Towards the “China Model” of Development? Ethnopolitics and Party System Stability in Africa

Abstract:

From massive investments in infrastructure, the growing prominence of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), and the extension of the Belt & Road Initiative into the continent, there is no question that China is changing the way African politicians seek aid and investment. However, many in Washington fear that China’s economic diplomacy efforts to promote more non-Western government engagement in Africa are in fact intended to demonstrate that Western democratic ideals are not universal. In light of this persistent narrative of an ideological struggle between the United States and China on the African continent, politicians, scholars, and the media alike typically focus on evaluating whether China seeks to use its soft power to export an alternative model of development to liberal democracy and the Washington Consensus—one predicated on a greater reliance on market capitalism while retaining an authoritarian political structure. 
 
However, the underlying mechanisms that condition the extent to which African states themselves find the so-called “China model” attractive remain relatively underexplored. In order to shed light on the recipient country perspective, I interview government officials, scholars, and development professionals in Kenya and Ethiopia about their attitudes not only towards the lack of stringent conditionality attached to Chinese assistance, but moreover the appeal of China’s internal ideology and governance approach for their own countries. Despite Kenya’s and Ethiopia’s respective regime types as democracies and closed anocracies, I find that the party system that each country engineered as a means of ethnic conflict management—and the political stability, or lack thereof, that each produces—plays a critical role in determining the extent to which government officials are receptive to the lessons in political governance offered by the China model. I then evaluate the generalizability of this argument beyond my two case studies by conducting large-N regression analysis using the Varieties of Democracy dataset and Afrobarometer’s household surveys, in order to determine whether there exists a correlation between electoral instability and perceptions of China as an attractive development model for one’s country.