9 - What Africa Teaches Us

Summary

Political scientists strive to be “real” scientists. This ambition to imitate the natural sciences, however, has its limitations. Politics has its own dynamic, one that is not really captured once and for all in a single theory. Instead, theories come and go. Comparativists cannot sit back and enjoy more than a moment of “normal science”. Their search for fresh knowledge is open-ended and as reliant on new theoretical insights as it is on already established theory. The temptation to formalize theory into a single construct, however, has increased with the availability of standardized meta data sets. It is in this context that countries that are structurally and culturally different from the mainstream Western model of politics lose their position as entities of interest for their own sake. This book reluctantly acknowledges this reality of the field and uses Africa as an example to highlight the limits of comparisons based on theories derived from the political experience of already developed and democratic societies. The premise that democracy is “the only game in town” is a case in point. It has made Comparative Politics turn almost exclusively into comparative democratization – at the expense of attention to how and why countries change. This final chapter is meant to highlight the many significant omissions that follow from relying primarily on a democratic theory lens. African politics, like that of other developing and democratizing regions, is much more varied and complex. Above all, the social forces that drive it are foremost local. The interesting issue, therefore, is not how well countries score on a global democracy scale but how existing structures accommodate the presence of democratic values and norms. Democracy is no longer the independent variable that best explains politics on a global scale. Today it is best approached as dependent variable.