In 1990, Only Four African Countries Counted as Democracies

As the 1990s began, only four African countries met a strict definition of electoral democracy: sustained multiparty elections, a functioning free constitution and a genuine record of peaceful transfers of power. Freedom House, the Washington-based organization that has tracked global political rights since the 1970s, counted Botswana, The Gambia, Mauritius and Senegal as the continent’s sole electoral democracies going into 1990, out of more than 50 African states. Most of the rest of the continent was governed by single-party systems, military juntas or personalist regimes that had, in many cases, held power since independence decades earlier.

That count reflected a broader Cold War pattern across the continent. Political scientists Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, in their 1997 study “Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective,” describe how superpower competition through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s propped up one-party and military governments across Africa on both sides of the ideological divide, with the United States and Soviet Union each backing allied strongmen regardless of how those governments treated internal political opposition. Botswana, Mauritius, Senegal and The Gambia stood out as exceptions that managed to sustain competitive, if imperfect, multiparty systems through that era, though The Gambia’s own record ended when a 1994 military coup toppled its elected government.

The picture changed rapidly once the Cold War itself ended. Bratton and van de Walle trace how the collapse of Soviet patronage after 1989 removed a key prop holding up African one-party states, just as domestic pro-democracy movements, citing the wave of change sweeping Eastern Europe, mounted mass protests demanding multiparty elections in country after country. Governments in Benin, Zambia, Malawi and elsewhere that had ruled unopposed for decades faced national conferences, referendums or negotiated transitions that forced them to legalize opposition parties and hold competitive elections, often for the first time since independence. Some of those transitions produced genuine, lasting democratic openings; others produced elections that incumbents managed to win through fraud or intimidation, a distinction that became central to a wave of academic research on Africa’s so-called third wave of democratization.

By the end of the 1990s, the number of African states meeting reasonably strict democratic criteria had grown into the double digits, a dramatic shift from the four-country baseline of 1990, even as many of the continent’s new multiparty systems remained fragile, with elections that international observers rated as only partly free or governments that backslid into authoritarian practice within a few election cycles of their democratic opening.