The Political Economy of Competitive Authoritarianism in Africa’s Policy-making Processes: The Case of Mozambique

How do regime institutions affect the behaviours and choices of key agents in their policy decisions? When it comes to the puzzle of the causal relationship between regime institutions and actual policy process, the focus of most existing analyses has fallen into the two most prevailing regime types, either democracy or authoritarianism. Despite the proliferation of competitive authoritarian regimes which are positioned in the intermediate category of hybrid regime in between full democracies and fully authoritarian regimes across the Global South, particularly in Africa, the competitive authoritarian type of hybrid regimes has received little or no sufficient consideration in classical classification of political regimes. For this reason, the complex and multi-dimensional features of such hybrid type of regime and their impact on the actual policy-making process has received less scholarly attention. To fill this gap, this paper seeks to examine how competitive authoritarian type of regimes in Africa has shaped and constrained the political behaviours and choices of African ruling elites to fully explain the underlying political process that leads to the formation of a particular industrial policy or political phenomenon. Drawing on a qualitative single case study of Mozambique, using data collected through desktop research and semi-structured interview the author conducted during the field research, this paper explores how Mozambique’s long-standing authoritarian dominant party system within competitive authoritarian regime contexts has shaped the behaviours and choices of ruling elites. For this analysis, this paper employs the theory of institutional bargaining and argues that Mozambican ruling elites’ skilful management of competitive authoritarian regime structure through institutional bargaining has enabled them to achieve a balance between external engagement in domestic policy-making processes and obtain their preferred economic policy decisions.