ABSTRACT
Eritrea has no political parties, and in the Kingdom of Swaziland, whilst political parties are now able to register thanks to pressure from the High Court, they are not allowed to contest elections. The best-known experiment with no-party democracy comes from Uganda. In the words of R. Crook, 'the decentralized administration and District Assembly system created in 1988–89 was based on a theory of community-level, participatory, no-party democracy which idealized the consensual character of "traditional" Ghanaian village life'. This chapter explains the contours of a research programme on African political parties that combines T. Carothers's insights about the peculiarity of third-wave parties with the state-of-the-art literature on parties in Western industrialized countries. It highlights the usefulness of the cartel party model for the study of African parties. Against the background of the cartel party thesis, van Biezen and Kopecky propose a framework for the study of the party-state relationship that also holds promise for Africa.
