Research
Consultancy

Research

Research has mainly dealt with political institutions and their functions both for the consolidation of fragile political systems and for economical and social development at a broader level. Institutions can thereby, in line with the neo-institutional understanding, both formal or informal, while our research agenda has concentrated so far on the formal ones. Subject of research were not only national political institutions, such as the governmental, electoral, or party system but also sub-national institutions at federal or decentralized level, and finally supra-national institutions, like the institutionalizing pressure of regional organizations on the internal political dispensations of member states.

 

Party-Bans in Africa (Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung)

Gemeinsames Projekt mit Mathijs Boogards (International University Bremen); Matthias Basedau (Institut für Afrikakunde Hamburg) und Peter Niesen (TU Darmstadt)

During the 1990s the number of African states to hold multi-party elections increased dramatically. Paradoxically, the spread of democracy and the extension of political rights in Africa has been accompanied in the majority of countries by legal bans on, among others, religious, ethnic, regional, and linguistic parties. The main official reason for such party bans has been the aim of preventing the politicization of ethnicity as this is feared to lead to ethnic conflict and political instability.

Surprisingly, the unprecedented scale of party bans in Africa has received little attention from international organizations, donors, non-governmental organizations and scholars. To date, there has been no research on party bans in Africa, their origin, their implementation, their effects on party competition and their success in preventing ethnic conflict. Nor has the place of ethnic party bans in democratic theory been scrutinized. This project seeks to fill the gap through a study that integrates empirical, theoretical, and normative approaches to the study of party bans in Africa.

In light of the history of ethnic conflict in Africa and the possibility of drawing lessons for other plural societies, the leading question will be: are party bans an effective instrument in preventing and managing ethnic conflict and at what cost to democracy? This main question translates into four sub-questions: 1) Which empirical phenomena might be defined as party-bans and which main types of party-bans do exist? 2) What are the effects of formal bans? Why have ostensibly so few of the countries that adopted party bans actively enforced them? And to what extent are formal bans on ethnic parties an effective instrument in ethnic conflict management?; 3) Why have so many new democratic regimes in Africa adopted party bans? And which variables explain that other countries did not? 4) Given that party bans pose limits to political liberty, how can their existence be squared with the democratic aspirations of new or consolidated constitutional regimes? What are the strategies used and legitimations adduced in order to integrate party bans with the democratic self-understanding of the respective polities?Compared with how democracies in the OECD-world justify bans on political parties, how do these justifications stand up?

The main research activities will be the collection of data on legal-constitutional party bans in the new multi-party electoral regimes of Africa, creating the first-ever inventory of party bans and their implementation in Africa, and their subsequent analysis to answer the research questions formulated above. The project will make use of plural methodologies. As for the effects, causes and justifications of party bans the project will apply both macro-qualitative and ''small N'' comparisons.

Project duration: 2006-2008

For further information visit this research project's home page

Publications:

Bogaards, M./ Basedau, M./ Hartmann, C. 2010: 'Ethnic Party Bans in Africa: An Introduction', in Democratization 17/4, 599-617.

Hartmann, C. 2010: 'Senegal's party system: The limits of formal regulation', in Democratization 17 (2010), 4, 769-786.

Hartmann, C./ Kemmerzell, J. 2010: 'Understanding variations in party bans in Africa', in Democratization 17/4, 642-665.

Basedau, M./ Bogaards, M./ Hartmann, C./ Niesen, P. (2007) 'Ethnic Party Bans in Africa: A Research Agenda' in German Law Journal 8/6, 617-634.

Professional Expertise and Consultancy

Expertise mainly exists in the following three sectors:

• Reform of electoral systems and election assistance
• Crisis prevention and conflict management
• Promotion of democracy and political development cooperation

Reform of electoral systems and election assistance

C. Hartmann advised, on behalf of various donors, constitution-drafting bodies, as well as electoral commissions and parliaments. This applies in particular to the Egyptian parliament (2002) and the Kenyan constitutional commission (Constitutional Review Comission 2002/2003). In 2000 he participated in a roundtable of politicians, experts and constitutional lawyers from Southern Africa, in Cape Town. In 2001/02 he was a member of the working group of the Venice commission (Council of Europe) for the revision of the local election law of Croatia. Since 2002 he is officially registered as an expert of the “United Nations Electoral Assistance Division”.

Crises prevention and treatment of conflicts

C. Hartmann was an initial member of the University Network on Crisis Prevention and Conflict Management in Sub-Saharan Africa (UnetCPCM), financed by the GTZ. In this context he was involved in the organization and implementation of workshops in Cape Town, Nairobi (Kenya) and Lilongwe (Malawi). In 2001 he prepared, on behalf of the European Union and its Conflict prevention network (CPN), a desk study on European Options of Crisis Prevention in the Ivory coast. In the context of an impact assessment of project activities of the Friedrich Ebert foundation he evaluated crisis prevention projects in the north of Mali (2003).

Democracy promotion and political development cooperation

C. Hartmann has been involved in impact assessment of development projects in the field of the promotion of democracy, trade unions, gender projects, decentralisation and human rights for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Mali (2003) and in Senegal (2002). In 2002 he assessed projects of the Hanns Seidel Foundation in Benin, Burkina Faso, the Ivory coast and in Togo. Since 2003, he has also worked as an country expert of the Bertelsmann Foundation for the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) for the countries Benin and Ivory Coast.