Sammendrag
How does the contestation for liberal rights play out in Africa’s multiparty democracies? This question forms the centre of inquiry in this thesis. Though African democracies to a large extent have embraced the electoral democratic tradition, democratic governance practices linked to the liberal components of democracy, accountability and civil liberties - hereunder liberal rights such as association, expression, and information rights - are still contested. Underlying the outward appearance of stalled democratic progress, this thesis will show that contention is playing out as a highly dynamic interaction in African democracies between those advocating for liberal rights on the one hand, and those challenging them on the other. Focusing on elite-level interactions, notably between right advocates representing civil society on the one hand and politicians on the other hand, this thesis focuses on the contentious politics of regulating and legislating freedoms of association, expression, and information. The articles in the dissertation ask what explains strategies of government repression of liberal rights, what explains strategies of liberal rights advocacy, and what are the consequences of repression of and pushback against liberal rights? This dissertation builds on and contributes to the literatures on democratic backsliding and civil society clampdown. On the one hand, the backsliding literature is useful for its focus on actions and strategies of political leaders. However, while existing studies on democratic backsliding increasingly focus on elite dynamics, the focus has primarily been on other political actors, such as opposition and courts, and not on members of civil society. On the other hand, while the civil society clampdown literature says more about the relationship with politicians, it rarely portrays civil society advocates as elite actors with an agency to shape this relation. While much scholarly attention has been afforded to political elites, elites within civil society have received less attention. The dissertation contributes to theory development in two significant ways. First, it includes an elite perspective of civil society actors and, second, it nuances the scholarship on democratic backsliding by emphasising the iterative relations between political elites and civil society actors. This compilation PhD dissertation is composed of five independent articles, all focusing on processes of regulating and legislating liberal rights in Sub-Saharan Africa. All articles are concerned with the strategies of government and civil society actors, either one or both. Two of the articles in particular study the dynamics and interactions between political and societal elites in the case of drafting and advocating for the Right to Information Act (2019) in Ghana. Theoretically, methodically, and empirically, all articles stand on their own. To varying degrees, the five articles combine quantitative as well as qualitative data and methods and while some of them are classical single-case studies, others take a cross-national perspective.
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