To the extent that political scientists have thought about legislatures in sub-Saharan Africa, they have not been viewed as consequential political institutions. Putting aside the fairly unique case of South Africa, African legislatures have been seen as either too weak to effectively constrain powerful presidents or too compromised by corruption and clientelism to have any interest in playing such a role. Ken Ochieng’ Opalo’s Legislative Development in Africa is an important corrective to these views. First, Opalo challenges the uniformity of legislative subordination in Africa, arguing instead for variation in legislative independence and capacity, even under authoritarian rule. Second, he offers a compelling and original explanation of how the resources available to authoritarian presidents shape legislative autonomy and power. His argument challenges some of the intuitions advanced in the literature on autocratic institutions and authoritarian durability, making the book a valuable read for Africanists and non-Africanists alike. Finally, the book provides the most significant analysis of African legislatures in decades, and its impressive tracing of institutional evolution in Kenya and Zambia expands our understanding of these cases and of transitions from authoritarianism to democracy in general.
The key contribution of the book is the link it draws between the initial strategies used by executives to consolidate power after independence and differences in the subsequent evolution of legislatures. The immediate post-independence period constituted a critical juncture, in Opalo’s account, that set legislatures on separate developmental trajectories. Where executives had access to strong administrative structures, as in Kenya, they could grant concessions and influence to other elites. This resulted in more autonomous and powerful legislatures. Where executives instead inherited weak administrative structures at independence, as in Zambia, they were in a more vulnerable position. Lacking the means to independently monitor and regulate rival political elites, these executives clamped down on legislative autonomy and exerted greater direct control over policy making and patronage. This model of executive–legislative bargaining may alter our understanding of the role that legislatures play in stabilizing authoritarian rule. It is unclear whether institutions independently increase the likelihood of autocratic survival, as the existing literature argues. Instead, Opalo suggests that strong, secure autocrats are the rulers who can afford to allow institutionalization, which explains the observed correlation between legislative institutions and autocratic survival.
For Opalo, patterns of legislative development are set under authoritarianism, but they have implications for governance after political opening. Where executives allowed for legislative autonomy, parliamentarians spent more time in session, developed internal procedures and committee systems, and bargained for organizational resources that allowed for a more informed role in policy deliberation. When authoritarian states liberalized, these stronger parliaments were poised to become feisty critics of presidential power. In contrast, legislative weakness under authoritarianism persisted after democratic opening, even in cases where authoritarian ruling parties lost power.
The empirical core of the book is the sustained comparison of two fairly similar cases, Kenya and Zambia. In chapters 4 and 5, the author lays out how institutional inheritances at independence led to differences in presidents’ abilities to monitor and regulate rival elites, which then shaped their choices about constraining or interfering with parliamentary activity. In chapter 6, the author draws on archival work in the two countries to show that divergence in the behavior of legislatures emerged before political opening. Differences in sitting time and the number of bills passed suggest that the Kenyan parliament played a more meaningful role in deliberating policy under authoritarianism than its counterpart in Zambia, even though legislative vetoes of executive-introduced bills were rare in both countries. Institutional divergence became more apparent after the transition to multiparty rule. The Zambian legislature continued its subordination to the executive, passing 90% of executive bills introduced in the first 10 years of multiparty rule, whereas Kenya’s legislature passed only 57% of those bills during the same period.
The quality of the case study chapters is very strong. I know both of these cases very well, but I still found Opalo’s marshaling of evidence and his interpretation to be fresh, original, and thought-provoking. The author also examines his argument using original data on parliamentary powers and budgetary control in 38 African countries in chapter 2. This chapter provides only weak support for Opalo’s arguments about the origins of institutional divergence, although this is likely because of the lack of good proxies for executive resources. The chapter is more effective in addressing potential rival explanations for variation in legislative institutionalization within Africa, such as GDP per capita or ethnic heterogeneity.
Legislative Development in Africa lays out a powerful and elegant model of institutional creation and evolution, but there are points where I wish the book had veered more precariously off its own meticulously set path. There are two directions that future scholars of legislative politics may wish to pursue. First, Opalo argues that ambitious politicians are incentivized to build more powerful legislatures, where possible, but we learn fairly little about parliamentarians’ own understandings of the institutions they were building. Did politicians view institutional innovation as a means of building collective power for the legislature itself, or were changes to sitting schedules and budgetary capacity viewed primarily through the lens of individual benefit? Do differences in legislative autonomy and capacity shape either parliamentarians’ behavior or the broader institutional culture? For instance, are rates of absenteeism lower in stronger legislatures, or do a larger proportion of members speak during plenary?
The book also might have gone further in discussing the broader stakes of its argument, and analysis of the consequences of legislative development is one of the most promising directions for future research. In chapter 7, Opalo takes a first step in this direction by looking at how political liberalization affected incumbents’ reelection rates and legislatures’ abilities to secure pork in his two core cases. But we are left wondering about the book’s implications for larger questions of governance and accountability. Are more autonomous legislatures able to deliver better policies, or do they more consistently guard against executive overreach? Or is it possible that more powerful legislatures might impede electoral turnover and democratic deepening, because their greater capacity to capture rents could magnify electoral advantages for incumbents?
These suggestions should not detract, however, from the strengths of this excellent book. Opalo has written a groundbreaking work that should reinvigorate interest in postcolonial legislatures, which have not received the same attention as political parties and bureaucracies.
Furthermore, the book’s core insight about the institution-strengthening effects of strong authoritarian executives should provoke new thinking on the causes of authoritarian durability and demise.
