Just over a decade ago Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle published their Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective, (1997). It thus seems timely to review three works with “democracy” figuring prominently in their titles, which presumably share an interest in the character of the regimes emerging in Africa in this post–Third Wave era. The publication of these works testifies to the persistent importance of the democratization problématique on normative, theoretical, and empirical levels, and for the quality of the lives of most Africans. Bratton and van de Walle's politico-institutional approach sought to move scholars beyond simplistic dichotomies, such as structure versus agency and domestic versus international. The works under review clearly follow their lead, and as a result each offers important theoretical insights while simultaneously capturing much of what is phenomenologically compelling about transition narratives.

Because Democratic Experiments was based on only the first five years of the “African wave” of transitions, its authors tempered their conclusions regarding consolidation. The divergent experiences described in the works reviewed here seem to confirm, however, the still discernibly pessimistic conclusions of Bratton and van de Walle's landmark work. By 1997, reforms in Africa were already heading in multiple directions, many less than desirable. The current cases similarly refute teleological assumptions about transitions from authoritarianism, and all demonstrate a key proposition advanced in Democratic Experiments—that a regime's transition dynamics reflect the nature of its prior, most often neopatrimonial, character. The “end of history” appears still in abeyance.

In the most sanguine of the books under review, Brokering Democracy in Africa, Linda Beck describes the emergence in Senegal of what she terms “clientelist democracy,” which she defends as a nondiminished subtype. It is a fully “democratic regime infused with clientelist relationships that serve as the basis for political mobilization and accountability” (p. 4). Giovanni Carbone's No-Party Democracy? finds comparatively little significant democratic development in Uganda—but his analysis concedes important departures from the brutality of the Obote and Amin governments. Makau Mutua describes Kenya's Quest for Democracy (also failed) but cannot qualify his conclusion with much more than an opening apologia that “Kenya has been far from a basket case” (p. 5).

These works demonstrate the importance of conceptual clarity in the study of regime change, especially respecting the concepts of state, regime, and government. Brokering Democracy is meticulous in this regard. Beck's central concern is “to identify the conditions that are likely to permit the rise of sufficient political competition and participation resulting in a clientelist form of democracy” (p. 2). Having deftly navigated more than 35 years of both the Anglophone and Francophone literatures on Senegal, and fortified herself with nearly a decade of fieldwork, she has identified subtle but important questions about Senegalese politics that have seemingly been left unanswered by even the most notable works on this “exceptional” case.

Beck focuses on variations in subnational data, which often go unnoticed, especially by non-Africanists, even though it is with respect to this variation that the most important questions often lie. So although she takes Bratton and van de Walle's work as a starting point, she notes their lack of consideration of the “differences in the nature of neo-patrimonial relations as possible explanations for variation in levels of political competition and participation” (p. 3), and how this shortcoming led them to ignore informal political institutions, which are often centrally important in Africa. Beck builds on Catherine Boone's analysis of the diverse patterns of state formation that result from variations in center–periphery alliances, themselves results of the varied capacity of rural elites to bargain with central state authorities (Political Topographies of the African Sate, 2003). Like Boone, Beck employs a subnational comparative design to explore variations in “the continuous and dynamic nature of the authority and autonomy of local leaders” that determine their capacity to function as “brokers.” This, in turn, explains the varying levels of competition and participation across Senegal. In the end, this is a smart book. Use of the subnational design demonstrates its power to “mitigate some of the characteristic limitations of a small-N research” (Richard Snyder, “Scaling Down: The Subnational Comparative Method,” Studies in Comparative International Development 36 [Spring 2001]: 93) and continues the field's move away from an underconceptualized, overly homogenized African state.

Still, Beck's volume begs an important question. Does political science actually need another adjectival democracy (David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Research Note: Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research,” World Politics 49 [no. 3, 1997]: 430–51)? The question of its theoretical leverage seems relevant when she concedes that her “concept of clientelist democracy is not entirely new” and that much of its essence is found in the more recognizable terms “Big Men democracy,” “patronage democracy,” and even the more influential “delegative democracy.”

Even if one were to reject the need for an additional “democracy with adjectives,” however, Beck's analysis of variations in the nature of clientelist networks and the taxonomy of brokers it generates is illuminating. Again following Boone (2003), she adds to our understanding of state building in agrarian societies and—in the fashion of Anthony Giddens (inter alia, Central Problems in Social Theory, 1979)—demonstrates the particular suitability of a “structured agency” approach in an account of regime change. Beck reveals clientelism's structural duality in that it is indeed “both medium and outcome” of the social practices it recursively organizes. All of this avoids the false choices of structure and agency.

That said, some might still question whether clientelism is as independent a variable as a “clientelist democracy” subtype would seem to demand (i.e., that it “serve as the basis for political mobilization and accountability,” and thus give rise to competitive electoral politics in Senegal). One can reflect, for example, on the growth of subaltern autonomy in the context of Senegal's most powerful brokers, the Murid marabouts, following the controversial 1988 religious command that forced disciples to remain wedded to a ruling party known to be bereft of the resources needed to make such a choice rational (pp. 91–115). The precipitous decline in both state “scope and strength” (Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, 2004) begins to appear as a plausible coequal explanatory factor in the emergence of competitive party elections, or at least as an equally relevant part of the context that delimits broker—and induces client—choice.

Carbone's narrative employs Yoweri Museveni's language of “no-party” or “movement” democracy, and thus does not offer new subtypes. He nevertheless points out that “recent or contemporary experiences [of no-party regimes claiming democratic credentials] can be found in countries as diverse as Nepal, Afghanistan and Swaziland” (p. 3). So although it is at best a rare species, these other cases might suggest yet another (clearly diminished) democratic subtype. Despite its diminished nature, however, Carbone recognizes that “considerable progress was made in terms of popular participation and respect for the rule of law” and notes that “in the real world one often finds electoral regimes that combine both coercive and constitutional practices” (p. 200). This at least lands Uganda in the seemingly catch-all category of “hybrid regime.”

Overall, Carbone's analysis of the construction, maintenance, and political impacts of a partyless system is a well-researched and cogently presented narrative about an interesting case that long held the fascination of the West, and especially its lending institutions. In two areas, however, Carbone misses the opportunity to deepen his analysis through a constructive engagement with key theoretical literature.

One place is in the general theoretical literature on political parties. In particular, Carbone's interest in how an allegedly democratic regime could function without parties would have benefited from a discussion of John Aldrich's Why Parties (1995), which largely remains the received view in political science. Aldrich subscribes to E. E. Schattschneider's dictum that “democracy is [unworkable] save in terms of parties” because his new institutional perspective holds that the collective-action problems of participatory politics (e.g., regulating office seeking, voter mobilization, and the need for majorities to effectively legislate) can only be overcome by parties. Carbone indeed finds that the failure of the Ugandan no-party experiment resulted in “a systemic drive toward the formation of party surrogate organizations” that provided politicians with “opportunities for legislative, office-seeking, and purposeful collective action” (p. 188).

A second area where attention to the broader literature would have helped is Carbone's account of domestic–international interactions. This account echoes, for example, Arnold Rogowski's Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affects Domestic Political Alignments (1990), which modeled the impact of changes in the international economic environment on the nature of domestic cleavages and coalitions. In Uganda, of course, these are largely relations of aid rather than trade, but when their terms deteriorated, Museveni increasingly relied on the Baganda and Banyankole as domestic constituencies, to the greater exclusion of northerners, especially the Acholi. Carbone's analysis of Museveni's ever-pragmatic courtship of Western donors also resonates with, but does not engage, the insights of work such as David K. Leonard and Scott Straus's Africa's Stalled Development: International Causes and Cures (2003), which explores the ways in which foreign aid may create the same perverse governance incentive structures as does a state's dependence on enclave-produced export commodities (e.g., blood diamonds, oil, timber). Drawing on such works would have added to Carbone's explanation for the survival of a regime constituted on a politics of exclusion.

Unlike Beck and Carbone, Mutua lays no claim to any particular conceptual innovation in his study. His title, Kenya's Quest for Democracy, however, suggests the same focus on regime—the rules, norms, and embedded practices that structure the exercise of power and the nature of state–society relations—and on the factors that explain a regime's rise, survival, or fall. In reading Mutua, however, one often loses sight of his target (a single- or hegemonic-party system) because he moves up and down the ladder of abstraction using the terms “state,” “regime,” and “government” interchangeably and without distinction.

To be sure there is much to commend in this work. Mutua speaks with a kind of knowledgeability and passion that can only come from being a participant observer. He states at the outset that he arrived in Kenya to study regime transformation, but was very quickly “swept up in the maelstrom and deposited right in the vortex of the struggle for regime change” (p. 1). Perhaps the confusion regarding boundaries and relationships among state, regime, government, and even the frequently used notion of “political order,” is the result of the author's closeness to the action. Not having a clearer sense, however, of the conceptual/empirical level at which the problems in Kenya lie is of considerable practical importance, given that it has remained on the International Crisis Group's early-warning Crisis Watch since December 2007, when Kenyans witnessed their worst convulsion of violence since independence.

In Mutua's defense, however, one might note what Leonardo Villalòn has to say in his contribution to his and Phillip Huxtable's The African State at a Critical Juncture (1998, 9): that while “there is a great deal of validity in the common analytic distinctions made by political scientists among these concepts … one of the more salient facts of the African context remains the difficulty—if not the impossibility—of deciphering or drawing lines between regime and state.” This observation may also explain why Mutua wavers between regarding the state as determined or captured by social forces and regarding it as a primary causal force, in the manner of the bringing-the-state-back in literature. Whatever the explanation, his reasoning is sometimes circular. For example, he attributes the failure of democratic reform in Kenya to the weaknesses of the state, and yet argues that only through democratic constitutional reform can the state be reconstructed.

The books under review make clear that problems of concept formation remain central to advancing the study of regime change in Africa. The challenge is thrown into stark relief by Beck's book, thanks to the care with which she develops the notion of clientelist democracy and her broker taxonomy. This does not mean that her subtype is above interrogation. It can be questioned whether a regime should be classed as a nondiminished democratic subtype when it is admittedly characterized by 1) serious institutionalized political inequality (pp. 32–35), 2) the lack of the basic republican notion of the public interest (pp. 35–39), and 3) a dismissiveness of the rule of law (pp. 40–43). Yet in the end, many will find Beck's conceptualization persuasive, informed as it is by a solid critique of the narrowness and Eurocentrism of much of the democratic transitions literature.

Regardless of whether “no-party” or “clientelist” democracies are viable conceptual categories, they are well-articulated frameworks and remain distinct conceptual categories from governments and states, and they clearly offer insight into the African contexts under discussion. At the same time, the primary challenge in many parts of the world today, and especially in Africa, is less democratic regime change than it is the creation of functioning states. Clearly differentiating among these different levels of analysis—government, regime, and state—is a conceptual challenge of the first order, as these books make clear. But it is necessary in order to advance our understanding of the complex problem of regime change in contemporary Africa.