Most African countries have held at least one election since the beginning of the 1990s, making the past two decades a period of tremendous democratic experimentation on the continent. In spite of this experimentation, many African opposition parties remain weak. They limit themselves to narrow ethnic cul-de-sacs, failing to build the bridging coalitions necessary to challenge ruling parties. They neglect local branch structures, restricting their influence to urban areas around capital cities. They ignore or retreat from alliances with civil society organizations that could facilitate their reach into diverse communities. In short, they relegate themselves to ethnic niches or shallow, elite-driven organizations. Why?

Adrienne LeBas's From Protest to Parties attacks these questions with originality, clarity, and empirical depth. Comparing Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Kenya, LeBas observes that opposition parties in these countries have demonstrated varying levels of strength. While the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) of Zimbabwe bridged ethnic divisions, established deep connections into the countryside, encouraged and maintained mass participation, maintained elite commitment, and incorporated a wide variety of civil society organizations under its broad and inclusive umbrella, its counterparts in Zambia and Kenya were less successful. After initial success defeating an incumbent at the polls in 1991, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) of Zambia neglected its connections to the network of trade unions that had previously given it national breadth and rapidly lost its capacity to act as a focal point for the opposition. Kenyan parties of the past two decades lacked even the initial coherence of the MMD in Zambia. Politicians have relied on personal connections with ethnic constituencies to mobilize votes. Party labels contain little meaning and shift from election to election, and ethnic “big men” and patrons form alliances of convenience that rarely prove durable.

If LeBas's first contribution is to remind us that opposition parties in Africa are heterogeneous creatures that have followed different paths with varying levels and types of success, her second contribution is a novel explanation for these differences. Her argument has two parts.

First, the authoritarian period in African countries left behind different institutional legacies that proved consequential to the building of opposition parties during the recent democratic period. LeBas focuses particular attention on the relationship between authoritarian leaders and organized labor. In Kenya, as in most of Africa, “authoritarian rule flattened the associational landscape” (36). Authoritarian leaders suppressed labor organizations and relied instead on clientelism and ethnic brokerage to project authority. When Kenya democratized, it lacked a linking structure upon which a cohesive, bridging opposition might be built. Kenyan opposition parties had no choice but to mobilize ethnic enclaves. In contrast, authoritarian regimes in Zambia and Zimbabwe formed alliances with trade unions to control populations and implement policies. Autocrats coexisted and cooperated with labor, even allowing it a certain degree of autonomy. While these alliances initially enhanced authoritarian rule, they also facilitated its demise: Opposition parties in both countries used labor organizations and linking networks as launching pads for inclusive national campaigns that bridged ethnic groups and reached deep into civil society to overturn authoritarian incumbents. Thus, variable institutional legacies of the authoritarian period, reflecting strategic choices of early autocrats, shaped the breadth and depth of opposition parties in initial elections in all three countries.

Building on this structural base, LeBas develops a second argument that emphasizes contingency and choice. While opposition movements in Zambia and Zimbabwe both had initial success in uniting and mobilizing broad constituencies, their paths quickly diverged. In spite (or perhaps because) of extensive violence on the part of the ruling party of Zimbabwe, the MDC managed to hold together its coalition, mobilize and empower grassroots constituencies, and maintain discipline among party leaders—at least until recently. In contrast, the MMD in Zambia was unable to sustain mobilization and quickly saw its support collapse and the opposition vote splinter. LeBas argues that these diverging paths reflect different choices taken by leaders in both countries. In Zimbabwe, even before the launch of the MDC, labor leaders had built strong alliances with civil society groups and expanded the organizational reach of the movement. When the MDC formed, it inherited a strong, coherent network. In contrast, Zambian labor leaders had not invested in structures or relationships and bequeathed to the MMD a looser network of weak ties that proved less enduring. Moreover, Zimbabwean party leaders built organizational strength by escalating conflict with the ruling party and fostering polarization. Polarization reified boundaries, disciplined the behavior of party members, and increased cohesion by “trapping potential defections within the party” (p. 46). These choices strengthened the party, but they also led to increased violence in Zimbabwe.

This is LeBas's most interesting and original argument: Opposition strength may ultimately be forged in polarization and conflict. The very process that creates strong opposition parties may ultimately undermine democratic stability. At the same time, it is also her least empirically supported argument. We do not know whether the differences between the two countries reflected the polarization strategy of opposition leaders in Zimbabwe, differences in the ruling parties, prior differences in the organizational networks of the MMD and MDC, or all three.

The author builds her argument around three case studies, and therein lies both the book's strength and its weakness. Restricting analysis to three cases allows LeBas to pursue her topic with extraordinary depth and detail. Combining archival research with extensive interviews with labor organizers, party leaders, and civil society groups, she paints an uncommonly detailed “under the hood” portrait of party formation and development in her cases, especially Zimbabwe. In an era when much work on African politics focuses on amassing large data sets and answering narrow questions, her effort is refreshing and incredibly valuable.

At the same time, restricting analysis to three cases generates limitations. These cases may be unusual. Would the argument explain, for example, the varying paths taken by parties in Ghana and Benin? Institutionalized parties in Ghana have built broad cross-ethnic coalitions, whereas Benin's parties have proven more ephemeral. Do these differences reflect varying authoritarian legacies or different strategies of polarization and conflict in the current period? Ultimately, it is difficult to know whether LeBas's story is limited to the cases she studies or if it generalizes beyond their borders.

Another limitation concerns the problem of omitted variable bias. LeBas argues that her cases are matched on institutional factors like electoral laws. But there are many factors on which they are not matched: ethnic demographics, wealth and development, the presence of natural resources, a history of civil war, the extent of colonial settlement, and so on. One worries that one or more of these factors drive both the dependent and independent variables in the theory. For example, LeBas argues that authoritarian leaders in Zimbabwe and Zambia opted to align with labor and give it autonomy, whereas authoritarian leaders in Kenya squashed it. Why did leaders choose these different but highly consequential paths? What if the factors that drove their choices also influenced the later trajectory of opposition parties? As a further example, consider the role of financial resources. The author argues that leaders in Zambia failed to invest in local branches and alliances with civil society, whereas leaders in Zimbabwe did. Might these differences simply relate to the availability of funding and the greater general wealth of Zimbabwe compared to Zambia? Did Zambian opposition leaders really have a choice or were they dealt a losing hand? In short, with only three cases, it is difficult to sort out all of the factors that might drive differences between these countries.

It is therefore best to see From Protest to Parties as a theory-building rather than theory-testing exercise. LeBas has given us a series of provocative hypotheses, rooted in a deep understanding of a set of consequential African cases, about when and how coherent, disciplined, and bridging opposition parties might form and persist in emerging multiethnic democracies. Her book is essential reading for any scholar of African politics or emerging democracy more broadly, and it has set the agenda for future work in this important area.