Why African Democracy Breakdown

In the 1960 s,most of the African countries continued the political Institutional of the colonial eraafter the independence,imitating the Western developed countries to establish different democratic regimes.However,these polities were frequently in troubles: not only falling into the large-scale political turmoil and political polarization,but also deteriorating the political forms and leading to democratic breakdown in the extreme situation.And such as Sudan,Niger and Nigeria and other countries have also collapsed in several times.Why does democratic breakdown in Africa? It is very important and far-reaching to explore this issue when the Huntington said “the third wave of democratization” occurred 40 years later.In the first part,I propose six assumptions based on the conditional variables which includes the situation of economic development,the forms of democracy,the electoral methods of the legislature,the circumstance of religion,the status of ethnic groups and the domination way of colonial states,and use qualitative comparative method to analysis the 29 cases.Through conditional screening and testing,I find six parallel combinations of factors in the research,in which the “negative impact of the British colonial rule” and “centrifugal institution” coverage the most cases,so those have the decent explanation.And the aspects of possible mechanisms,In first combination of reasons,the British as a colonial sovereign in Africa,mainly used “indirect rule”,did not establish a modern bureaucracy,but to promote the ethnic and religious boundaries of the division,leading to colonial political authority fragmented.And the second combination of semi-presidential system and proportional representation electoral system makes the political system have a great centrifugal: not only to build a fragmented and easily polarized party system,but also to enlarge the separation effect of the authority between president and parliament,as a basis for the democratic system in the actual operation of the process often presents weakness.In the last part of assumptions discussed,the hypothesis of "economic development","religious situation" and "ethnic political situation" is basically verified.Therefore,this paper combines the latter two conditions with the domination way of colonial states as the “historical structure” factor.So,this paper has constructed an explanatory framework for studying and analyzing the African democratic breakdown from the three aspects: historical structure,economic performance and institutional building.In the second part of the study,this paper attempts to describe the success case of democratic consolidation-Mauritius to prove the conclusion of the first from the perspective of “negative case”.The study found that Mauritius was similar to other African countries before independence,there were a lot of unfavorable factors such as historical structure,economic performance and institutional construction to hind the development of democracy.But through the construction of "consensus politics","inclusive society" and "development economy",it successfully created an suitable operating system for the sustainable development of democratic politics in Mauritius,and achieve the consolidation of democracy.The study fully demonstrates that how to transform the historical structure or overcome its negative impact on the development of democratic politics,to build and maintain the effective operation of the centripetal system and to foster the sustainable development of the economic model are the Core Essentials to prevent the democratic breakdown and achieve the democratic consolidation.In the final part of the study,we also try to analyze the future direction of African democratic politics from the perspective of political development and state governance,and make a useful discussion on the “Pathways from the Periphery” of African politics.In conclusion,this study focuses on the African political development from the perspective of democratic breakdown for the first time,examining the main conditional variables and assumptions by using the comparative approach which are the forefront of political science research and putting forward a powerful mechanism,this all provide a new perspective for the study of the African democratic politics.