A Theory of Legislative Power in Africa: Elite Contestation as a Motor for Legislative Strengthening in Dominant Party Regimes

This paper presents a novel political economy theory of legislative institutional strengthening under single and dominant party rule, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa. It outlines how contrasting institutional outcomes result from differences in the distribution of power across economic elites, which are themselves the product of differing state-led development strategies. Where governments’ economic management allows for the emergence of an enlarged class of private accumulators, this undermines authoritarian party cohesion and turns the legislature into an arena for intra-elite bargaining. Elites then invest in legislative strengthening to entrench their political and economic advantage. While this is primarily a theory-building paper, it offers a schematic cross-case comparison of Tanzania and Uganda to illustrate the argument, which I explore further in my doctoral thesis. This paper intervenes in several scholarly debates. First, it challenges an Africanist literature that either overlooks the extent of institutional variation across parliaments or else leaves this variation insufficiently theorized (van de Walle, 2003; Barkan, 2009). Second, it offers an alternative to more prominent rational choice analyses of authoritarian legislatures in the comparative politics literature (Gandhi, 2008), drawing inspiration instead from “power-based” analyses of institutional change (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010). It also builds on a critical political economy literature, elaborating prior insights regarding the effects of divergent patterns of elite accumulation on party and legislative institutional outcomes (Khan, 2010). Finally, it engages with a literature on executive-legislative relations (Chaisty, Cheeseman and Power, 2014), identifying the shifting bundle of formal and informal tools used by the executive. The composition of this bundle varies depending on the extent of intra-elite bargaining and hence executive-legislative contestation. Overall, this work aims to contribute to the institutionalist literature by emphasising how the nature of legislative institutional strengthening and its effects on executive-legislative relations reflect variation in the underlying distribution of power within a regime.