Measuring party institutionalisation in developing countries: A new research instrument applied to 28 African political parties

The institutionalisation of political parties is recognised as an important factor for democratic development, but its measurement remains a neglected area of research. This paper seeks to address this gap by developing an instrument that measures party institutionalisation empirically.

The authors conceptualise the institutionalisation of political parties as progress in four dimensions, namely, (1) roots in society; (2) level of organization; (3) autonomy, and (4) coherence. Based on this the authors construct an Index of the Institutionalisation of Parties (IIP) and apply it to 28 African political parties.

Initial results reveal a more differentiated degree of institutionalisation than is commonly assumed. While showing overall deficits in party institutionalisation, the IIP highlights an astonishing variance between individual parties and—to a lesser extent—between national aggregates. The other major highlights of the findings are:

• in general, African political parties show rather low degrees of institutionalisation. Though there are well-performing outliers such as the long-time ruling parties of Tanzania and Botswana, most parties exhibit a fairly limited degree of institutionalisation
• there is a fairly large diversity in the degree of institutionalisation with regard to both dimensions and individual parties, which clearly reflects the heterogeneity of Africa’s political developments
• results challenge the myth of sub-Saharan uniformity, whether of an Afro-optimistic or Afro-pessimistic nature
• African parties have homogeneously weak roots in society while they vary more with respect to the other dimensions
• there is also no clear connection between the levels of democratisation and the levels of party institutionalisation, which clearly points to the fact that the relationship may be more complex than commonly assumed
• larger parties are more likely to be better institutionalised, so that parties in party systems which tend to be less fragmented seem to benefit from larger shares of state resources