Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal were the jewels in the crown of the French colonial empire in West Africa. Both shared many colonial experiences based on the panterritoriality of the colonial empire. The rivalry between African nationalist politicians in both countries was a feature of the decolonisation process. Senegal prided itself as the political and cultural centre of French West Africa, due to the cultural sophistication of its évolué elite and the fact that the Governor-General of all the territories was based in Dakar. Côte d'Ivoire, on the other hand, saw itself as the real power-house of the economy of the colonial empire. Importantly, however, the post-colonial settlements in both countries were radically different. Post-colonial Senegal had a greater institutionalisation of formal and informal threads connecting society to the state, while Côte d'Ivoire developed a more elitist, more ethnic, and more personalised post-colonial regime centred on the person of President Houphouet-Boigny. This difference was to have important ramifications for their experiences of democratisation. Both continued to depend heavily on France, while being held up as models of post-colonial development in Africa: Senegal for its tolerant, almost liberal political orientation, and Côte d'Ivoire as a haven of stability and an African economic ‘miracle’. The trajectory of democratisation has been radically different in both countries. Senegalese democratisation is a gradual process of decompression, deliberately initiated from the top, starting in 1978. Ivorian democratisation, on the other hand, came about as a result of unanticipated shocks to the Houphouetist post-colonial paradigm.