Abstract
Senegal is a bit of a conundrum for students of both democracy and organized labor. Senegal is the anomalous African country that lapsed only briefly into one-party politics during the post-independence period. Following the elimination of opposition parties through a familiar combination of co-optation and suppression in the late 1960s, by the mid-1970s the regime of President Leopold Senghor had once again legalized political contestation on the part of a limited number of opposition parties. In 1981, Senghor’s successor, Abdou Diouf, decreed unlimited rights of party formation and contestation.
Note: The views expressed in this essay are those of the author, based on dissertation research in Senegal, and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Bank.
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Notes
For theoretical and empirical underpinnings of this statement, see Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin A. Trow, and James S. Coleman, Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1977);
and Gary Marks, Unions in Politics: Britain, Germany and the United States in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
As Jonathan Barker has shown for Senegal’s rural areas, the factional leader is an intermediary between other factions lower and higher on the pyramid of clan groupings that exist between the individual and the state, whose personal status depends on the ability to provide flows of material resources. This authority, however, is highly precarious, since “factional leaders at lower levels can transform their loyalties from one higher-level faction to another with relative impunity.” Barker, “Political Factionalism in Senegal,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 7, no. 2 (1973): 292.
Donal Cruise O’Brien, “Senegal,” in John Dunn, ed., West African States: Failure and Promise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 179–80.
Senghor at Tunis in 1975, quoted by Christine Desouches, Le Parti démocratique sénégalaise: une opposition légale en Afrique (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1983), 28.
For a highly cogent account of the splintering of the underground opposition following democratization, see Momar Coumba Diop, and Mamadou Diouf, Le Sénégal sous Abdou Diouf (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1990), 214–15.
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© 2007 Jon Kraus, ed.
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Bergen, G. (2007). Labor, Democracy, and Development in Senegal. In: Kraus, J. (eds) Trade Unions and the Coming of Democracy in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610033_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610033_2
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