John Ishiyama and John James Quinn, "African Phoenix? Explaining the Electoral Performance of the Formerly Dominant Parties in Africa," Party Politics, 12 (May, 2006), 317-340.

First Paragraph:
What affects the development of political parties in new democracies? Although many scholars have argued that political parties are requisite for the development of any democratic political system (e.g. Aldrich, 1995; Apter, 1965; Downs, 1957; Duverger, 1954; Key, 1964; Lipset and Rokkan, 1967; Sartori, 1976; Schattschneider, 1942) and despite considerable attention paid to political party development in other new democracies in postcommunist Europe (Ishiyama, 1995, 1997; Kitschelt, 1995, 1997), Latin America (Mainwaring, 1994) and Asia (Shin, 1994), scant attention has been paid to the question of the development of political parties in new electoral regimes in Africa. To be sure, there have been several studies that have focused on the level of party systems development and characterized the types of parties that are emerging (Bratton and van de Walle, 1997; Kuenzi and Lambright, 2001; Makinda, 1996; van de Walle, 2003; Vengroff, 1993; Widner, 1997), but none have examined the evolution of political parties per se.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1. List of parties and legislative elections in the sample
Table 2. Regression results

Last Paragraph:
Whatever the case there remains a considerable amount of work to do. Events in Africa have provided enormous opportunities for students of political parties to examine the generalizability of existing theories of party development. This article represents only a preliminary attempt to explain the evolution of the formerly dominant parties that emerged from the oneparty states in Africa. Nonetheless, the fate of these parties will not only shed a considerable amount of new light on identifying the reasons why parties develop in the way they do, but will provide insight as to the future shape of politics and electoral democracy in Africa.