Decentring the State

Research on political parties has become a global enterprise. One area where it remains incomplete is how the condition of plural authority shapes parties. This blog draws on African experiences to consider what plural authority means for party theorising. Its central argument is that taking plural authority seriously raises new questions about parties and challenges some of the assumptions embedded in established theories. African experiences do more than reveal the limits of existing party theory; they provide critical resources for reconstructing it as a more genuinely global comparative theory.