffs might occur. This is a debate ripe for future investigation.
Conclusion
The three books reviewed here offer compelling examinations of urban growth, legislative strength, economic inequality, and contemporary electoral politics. Shifting the emphasis away from stress on ethnic competition to economic differentiation and political power, they recover previous analytical approaches that privilege the study of political economy. In so doing, they generate fresh debates regarding the relationship between urban and rural areas, the separation of powers among political institutions, the nature of authoritarian regimes, and the dynamics of capital accumulation over time and space.
To recognize that ethnic identities are not the driver of political difference is not to dismiss the ways in which such identities might be mobilized in support of a candidate or message. Rather it is to realize, as Boone does, that at the root of inter-ethnic tensions are spatially differentiated economic rivalries that politicize ethnicity. Echoing Boone, Collord notes that intra-elite contestation can occur within members of same ethnic group and that “politicization of ethnicity is itself intertwined with politico-economic dynamics”(p. 17).
These three books also signal a resurgence of political economy approaches after a long period in which they were largely marginalized in the study of African politics. A possible reason for their decline is the transition to electoral politics in Africa during the 1990s, which coincided with the spread of public opinion and expert surveys on democratic attitudes and preferences, as well as the development of datasets on political parties, and local and national political institutions. These provided the empirical basis for the spread of statistical approaches in political science scholarship in Africa. The appeal of linear regressions and multi-level models using vote share and vote preferences as the dependent variables and ethnicity as a covariate eclipsed an earlier, broader reliance on political economy and privileged the study of elections and election outcomes.
The research that resulted from the study of electoral politics has been invaluable. However, by insufficiently accounting for the role of economic interests in shaping politics, it has been incomplete. The availability and reliability of data, such as nighttime luminosity or satellite imagery, and the development of new tools to study subnational variation in developing countries has once again expanded the kinds of questions scholars can explore. Together with the proven tools of comparative politics such as fieldwork and interviews, they make possible the comprehensive study of legislative strength and its origins by Collord, the systematic examination of regional spatial inequality by Boone, and the rich comparison of urban difference by Goodfellow. With the resurfacing of political economy approaches, we should expect to see more studies that address the bold, ambitious questions that these books have tackled.
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