African parliaments show mixed success in representing citizens

BY THE end of this year, 42 African countries will have held national elections in the previous 24 months. But do these elections produce parliaments that accurately reflect the societies they serve? Aside from studies of women in Africa’s legislatures, there is surprisingly little information about this important issue.

- ROBERT MATTES, MATTHIAS KRONKE and SHAHEEN MOZAFFAR

Elected parliaments are the essence of representative democracy. Lawmak-ers are more likely to know what voters need and want if they are alike in age, gender, language, education or occupation.

As scholars of African politics, we wanted to find out if African legislators actually represented their voters.

We compared the results of two separate surveys conducted across the same 17 African countries.

The first comes from the African Legislatures Project. This interviewed 823 elected representatives (MPs). The second was produced by Afrobarome-ter, a pan-African research network.

Our study found wide gaps between citizens and their representatives in some respects, but a high degree of similarity in others. Compared to ordinary African citizens, African leg-islators possess much higher levels of education. They are also far more likely to be older, male and to come from professional or business backgrounds. Yet the overall profile of legislators closely matches that of the voters in terms of ethnicity and religion.

Religion and ethnicity

One of the most striking findings is the match between the religious, lan-guage and ethnic make-up of African legislatures and voters.

Across all 17 countries, the pro-portion of lawmakers who are either Muslim or Christian closely resembles their electorates. They are also similar at the level of religious denomination (for example Catholic, Methodist or Pentecostal).

Legislatures closely mirror the lan-guages spoken by citizens in their coun-tries. In some countries the overlap is high. In Lesotho, for example, almost all MPs and citizens speak the same language (Sesotho). In Zimbabwe, the distribution of Shona and Ndebe-le-speaking MPs is much the same as it is for the public.