Political parties, political change and public policy in Africa

The epistemology of political parties and regime change in Africa and their governance roles has often paid inadequate attention to how these changes infuence policy processes. The vast literature mainly focuses more on the relationship between political parties and democratization in Africa. However, from a public policy approach, this tends to paint an inconclusive picture of how these political changes translate to microscopic transformations in how government activities are organized and executed within a political system. First, how the feedback processes from implementing these activities in society relate to political parties’ activities is understudied inside and outside most African governments. This is evident in the insufcient attention to how political parties shape political behaviours that pattern dis-cursive policymaking processes such as mobilizing or coalescing diferent organized groups around a policy issue and ofering alternative policy designs or articulating course of action sought after by the government. Thus, apart from demonstrating the relations between political party politics and the development of policy regimes in Africa from more autocratic to relatively democratic or participatory policy regimes, this review makes a moderate attempt to locate political parties’ policy functions.

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Published in: Routledge Handbook of Public Policy in Africa
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003143840-28