Mellan Nouakchott och Antananarivo : Afrika och demokratin

The purpose of this essay is on the one hand to study Sub-Saharan Africa from a comparative perspective to analyze different explanations to democratization and on the other hand to compare the democratization of the most interesting cases found. To fulfil the purpose, the essay is divided into a quantitative and a qualitative part. The quantitative part starts from four different theories of democratization and thus has a deductive theory testing approach. We intend to use four theories: the modernization theory, the theory of stable institutions as a prerequisite for democratization, political culture and ethnic diversity as an obstacle for democratization, to test how they correspond with the democratic situation in Africa, and at the same time find deviant cases. The second part of the study takes its start from an inductive perspective and examines institutions and citizens of the deviant cases. We have found that the stable institutions indicator and the socioeconomic indicators are the ones out of our indicators that best can explain democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa. The quantitative study also reveals two cases that are democracies although they do not follow the general patterns of democratization. Our research concludes that the most striking resemblance between our deviant cases, Benin and Mali, is that they have both developed stable institutions. This could be one reason why they have managed to democratize despite their harsh conditions