ABSTRACT
Early approaches to democratization in Africa were largely subsumed under the closely interrelated perspectives of modernization and nationalism. Africa’s ‘new states’ were assumed to be in the throes of a process of political modernization, whose end-state had an uncanny resemblance to political life in the industrialized West. While dependency theory and Marxism contributed much to the understanding of the patterns of African development and ‘periphery capitalism’, they posed as many questions as they solved, not least because of their inability to delineate realistic alternative paths to development. The early 1990s witnessed a dramatic return of multi-party democracy to Africa. Africa’s second wave of democracy re-ignited enthusiasm for the study of individual elections. Africa’s electoral systems were in large measure inherited from the colonial powers. Traditionally, Francophone countries have elected their rulers by systems of proportional representation, Anglophone countries by plurality systems.
