The Politics of Legislative Expansion in Africa

• Author: Thalia Gerzso,Nicolas van de Walle
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221074277
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(14) 2315–2348

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140221074277

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The Politics of

Legislative Expansion in

Africa

Thalia Gerzso

1

and Nicolas van de Walle

1

Abstract

The number of seats in national legislatures around the world rarely changes.

Yet, in Africa, a substantial number of countries have regularly increased the

size of their legislatures, and these increases have become more common in

recent years. Previous research on political off‌ices in Africa’s electoral au-

tocracies has suggested that their numbers and increases are largely motivated

by patronage and clientelist considerations. Is this also the case for national

legislatures? Curiously, very little political science scholarship exists on leg-

islature size, either in Africa or the rest of the world. Using a mixture of

descriptive statistics to present a new database, as well as econometrics and

three case studies, we f‌ind that legislative expansion can be linked to executive

branch manipulation. Presidents have found it politically useful to expand the

size of African legislatures to weaken and/or control it.

Keywords

African, politics, legislative, studies

Introduction

The multiparty

1

electoral era that began in sub-Saharan Africa in the early

1990s has been characterized by the phenomena of legislative expansion.

2

Of

1

Department of Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Thalia Gerzso, Department of Government, Cornell University, 124 White Hall, Ithaca, NY

14850, USA.

Email: tg355@cornell.edu

course, as in other regions, national African legislatures vary signif‌icantly in

size, at least in part because of differences in population size. Even adjusting

for population, signif‌icant variation in the size of individual constituencies can

be observed in Africa, as elsewhere. Where African political systems have

been different is in their proclivity toward expansion, particularly since the

early 1990s.

African legislative expansion takes two forms. First, in a number of

countries, the number of seats in the legislature has gone through multiple

changes. For instance, Angola’s legislature included a modest 53 members at

its independence in 1975 and has today some 220 members, following four

different increases in size. In Mauritania, for its part, the six parliamentary

elections since 1990 have witnessed 5 seat increases, as the legislature has

increased from 79 seats in 1992 to 157 seats in 2018. During this time as well,

a standard two-round majority system has been replaced by a complicated

mixed system, combining elements of both closed-list proportional repre-

sentation and single-member two-round majority voting, with set-aside seats

for women candidates. Overall, since independence, the size of the African

legislature has been changed 230 times in some 45 African countries. Already

present under the one-party era, this process of expansion has accelerated with

the turn to multiparty electoral politics in the 1990s.

Second, several African countries have recently added a second house.

Overall, some 24 countries (out of 49 in the region) currently have had some

period of bicameralism in their postcolonial history or once had it (4 of these

countries). Nonetheless, the predilection for bicameralism is relatively recent.

It can be said that bicameralism is also an innovation of the contemporary

multiparty electoral era, as 16 African countries have reestablished upper

houses in the last 20 years (for an account of the recent turn to bicameralism,

see Coakley, 2014).

What drives this proclivity toward expansion? The comparative institu-

tionalist literature has mostly ignored the issue of legislative expansion. We

turn instead to the literature on authoritarian resilience, which argues that

executive control of the legislature constitutes a reliable mechanism of regime

control, thus providing a motivation for executives to manipulate the legis-

lature (Slovik, 2012;Schedler, 2013;Schuler & Malesky, 2014;Gandhi &

Przeworski, 2006). Unfortunately, this literature remains quite abstract con-

cerning the mechanisms by which control is asserted and does not specif‌ically

link the legislature’s size to executive manipulation.

In this paper, we focus on changes in the size of the legislature and argue

that this proclivity toward expansion is engineered by the executive branch of

government for self-serving political reasons.

3

In particular, we link it to the

relationship between the executive and legislative branches, notably as it is

set by various formal institutions. Our initial hunch that there would be a

straightforwardcorrelation between legislative expansionand broad democracy

2316 Comparative Political Studies 55(14)

measures suchas those of Freedom House and V-DEMis only partly conf‌irmed

by our data. Clearly, legislative expansion occurs at different levels of de-

mocracy,though this may be becauseof a limited rangeof regimes in the region,

none of which are consolidated democracies. Instead, we f‌ind that the decision

to increase thenumber of seats in African legislaturesoriginates in the executive

branch of government and is usually opposed by the legislative opposition,

some of the president’s backbenchers, and the independent media. More

specif‌ically, our data suggeststhat legislative expansion is likely to occur when

the executive branch has the capacity to control the process. In addition to

testing alternative hypotheses outlined by existing scholarship, we develop

three overlapping hypotheses about the circumstances under which the exec-

utive branchf‌inds it possible and convenientto resort to legislative expansion as

an instrument to weaken or better control the legislature. Executives do so to

weaken the House’s ability to function as a body, to more effectivelycontrol it,

and/or to gain patronage positions for its own backbenchers and other party

elites. We argue thatthe degree to which the president is thenable to assert his or

her preferences on the matter is less related to the level of civil and political

rights in the country than it is to the ability to act on these three sets of mo-

tivations, which vary across our cases.

We use event history analysis and f‌ind suggestive supportive evidence for

our hypotheses, with an original dataset of the legislative history of all of the

countries in the region that have conducted legislative elections since 1990.

Our results are robust to various specif‌ications and models. The cross-national

econometric analysis does not, however, leverage much certitude regarding

causal mechanisms, and the paper turns to case studies of legislative ex-

pansion in Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia to gain a better understanding of the

processes of enlargement. The f‌irst two are examples of regular and regime-

promoted legislative expansions. On the other hand, Zambia did not undergo a

single increase from the beginning of the Third Republic in 1991 until a small

increase in anticipation of the 2016 elections. This negative case provides

additional insights into the reasons for expansion.

Together, the econometric and case study evidence strongly conf‌irms that

legislative expansion results from executive branch initiative, even if no single

political logic can account for all episodes of expansion, and even if it is hard

to distinguish the three motivations for expansion. The econometric analysis is

suggestive, and the three cases tend to conf‌irm that expansion can be ex-

plained with reference to clientelist and patronage considerations linked to the

needs of the incumbent party and political control of key constituencies. In

addition, however, expansion episodes also appear to frequently result from

the political survival strategies of African presidents, who wish to ensure their

control over a legislature in which the governing party shows signs of

weakness or independence from the executive. In sum, in the contemporary

era of electoral autocracies, we argue that efforts to increase the size of the

Gerzso and van de Walle 2317