Abstract
Political scientists are, generally, agreed that political parties play a very important role in the consolidation of democracy. Indeed, parties play several inimitable roles in actualising representative democracy, including the structuring of the vote, aggregation of interests, political integration, and mobilisation of public participation. Most political scientists also agree that only institutionalised parties and party systems can effectively play these roles. Therefore, the re-introduction of multiparty democracy in the 1990s raised a lot of hope and expectations regarding the future of democracy in the Sub-Saharan Africa region.
Nevertheless, the expectation that political parties in third wave democracies would follow in the footsteps of their counterparts in mature Western democracies has not materialised. They have not only evolved differently but also diverge considerably in their levels of party and party system institutionalisation. Kenya and Ghana epitomise these divergences. The two countries share remarkable structural and institutional characteristics but substantially diverge in their levels of party and party system institutionalisation. After 30 years of multiparty democracy, Kenya’s significant parties and party system remain weakly institutionalised; whilst Ghana’s significant parties and the party system are ranked among the most highly institutionalised in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The extant party research literature does not adequately explain the variations in the levels of party and party system institutionalisation among Sub-Saharan Africa’s third wave democracies. The few scholars that directly focus on explaining party and party system institutionalisation have variously conducted empiricist, interpretivist and mixed-method studies. But most of them tend to engage historical institutionalism and, thus, converge on legacy explanations that undermine their ability to explain endogenous factors responsible for party and party system institutionalisation. They also seem to ignore the fact that historical institutionalism is informed by a realist epistemology.
In view of the above theoretical and methodological challenges, this study takes a case study approach and engages critical realism to execute a three-step process that entails the following: firstly, the explication of the structures and causal mechanisms behind party and party system institutionalisation in Kenya and Ghana; secondly, a theoretical comparison, which, among other things, entails the evaluation of the five mainstream new institutionalisms - i.e. rational-choice institutionalism, sociological institutionalism, historical institutionalism, discursive institutionalism and evolutionary institutionalism - to assess their capacity to explain the explicated patterns of party and party system institutionalisation and, consequently, their integration into a more complete, complex, dynamic and layered theoretical
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framework: the real institutionalism (RI); and, finally, the empirical corroboration of the RI, using data from 57 interviews conducted in Kenya and Ghana, and relevant documents, to confirm evidence of the presence of its causal mechanisms in party and party system institutionalisation processes, as well as, their potency and accuracy.
The corroboration exercise confirmed that the causal mechanisms of the RI, as a composite and layered framework for analysing party and party system institutionalisation in Sub-Saharan Africa, are present and applicable in the Kenyan and Ghanaian contexts, and that it attains the causal depth, and effectiveness and authenticity, that eludes the individual new institutionalisms. The exercise also deepened the explication of the generative structures and causal mechanisms. For Kenya, the data collected confirms the initial accounts and vivify the causal mechanisms. However, for Ghana, the exercise ascertained material differences that hold significance in the explanation of party and party system institutionalisation e.g. the atrophy of ideology as an ideational structure, deeper societal bases for the bifurcation of party politics, and the paradox of strongly institutionalised parties and party system and weak democratic governance. The fact that the RI can account for such deviations redounds to its credit. Indeed, it is able to explain the causal mechanisms behind elite capture, which constitute the biggest threat to representative democracy, in general, and party and party system institutionalisation, in particular, for both countries.
The study, therefore, makes several original contributions to knowledge: firstly, it presents an evaluation of all the five mainstream new institutionalisms; secondly, it extends critical realism by applying its metatheoretical framework to a substantive study in comparative politics, generally, and African party research scholarship, specifically; and, thirdly, it formulates a new complex and dynamic theoretical framework: the RI. The RI, among others things: dissolves the problem of the incommensurability of the epistemological and ontological bases of the new institutionalisms, thereby allowing for their integration and, consequently, the consolidation of knowledge; advances a simpatico logic, which enables it to explain the links in the causal chains, thereby overcoming the challenge of circular arguments typical of historical institutionalism informed studies; adopts a complex and layered structure thereby integrating agency and structure; and, incorporates the ideas of morphogenesis and morphostasis thereby introducing more nuance into comparative political analysis