Abstract
Political Parties and Democracy is a five-volume collection of stand-alone chapter accounts of the development and current status of party systems in 46 countries. It is an impressive collection for its breadth and its valuable analysis of many political parties and party systems that have not been studied in great depth before. The focus of this review is Volume IV: Africa and Oceania, edited by Luc Sindjoun, Marian Simms and Kay Lawson, and which includes chapters on Cameroon, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa and the Solomon Islands. The other four volumes encompass the Americas, Europe, Post-Soviet and Asian parties and the Arab world.
Admittedly, the grouping of nations covered in this volume seemed odd to me at first. Africa and Oceania are not regions that one would instinctively place together in one book. Even within the sub-category of Oceania, the countries examined did not all appear to be natural counterparts: while the New Zealand and Australian party systems are often examined together, I was unsure that Fiji, Samoa and the Solomon Islands would necessarily fit within the same analytical grouping. Indeed, there seemed to be little that tied these nations together apart from geographic proximity; for example, cases were not grouped according to any classification of the party system, and the reasons for the groupings were not explained by the editors of the volume.
However, on reflection, I do not think that this collection is intended to be a comparative work in the sense requiring systematic analysis of a number of carefully selected cases. Rather, I think the volumes are better viewed as a series of encyclopaedia entries or reference works on a diverse range of party systems across the world. A key strength is that each of the country chapters is written by an indigenous author, enabling for the first time a more nuanced and considered account of party politics in nations previously not studied in any great depth. Volume IV in particular deals with nations still making the transition to democratic rule and party government, such as Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, Namibia and the smaller Pacific Island nations of Samoa, Fiji and the Solomon Islands. It is a significant comparative and collaborative endeavour in this regard.
Each chapter is linked by the basic question that the authors have been asked to address: What is the relationship between political parties and democracy? Perhaps a weakness of this approach is that it only really allows for a broad overview of the development of parties and party systems and their relationship with the state in any given country, rather than facilitating the provision of any new and detailed information (particularly for the established and well-researched democracies such as Australia and New Zealand). However, at the same time, a strength of this framework is that it is broad enough to enable the incorporation of a range of states at different stages of democratic development into the same conceptual analysis. Thus the chapters reveal some very interesting broader power dynamics that point to the importance of political parties in establishing, sustaining, de-stabilizing and even eroding democracy – dynamics and patterns that are crucial to all states, but often obscured in the detail of individual party system analyses (particularly in advanced industrial democracies). As Lawson notes in her introduction to the volume: ‘[T]he development of political parties over the past century is the story of three stages in the pursuit of power: liberation, democratization, and de-democratization. In every volume of political parties and democracy the reader will find parties at all three stages’ (p. xi).
Although the chapters in the volume do not follow any common structure, a number of themes or common stories are evident amongst parties within particular regions. A key theme in Part 1 of the volume, ‘Africa’, is the interdependent relationship between parties and the institutions of democracy and the importance of plurality in African political development. In Part 2, ‘Oceania’, the continuing impact of the colonial legacy is brought to the fore, as each of the five nations examined share mixed histories of British rule. The relationship between parties, historical development and independence is evident in the parliamentary systems and ‘strong parties’ present in these democracies, in addition to a willingness to experiment with electoral and political reform, which has resulted in some interesting party and party system variations within the region. In hindsight, the organization of the party systems within this volume actually reveals the importance of geographic region, and highlights some of the shared histories, developmental characteristics and commonalties between parties and party systems that might not be immediately obvious.
Political Parties and Democracy is a comprehensive reference collection of party politics useful for those of us seeking to appreciate the specific dynamics of party politics in a diverse range of nations, or to contextualize more general data relating to political institutions and democratic development. Although not a strictly comparative analytical work with common chapter structures and specific areas of inquiry, the volume nonetheless highlights the relationship between parties, the state and the exercise of power that is of fundamental importance throughout the world, and provides reasonably detailed information on the development and characteristics of the party system in each of the constituent country chapters.