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Campaign costs have risen in Africa. I ask: what has driven this cost inflation? Studies of Western parties attribute it to campaign modernization as mediatization. Studies of African parties do not recognize this campaign advancement. They attribute these it to another cause: spiraling clientelism. I argue that there is a third, hitherto overlooked driver of such inflation and adaptation: the hybridization of rallies with capital-intensive practices. This capitalization of rally production amounts to an alternative form of campaign modernization which diverges from those found in the global north. I trace this process in Tanzania, but this theory has wider reach. Many African campaigns are rally-intensive and have fewer authoritarian retardants of party competition than Tanzania. This makes it likely that other countries' experiences resembled or surpassed Tanzania's in Africa and beyond. Altogether, I demonstrate that there is ongoing innovation at rallies which is driving significant rises in campaign costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authoritarian populists offer a vision of state. This ideologically fixed imaginary provides an electoral-authoritarian template for how to shape states once in power. Yet not all those called populists are populist. Some are elitist plebeians. They construct themselves as 'the moral elite' above which fights for 'the people' below against 'the corrupt'. I argue that elitist plebeianism contains a distinct vision of government as elected guardianship. Like populists, elitist plebeians advocate extending executive power. Yet they envisage this not as the realization of the people's will, but as the projection of accountability downwards. To them, divisions of power are acceptable as divisions of guardian labour. Rival opinions are not illegitimate, just irrelevant, but opposition is intolerable. Therefore, studies of populist authoritarianism should be revisited. Elitist plebeian visions of state may have been misread as authoritarian populist ones. I examine President Magufuli (Tanzania) as an exemplar and identify other potential elitist plebeians worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many opposition parties in electoral-authoritarian regimes identify as democracy movements. I ask: what ideologies do they publicly express? The first-glance answer is 'democratic ones', but there are many theories of liberal democracy, and they say little about living under or indeed confronting authoritarian regimes. I analyse the public messages of two such democracy movements: Chadema (Tanzania) and the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC, in Zimbabwe). I argue that they each articulate a homegrown vision of democracy in which they adapt democratic theory to make sense of their electoral-authoritarian circumstances. They do so by articulating that theory through the 'populist logic' conceptualized in the discourse-theoretic perspective. I call them anti-authoritarian (and democratic) populisms. Previous research has overlooked the distinctiveness of these ideologies because it has adopted concept configurations which invisibilize them. I argue that there are reasons to expect there to be a wider body of anti-authoritarian populisms articulated by democracy movements in electoral-authoritarian regimes in Africa, and indeed, worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about democratic political thought and African political parties. Studies judge that opposition speak about democracy, but rarely express democratic ideologies. This determination arises from democracy's perceived hegemony. As democracy is accepted, opposition parties invoke democratic ideas without advocating them. I contest this line of argument. There are multiple visions of democracy. Therefore, whether or not democracy is hegemonic, not all arguments for and perspectives on it are. By omission, the literature on African parties has denied this variety in democratic thought and precluded the study of one variant of it in particular: republicanism. Republicanisms elevate domination and corruption as ills and advocate limiting state power and empowering citizens. I analyse the "people's power philosophy" of leading Tanzanian opposition party, Chadema. It imagines a ruling party oligarchy which pursues its private interests through an interconnected system of domination and corruption. Chadema advocates a new constitution to undo that system: institutional reforms that limit state power and empower citizens. It claims that it can do so by overpowering the oligarchy in a popular struggle. It imagines struggle as the breaking of everyday dominance and therefore as emancipatory: a second liberation. I argue that this philosophy constitutes a republican-democratic ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I ask where African opposition parties organize. Party-building is communicative; it involves persuading people to become activists. The literature suggests that opposition parties organize where people are receptive to their messages and build outwards from there. I study Chadema's opposition party-building through site-intensive fieldwork. Chadema organized primarily in such receptive areas, but also in four unreceptive constituencies. I use these deviant constituencies to refine the literature. Prior theory neglects the heterogeneity of party-building. I decompose party-building into three modes as follows: by touring leaders, branches and concentrating leaders. Concentrating leaders dedicate their organizing to single places. They employ small rallies which afford interactive, individualized and iterative communication. This personalized communication enables them to overcome initial unreceptiveness to their messages. I conclude that opposition parties can organize in unreceptive areas, but only through the personalized methods of these 'lone organizers'. Altogether, I show how and through whom opposition parties organize in hostile environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'The elite' in ideational and discursive conceptions of populism has gone ill-defined. This makes conceptions of populism elastic. This article asserts that a discourse should only qualify as populist if it constructs an elite that acts in its collective interests and possesses a majority of power across fields. These criteria narrow the definition of populism and reveals another type of discourse, christened here 'elitist plebeianism'. While populists bifurcate society between 'the people' and 'the elite', elitist plebeians trifurcate society between 'the common people', 'the elite' and a middle stratum. While populists vilify the elite, elitist plebeians heroize it and vilify the middle. In office, populists struggle to reconcile their power and their opposition to the powerful; elitist plebeians do not. This similarity in terms and structure facilitates the movement between populist and elitist plebeian discourses. That makes elitist plebeianism a ready-made script for so-called 'populists in power.' Tanzania provides proof of concept. Tanzania's opposition constructed Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) as a corrupt establishment. Magufuli and his party appropriated this discourse but relocated corruption from the elite to the bureaucracy and business, which they portrayed as less powerful than themselves; their discourse is not populist, but elitist plebeian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concerns the organizational expansion undertaken by the opposition party, Chadema, in Tanzania between 2003 and 2015. It argues that Chadema's extensive party-building enabled it to mobilize on the ground. These organizational developments, as much as elite action, underpinned recent changes in the party system and the opposition's improved showing in recent elections. Chadema established branches even though many of the prerequisite circumstances typically recognized in the literature were absent. This makes Chadema a deviant case and this deviance has implications for the historical institutionalist literature on party-building. This article complicates Rachel Riedl's account of state substitution. She links the incorporation or substitution of social actors to different paths of party system institutionalization. This article demonstrates that the character and consequences of state substitution depend upon the balance of power between state and social actors. It also builds on accounts by Adrienne LeBas and others that when social actors are strong, they can endow opposition parties with resources which make branch establishment possible, and when they are weak, they can only act as surrogate party branches. This article illustrates that when social actors are absent from partisan politics, parties have no way to organize except by founding green-site branches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]