A Decade of Democracy in Africa

Abstract

This paper offers a broad retrospective on the experience of democracy in Africa over the last decade. It advances five major arguments to explain why the democractic experiment has had such a checkered history. It is argued that in order to gauge the pace and content of democratization, scholars need to move beyond the preoccupation with events in the political and legal spaces (i.e., elections and constitutions) by including a focus on issues such as changing social norms, generational change, and class and gender issues.