In the past two decades, many countries in the developing world have undertaken an array of economic reforms, including privatization of state-owned assets, commercialization of services, and financial market liberalization. But there is often a gap between governments' initial commitments to reform and actual implementation. Especially in sub-Saharan Africa, many reforms have been partial or manipulated, and liberalization has generated robust private-sector development or increased investment in only a small number of cases. In order to understand the outcomes of reform, there is a need to better understand the politics of implementation. Anne Pitcher's Party Politics and Economic Reform in Africa's Democracies is a valuable contribution to this endeavor.

Like much of the literature, Pitcher's book rightly places the emphasis on the complicated bargaining that reform provokes; however, it also underlines the importance of the institutional framework within which bargaining occurs. Pitcher argues that domestic formal institutions play a central role in mediating bargaining and thereby shaping the path from formal government commitments to concrete implementation. She places particular emphasis on the nature of the party system, a factor that is often neglected in Africa and other parts of the developing world. For Pitcher, the weak and fluid party systems common in new democracies magnify the impact of government discretion, making reform less credible. While slightly stronger party systems increase the degree of reform implementation, they also color its content, making outcomes more partisan or more marked by “winners” and “losers.” According to the author, it is only in countries with strong party systems and constraints on discretionary authority that reform implementation is able to properly balance societal demands. In addition to case studies of Mozambique, South Africa, and Zambia, the book relies on new data on reform commitments and implementation in a set of 27 African countries.

The first few chapters set up a number of questions about economic reforms aimed at private-sector development. How much variation is there in African governments' formal commitment to privatization and property rights reform? How big is the gap between formal commitment and implementation? Are particular reforms more likely to be implemented than others? For instance, are we more likely to see progress on privatization, while regulatory reform and commercialization of services lag behind? Finally, what explains variation in the character and extent of implementation? In order to tackle this diverse set of questions, Pitcher adopts a tiered research design. She takes an initial look at the gap between commitment and implementation with her full set of 27 cases, then examines the effect of party systems on this gap using a more limited set of nine cases, and then uses in-depth case studies of three countries to more fully elaborate the links between party system and processes of reform.

Pitcher's argument hinges on the interaction between two different elements of the institutional context. First of all, she argues that governments with significant discretionary authority are less likely to successfully implement their initial reform commitments. Discretionary authority seems to be partly determined by the content of the government's initial “motivational commitments”: Where assurances of property rights are built into constitutions, or where independent agencies have been established to undertake privatization, governments “tie their hands” in terms of implementation. At other points, however, the quality of democracy—operationalized via Freedom House scores—seems to serve as a stand-in for this idea of discretionary constraint. Secondly, Pitcher argues that party systems serve as important vehicles through which demands are filtered and accountability enforced. This is a more novel argument, especially in the African context. She suggests that stronger or less fluid party systems discipline governments: They force governments to listen to the demands of different constituencies and to undertake reform in a way that balances diverse societal interests.

This research design is the book's strength and its greatest weakness. The new data on reform commitment and implementation in sub-Saharan Africa is a significant advance on existing World Bank data, which uses blunter measures and contains a good deal of missing data. Pitcher constructs two new indices of motivational commitment and reform attainment, the latter of which she terms “imperative commitment.” This data source will be of great use to future researchers and is a significant contribution. Unfortunately, the quantitative analysis remains underdeveloped, and she misses an opportunity to take full advantage of the novel data she has collected.

In her first quantitative chapter, Pitcher convincingly demonstrates that motivational and imperative commitments are indeed positively correlated, but she also shows that the gap between commitment and implementation is intriguingly variable across her 27 African cases. Particularly puzzling was whether broader economic conditions, such as GDP per capita or integration into the global economy, might account for the bulk of the variation in either motivational or imperative commitment. Even more problematically, she never directly tests her hypotheses regarding party systems using her full sample. As written, the broader quantitative analysis sets the scene for more detailed case analysis, but it might have had a stronger role in testing Pitcher's argument as well.

The author couples her cross-case analysis with meticulous attention to the internal dynamics of a smaller set of cases. The strongest parts of the book are the comprehensive and nuanced case studies of Zambia, Mozambique, and South Africa. Taken together, these case studies show that outcomes of economic reform cannot be seen just through the simple lens of manipulation versus compliance. Instead, the cases persuasively demonstrate that governments face different incentives and opportunities when it comes to initial adoption of reforms and to their subsequent implementation. In Zambia, weak and fluid party loyalties allowed the government near-absolute discretion over the process of reform, resulting in an arbitrary and corrupt privatization process. In the cases of Mozambique and South Africa, partisanship was more firmly established, but institutional quality, as well as the strength of checks on discretionary authority, differed. In Mozambique, reform was more credible than in Zambia, but the benefits of reform were more obviously skewed toward party constituencies and swing voters. In South Africa, intraparty contestation and democratic institutions were both more firmly embedded than in Mozambique, and reform implementation was consequentially more credible and more balanced in its effects. Especially in these last two chapters, Pitcher powerfully conveys her deep expertise and years of experience in the region. These chapters convey new and important insights for those familiar with these cases, as well as for those coming to them with fresh eyes.

The analysis in Party Politics and Economic Reform in Africa's Democracies offers additional evidence that neither the design of reforms nor donor leverage produces positive outcomes on its own. As Pitcher convincingly demonstrates, domestic political context mediates both the content of economic reforms and the quality of their implementation. The book highlights the complexity of processes of economic reform in sub-Saharan Africa, and it is a valuable addition to the comparative literature on economic reform and its effects. This work will be of great interest to Africanists and scholars of economic reform in other parts of the developing world.