Democratic Consolidation in Sub-Saharan Africa: Can the variation be attributed to the level of corruption at early stategs of democratization?

Abstract

Despite the fact that almost all of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa introduced multiparty elec-tions during the 1990’s and that the region has seen democratic progress over the years, only nine out of the regions forty-nine states were considered by Freedom House in 2011 to be free and democratic. Using a multivariate logistic regression this paper adopts the preconditionist view of democratiza-tion theory and attempts to test and develop the argument that the variation in democratic consoli-dation in Sub-Saharan African countries can be attributed to levels of corruption at early stages of democratization. The covariation between degrees of corruption and democratic consolidation is strong. Moreover, both the bivariate and the multivariate logistic regression conducted in the analysis, and other visualizations of the two models, gives us further reason to believe that the degrees of corruption at a certain time serve as an important precondition. There are, however, reasons to interpret the data with care due to lack of observations and significant relationships.