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This paper analyses the parties and party systems that have begun to emerge in sub-Saharan Africa's fledgling multiparty systems. Using a data base of 87 legislative elections convened in the 1990s, the paper identifies three trends. The position of parties late in the decade is primarily tributary of their performance in the first multiparty election conducted in the early 1990s. Parties that won founding elections are almost invariably still in power. Secondly, the typical emerging party system has consisted of a dominant party surrounded by a large number of small, unstable parties. Thirdly, party cleavages have been overwhelmingly ethno-linguistic in nature, while ideological and programmatic debates have been muted and rare. The second half of the paper provides tentative explanations for these striking patterns. It emphasises the illiberal nature of most of the new African democracies, their characteristic centralisation of power around the presidency, and the pervasive clientelism that structures the relationship between the state and the citizenry. These characteristics shape the incentives faced by individual politicians and thus much of their behaviour.

A number of proposals today support a substantial increase in foreign aid levels to subSaharan Africa even though this region already receives a historically unprecedented volume of aid. This essay reviews the evidence regarding the potentially negative effects of aid dependence on state institutions, a topic which has received relatively little attention. We note several pathways through which political institutions might be adversely affected and devote particular attention to fiscal and state revenue issues. In addition to reviewing the economic literature on the aid-revenue relationship, this essay brings in the longstanding political science literature on state-building to consider the potential impact of aid dependence on the relationship between state and citizen. We conclude that states which can raise a substantial proportion of their revenues from the international community are less accountable to their citizens and under less pressure to maintain popular legitimacy. They are therefore less likely to have the incentives to cultivate and invest in effective public institutions. As a result, substantial increases in aid inflows over a sustained period could have a harmful effect on institutional development in sub-Saharan Africa.