Driving safely into a crash: Ethnic politics, constitutional erosion, and democratic breakdown in Burundi

Consociational power-sharing has been fiercely debated for several reasons, ranging from democratic accountability issues to cumbersome policymaking and the institutionalisation of ethnic cleavages; nevertheless, the recent wave of global democratic retreat has avoided these countries. While consociations often stall on a low level of democratic development, their complex system of veto provisions also prevents the concentration of power in the hands of a single actor – when consociations break down, it more likely leads to violent conflict. Through the past decade, a deviant case emerged in Burundi, where the ruling CNDD-FDD party monopolised power via largely peaceful means, amid the decreasing salience of ethnicity. While this deviant case has been addressed by multiple works, their major focus has been the ethnic dynamics underlying this process, with a limited attention to the explanatory power of theories on democratic backsliding. This work aims to bring these two streams of scholarship together, and analyse the causal mechanisms underlying Burundi’s democratic backsliding, stressing the question of whether this backsliding happened despite the ethnic integration or partly enabled by it. The study is carried out in the aim of theory-building processes-tracing, focusing on how particular institutional design choices interacted with the strategic exploitation of ethnicity and patronage by elites. This study aims to integrate research from the fields of comparative politics, ethnicity and nationalism studies, normative democratic theory, and constitutional politics, with a particular focus on the instrumentalization of constitutional amendments and the strategic litigation at the constitutional court which enabled the Hutu majority’s power-grab. In the latter regard, this contributes to the burgeoning literature on democratic backsliding and abusive constitutionalism, fusing it with research agendas on ethnic politics and nationalism.