In sub-Saharan Africa, property relationships around land and access to natural resources
vary across localities, districts and farming regions. These differences produce patterned …

Why do strong opposition party organizations emerge in some democratizing countries,
while those in others remain weak or quickly fragment on ethnic lines? From Protest to …

Guillermo O'Donnell drew attention to “brown spots” in Latin America's political topography,
which he defined as peripheral regions where the presence of the republican state is …

How does decentralization affect patronage and rent seeking? While centralization is seen
as enabling these practices, many expect decentralization to reduce them. With few …

Using political economy analysis, this paper discusses three precipitating factors that were
ignited by Kenya's 2007 election, which was too close to call beforehand and highly …

Kenya's March 2013 elections ushered in a popular system of devolved government that
represented the country's biggest political transformation since independence. Yet within …

In order to complement ongoing current empirical research, this article draws wider lessons
from the crisis that grew out of the disputed Kenyan presidential election of December 2007 …

The importance of the Kenya crisis for the African continent is not that Kenya may become
'another Rwanda', but that it reveals how fragile Africa's new multi-party systems may be …

For autocrats facing elections, officers in the internal security apparatus play a crucial role by
engaging in coercion on behalf of the incumbent. Yet reliance on these officers introduces a …

This paper draws on the recent experience of Kenya and Zimbabwe to demonstrate how
power-sharing has played out in Africa. Although the two cases share some superficial …