Center for African Studies

Margaret Ariotti, Assistant Professor, Department of International Affairs, University of Georgia.

Beyond the Big Man: Executive-Legislative Politics in African Democracies.

April 12 | 3:00pm EDT

Attend on Zoom.

Description

What explains the formation of coalition governments in African democracies? Despite the vast literature on government formation in Europe and Latin America, very little is known about the partisan composition of governments—the president or the prime minister and the cabinet—in African democracies. Counter to previous work that focuses on the power of the president, I show that not only are partisan coalitions a regular occurrence, but their formation can be linked to dynamics of the legislative bargaining environment. Using an original dataset of African governments from 1990-2015, I find that the complexity of the legislative bargaining environment affects the type of government that forms, and that coalition governments are most common at moderate levels of legislative complexity. These findings suggest that African leaders care about legislative support, which has important implications for the study of executive-legislative relations in African democracies.

This talk is based on a chapter from a larger book project. For more information on the book project see: https://mollyshewrote.com/book/