Emerging Legislatures in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Notwithstanding that Africa's legislatures have been described as ‘emerging institutions of horizontal accountability;’ the literature on democratisation pays little attention to parliaments of contemporary political regimes in Africa. The earliest generation of literature on parliaments in Africa, majorly case studies and inputs evaluating a limited number of cases, appraised the impact of numerous fundamental variables, such as legacies of colonial rule, the powers of appointment and dismissal of governing parties, control of state resources by the executive, among others, consistently agreed that these factors played a part in the institutional weakness of the new legislatures vis-à-vis powerful executives as well as in their limited role in law and policy-making. Although, other foremost literature which measured African parliaments in an extensive cross-national comparative structure also stressed these policy-making and institutional weaknesses, they also underscored their function in the legitimisation of government policies, recruitment and socialisation of new elites, and the mobilization of open support for political regimes. The resurgence of democracy in Africa prompted a renewal of scholarly interest in Africa’s parliaments but the ensuing literature bears little dissimilarity from the immediate post-independence focus of studies on single countries, habitually indicative of institutional weakness and the limited decision-making function of Africa's legislatures.