Conveners: Rebekah Lee and Doris Okenwa
Speaker: Michaela Collord (University of Nottingham)
Discussant: Elena Gadjanova (University of Exeter)
Joint event with the Northeast Africa Forum
This presentation introduces Michaela’s new book, Wealth, Power, and Authoritarian Institutions: Comparing dominant parties and parliaments in Tanzania and Uganda. This study offers a political economy explanation of why authoritarian parties and legislatures vary in strength, and why this variation matters. Without claiming to explain all institutional variation, the book outlines how diverse trajectories of state-led capitalist development engender differing patterns of wealth accumulation and elite contestation, which in turn, reshape institutional landscapes across regimes. Where accumulation is more closely controlled by state and party leaders, rival factions remain subdued, ruling parties can consolidate relatively strong institutional structures, and parliament remains marginal. Conversely, where a class of private wealth accumulators expands, factions can more easily form, both eroding party institutions and encouraging greater legislative strength. The book uses this analysis to reassess the significance of a stronger legislature. It considers parliament’s influence on distributive politics, both regressive and progressive. It also considers its relation to democratization, particularly in a context of broader liberalizing reforms. This study ultimately encourages a closer examination of how would-be democratic institutions interact with an underlying power distribution, shaping in whose interests they operate.
Dr Michaela Collord is Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on East Africa, especially Uganda and Tanzania. It covers themes relating to the political economy of authoritarian rule, authoritarian political institutions (parties and parliaments), urban politics, urban labour informality, and labour organising.
Dr Elena Gadjanova is Assistant Professor in Politics at the University of Exeter. She studies political communication, public opinion, and electoral politics in new democracies, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.
