ABSTRACT
Roughly three dozen countries in Africa are now involved in some type of process of political liberalization. However, democratization across the continent has been problematic. African political institutions are weak, previous efforts at democratization have often failed, and there is frequently a long history of military involvement in politics. Indeed, in a sure sign that the analytic moorings of current scholarship on African democratization are weak to nonexistent, there has been an enormous fluctuation in opinion over the prospects for democracy in Africa. The history of democratization elsewhere suggests that democratization is not a unilinear process and that repeated failure may be a part of learning how to succeed. Thus the Central African Republic (CAR), Comoros, Congo, Lesotho, and Zambia must still reform significant portions of their political systems before they can reasonably be viewed as being as democratic as their electoral politics imply.
