Multiethnic coalitions are critical for democracy in Africa. Even after two and a half decades of political reform, many African regimes remain weak democracies where incumbents resist sharing power, or even stubbornly refuse to leave office. Indeed, since 2011, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation has been unable to identify a former head of state who merits the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. In the context of semiauthoritarian rule, the opposition must be strong; in particular, opposition parties must be able to unify across a host of ethnic and regional differences. Yet in many African countries, the opposition has been fragmented and unable to overturn incumbent regimes. Whereas Mwai Kibaki was able to create a multiethnic coalition to win the 2002 election in Kenya, the opposition remained fragmented and unsuccessful in Cameroon.
Leonardo Arriola’s book explores this important topic, asking: Why do multiethnic coalitions form in some countries and not others? In Chapter 2, Arriola lays out his theory of pecuniary coalition formation. He argues that opposition political elites are able to form multiethnic opposition coalitions in countries where neoliberal economic reforms have allowed the emergence of private business elites who have autonomy from the incumbent regime. The key juncture was therefore an incumbent’s response to external pressures to liberalize the economy during the 1980s and 1990s. Where incumbents liberalized financial controls, business elites are able to finance the opposition, and opposition formateurs buy endorsements from other ethnic group leaders, which strengthens and unifies the opposition coalition. Where incumbents maintained financial restrictions, business entrepreneurs are less able to donate to opposition candidates, and the opposition fragments.
Arriola’s book is an outstanding example of the way in which thoughtful research design and careful multimethod analysis can yield rich theoretical insights to our understanding of politics. The author begins by laying out the puzzle of opposition coordination, introducing how this has varied over time and across particular key cases in Africa. Each chapter incorporates multimethod analysis, beginning with a large-n statistical analysis, followed by qualitative analysis of historical and interview evidence from the two primary case studies, Kenya and Cameroon. (Limited case material from Senegal and Ethiopia is also incorporated at points.)
After developing his theoretical framework, Arriola uses each subsequent chapter to test specific hypotheses and explore the mechanisms for each link in the theorized causal chain. In Chapter 3, the author investigates the historical origins of the state’s relationship to domestic capital. He examines how features of the late colonial period shaped attempts by postindependence leaders to mediate access to financial capital through financial reprisal regimes. In Chapter 4, Arriola shows how African leaders were not equally threatened by private capital accumulation at independence. The leaders thus created different kinds of financial systems, depending on whether their constituents or those of rivals would benefit. In this chapter, he tests whether the incumbent had an exporter or whether nonexporter constituency shaped the average number of commercial banks between 1945 and 2000. Next, in Chapter 5, the author investigates why African leaders liberalized their financial systems beginning in the 1980s by analyzing structural adjustment compliance (and not just official adoption), as well as private credit provision. In Chapters 6 and 7, he explains the alignment of business elites vis-à-vis the incumbent regime and opposition formateurs.
Notably, several of the key variables for the quantitative analysis across all African cases are hidden and difficult to observe, for example, the size of a leader’s patronage coalition. Arriola is explicit in conceptualizing these terms and is creative in his use of proxies. Hence, building on Nicolas Van de Walle (African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999, 2001), he employs the number of cabinet ministers to measure the size of a particular leader’s patronage coalition in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, since campaign contributions to opposition candidates are not public information, Arriola uses an indirect measure of business–state relationships by employing the tenure of the president of the national chamber of commerce.
Multiethnic Coalitions in Africa deftly bridges theories of political economy, voting, and ethnic politics. While these literatures are frequently developed in isolation from one another in political science, Arriola demonstrates how the intersection among these three areas of scholarship is critical for understanding the dynamics of election campaigns in Africa. Plenty of work has focused on the extent of ethnic voting across Africa; it is the addition of the political economy lens that adds real originality and value to Arriola’s book. Yet one potential problem with attempting to engage with several literatures may be the challenge of developing all of the core theoretical constructs equally well. Even though ethnicity is obviously at the center of his study, the author does not spend much time conceptualizing this variable. His theory is predicated on a highly instrumental view of ethnicity, where ethnic ties are used strategically, but this set of assumptions is not explicitly acknowledged or developed.
The book’s theoretical framework is implicitly based on a notion of politics as strategic bargaining among elites. This conceptualization usefully reveals the points of conflict and coalition among political and business elites. But it is also important to ask what this concentration on elite decision making may obscure. Arriola’s portrayal of the impacts of neoliberalism is tightly focused on the liberalization of financial controls for business elites, and their access to capital vis-à-vis the state. The focus is a two-player game between business elites and the state, leaving open some questions about a more complex political economy with multinational investors, rapidly accelerating flows of global capital, and heterogeneous effects for various groups of winners and losers at the local level.
Finally, Arriola says little about the implications of his analysis for the future of democracy in Africa. Bargaining and payoffs between business and party elites may facilitate a multiethnic opposition among elites, but is this the end goal? While this book makes a valuable contribution in illuminating the informal exchanges behind closed doors, we know less about the linkages between these elite leaders and the citizens of the polity. If wealthier business men in Kenya dominate politics and have disproportionate access to representation in these political systems, perhaps these nascent democracies are closer to the oligarchic politics of the United States than to the “ideal” model of democracy that Americans promote around the world.
