The Grassroots and Party Funding in Nigeria: Trajectories for Money Politics

This paper addresses grassroots indifference to party funding in Nigeria. It argues that all existing explanations on political apathy do not address the escalating tendency of the ordinary but educated and politically aware Nigerians to be averse to party funding. Drawing on political culture theory, the paper attributes the current trajectory of the phenomenon to a form of "inverse participant" culture by the grassroots, consequent upon their alienation that is driven by a convergence of three key variables: the cartel nature of party formation which is responsible for the disconnect in state-society relations, the appropriation and weaponisation of parties through funding, and decades of unfulfilled campaign promises. It further contends that grassroots indifference creates a funding vacuum which gives room for the monopoly of the party by the wealthy few and the moneybags. The paper concludes that, to arrest grassroots disinterest in party funding, it will require a reform of the Nigerian state to wean it of predatory and exclusionary character and arrest the prevailing cartelization of party formation and appropriation of political parties. It is also important to evolve a political culture that will create positive civic consciousness so as to shape voter-party-candidates relations in order to arrest the current negative voter attitudes that expect and demand for money from party candidates. This paper adopted the qualitative method of research , making use of extant literature on the subject matter and in addition used the interview method in seeking the opinions of a few individuals, some of them party card carrying members.

Introduction

The reader is introduced to the main themes of the book, outlining the ways the Mexican and Bolivian cases have been studied by previous scholars. The chapter argues that, paradoxically, the PRI success and the MNR’s failure have both been separately attributed to the same factor: the attempt to articulate variegated and fragmented social sectors. A comparative study of the cases can answer why the attempt was successful in one case but not the other. The reader is also introduced to the organization of the book as whole, which is divided in three parts: the first concerning theoretical discussions around party formation, the second which delves into the empirical cases in detail, and a third that draws out the broader implications of the study.

Dispossession and Party Formation in Broader Comparative Perspective

This chapter shows that rather than emerging from a ready-formed cohesive industrial labor movement, these parties’ original constituency was the demoted artisan and peasantry in transition to be, but not yet, proletarianized. Second, in a related way, the chapter shows that the period of party emergence followed a process of economic and political dispossession: these parties articulated new political subjectivities in the context of eroding traditional economic and political structures. The differences in the timing of party emergence between the countries lie precisely in how these processes of dispossession developed: in Germany, the process of economic dispossession coincided with a political dispossession setting the terrain for the mass-party form, while in the British case, economic dispossession was not initially accompanied by political dispossession of the working classes, who maintained a degree of self-presentational authority, particularly in the form of “friendly societies.”

Mexico and Bolivia in Comparative Perspective and the Sociology of Party Formation

This chapter measures up existing approaches to party formation against the rise of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in post-revolutionary Mexico (1929–1946) and the attempt but ultimate failure of Bolivia’s Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (1953–1964) to undertake a homologous process in the aftermath of the 1952 uprising, despite similarity in conditions. The chapters offers a critical review of existing theories of mass party formation and area studies literature, pointing to the limitations of ‘reflective’ and ‘state-modernizations’ approaches to the study of parties. Finally, it lays out the methodological and analytical strategy guiding the empirical chapters of Part II of the book.

The Failure of Party Formation in Bolivia

This chapter explores the role of persistent traditional agrarian structures on party organization. Land privatization was considerably less extensive in Bolivia when compared to Mexico. Through agrarian census materials and archival evidence of attempted electoral mobilization and peasant union construction, the chapter show how the regions in the country with relatively higher levels of communal land tenure and strong traditional authority structures were places where it was essentially impossible for the MNR to establish sustainable links to a mass base. In regions with less communal property holding, the MNR developed close links to existing and emerging peasant unions. Ultimately, these regions were not large enough as in the Mexican case to sustain stable party formation.

Political Game-Changers: The Importance of Leaders for Newly Emerged Parties in Romania

Party leaders continue to be crucial players in politics. The theories of personalization and presidentialization of party politics reflect the centrality of leaders’ roles. Little attention has been paid to the effects of leaders on the formation and development of newly emerged parties. This article aims to fill that gap by analyzing the effect of leaders on the formation, intra-party cohesion, and membership organization of three newly emerged Romanian parties between 2015 and 2019. The qualitative analysis uses content from primary (party documents and elite discourses) and secondary sources (media reports). The findings indicate that the leaders’ approaches towards party formation and organization differ substantially across the examined parties and explain their cohesion and electoral appeal.