Democratization as liberation: competing African perspectives on democracy

Do Africans tend to view democracy in more procedural or more substantive terms? This article argues that African endorsements of liberal and procedural understandings are not as pervasive as much of the literature on democratization suggests. Drawing upon Afrobarometer survey results as well as extensive fieldwork and interviews conducted over the past decade in South Africa, it demonstrates both the historical development and significance of these definitional understandings. By employing a substantive approach and thereby bringing questions of poverty and material inequality to the centre of the analysis, this article seeks to offer a perspective on democratization that helps to explain many of the challenges to the institutionalization of democratic regimes that procedural understandings fail to capture.