Late last month Afrobarometer released a new set of surveys. They were carried out in 2008 and some have a particular focus on democracy in Africa.

The surveys were conducted in 19 sub-Saharan African countries, including Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, and Senegal. So, there is a good range of semi-presidential countries and some opportunities to make comparisons between semi-presidential countries and both presidential and, to a lesser degree, parliamentary countries.

There is a Working Paper to download: “The Quality of Democracy and Governance in Africa: New Results from Afrobarometer Round 4”. There is also a very interesting Briefing Paper to download: “Neither Consolidating Nor Fully Democratic: The Evolution of African Political Regimes, 1999-2008”.

The Briefing Paper has a particular, but fairly intuitive, way of defining whether democracy is declining or advancing. In the context of semi-presidentialism, the worrying finding is that only one of the four countries to advance was semi-presidential (Cape Verde between 2002 and 2008), whereas two (or even three) of the four countries to decline were semi-presidential (Madagascar between 2005 and 2008 and Senegal between 2002 and 2008 – Kenya also declined between 2003 and 2008, but it did not become semi-presidential until early 2008). Moreover, given Madagascar’s collapse occurred in 2009, the decline there is even greater there than the one recorded in the paper.

Overall, there is a lot of interesting data and some interesting arguments.