@article{2025:shah:an_african,
title = {An African Model of Democracy? Evidence from Treaties and Frameworks, Constitutional Preambles, and Public Opinion},
year = {2025},
note = {Possibly more so than ever before, postcolonial states in Africa are
pushing back against the hegemony of the liberal democratic model.
Such arguments have explained how liberal democracy does not centre
socioeconomic rights and group rights enough or in ways that align
with many African communities’ priorities. Others have faulted weak
institutions, adopted wholesale from colonial rulers who designed them
for purposes of extraction and exclusion. Some experts have explained
that the antagonistic nature of electoral politics conflicts with many
African societies’ values for consensus, while others argue that
communal identities and slow development stand in the way of
democratic growth. At the same time, an emergent vision of African
democracy is recognizable in at least three institutional levels:
regional frameworks (and judicial interpretations of them), the
preambles of national constitutions, and popular values (as evidenced
in survey data). Examination of these standards, laws and opinions
reveals a conceptualization of democracy that goes beyond the core
tenets of the liberal model in important ways. Weak implementation
notwithstanding, these instruments and popular views provide the broad
strokes of a vision of post-liberal democracy in the African context.
Analysis of these documents and public opinion data reveals that while
there is a great deal of inter-national variation, there are several
consistent values across the continent. This continental vision
strongly features the values of participation, consensus and the
importance of context-specific values, rules and modes of
operation. This analysis reveals that African institutions and legal
texts already support forms of democracy that go beyond elections and
may even transcend national boundaries. A turn to research on the ways
in which institutions considered core to liberal democracy may need to
be redesigned to reflect local priorities more accurately could be a
fruitful next step.},
journal = {VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee},
pages = {279--305},
author = {Shah, Seema and Hudson, Alexander},
volume = {58},
number = {3}
}