Short Abstract

Amidst concerns with democracy's global erosion, this panel interrogates African experiences of democratic experimentation to reimagine the possibilities and limits of democratic politics. How do these experiments offer alternative conceptions of representation, participation and accountability?

Long Abstract

Amidst concerns about democracy’s global erosion, political scientists responses to “democratic backsliding” (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018) have varied. Some emphasize “democratic resilience" (Murkel and Luhrmann 2021) focusing on strengthening liberal-democratic institutions against contemporary threats, while others advocate the need for “democratic innovations” (Warren 2025; Della Porta 2020) to deepen participation and representation. Still others call for more fundamental efforts to rethink democracy’s meaning and institutional forms beyond liberalism (Hardt 2023).

For the most part, African cases have remained peripheral in these mainstream discussions.

Where the democratic crisis literature has attended to African politics it has been a focus on democratic failings - coups, electoral fraud, democracy's ambiguous status in opinion polls, etc. As such, Dickson Eyoh’s (1998) decades-old observation that democratization scholarship was characterized by “sparse regard for the African debate” remains pertinent in an analysis of contemporary scholarship on democracy within the subfield. This neglect persists despite the fact that African political actors, movements, and intellectuals have long engaged in democratic experimentation: efforts to construct alternative institutions, practices, and forms of political participation that depart from established liberal-democratic models.

Rather than simply adding African experiences to established debates this panel welcomes work that uses it as the basis for generating theory and critical knowledge.

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