Trajectories of Democracy in Africa and the Legacies of Democratic Experiments

The end of the Cold War witnessed the largest expansion of democratic liberalization the African continent had experienced since decolonization. However, in spite of such a democratic upsurge, instances of coups, government crises, and institutional stagnation continued to challenge and erode many of the democratic gains made in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. By 2009, only half of the states previously experiencing such openings could still be widely recognized as democratic. Why is it that some purported democratic transitions continued to thrive for more than twenty years after their initial openings, while others appeared to follow an opposite direction, or stagnate somewhere between democracy and authoritarianism? In answering this question, this paper puts forth a theory of regime trajectories to explain why certain countries followed paths of democracy, while others did not. Such an effort contributes to the scholarly analysis of African politics by not only identifying the types of regime trajectories emerging in the post-Cold War period in Africa, but by also explaining how such trajectories came to be associated with each of the twenty-eight countries contained within this study.