Why African Island States Are Generally Freer

VSGREEN APE may be best known for its white sand beaches. But the archipelago, about 500 km off the coast of Africa, has something else to offer. It is one of the few full-fledged democracies in the region.

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Africa has more than its share of despots. But archipelagos like Cape Verde seem to have escaped this curse. Four of Africa’s five island states with populations under 1.5 million are classified as “free” by Freedom House, an American think tank. This means that they are largely liberal and democratic. For the continent as a whole, less than one country in five is “free”.

A study published this month in the Journal of International Relations and Development argues that the size and insularity of these countries – Cape Verde, Comoros, Mauritius, São Tomé and Principe and the Seychelles – hold the key to their freedom. It’s part of a growing body of academic research that suggests that being small and being an island are associated with democracy. In Africa, according to the study’s authors, smallness leads to more personal politics, where voters may harass officials to keep their promises. The fact of being islands, add the authors, spares these countries land borders that their neighbors can dispute or on which conflicts can spill over.

Take Cape Verde. After independence, it was ruled by a single party. Although far from democratic, it still held regular elections and allowed some opposition politicians to compete. The authors attribute this relative liberalism to the personal politics of the island. It is much harder, they say, for a single party to crack down on dissidents when they are neighbors and friends. In the 1990s, it was fully democratized, largely thanks to the relative liberalism of the preceding decades. Today, Cape Verde sits just below Great Britain in Freedom House’s democracy rankings.

Identifying the foundations of democracy is tricky, especially with such a small sample and given that small countries are more likely to be statistically outliers. These islands have a handful of other attributes that could explain their politics. They lack natural wealth, such as diamonds and oil, which supports despots elsewhere. Instead, many islands depend on tourism, which tends to provide employment and income for a large part of society, and can therefore promote stability and development. But the five are varied in other ways, having been colonized by different countries, having bequeathed different political systems, and reaching different levels of development. The Seychelles have more than four times the GDP per person from Cape Verde or Comoros. Mauritius has a parliamentary system inherited from Great Britain. Seychelles and Comoros are presidential. Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe have semi-presidential systems.

The success of small islands is not instructive for the rest of Africa. Continental countries cannot split into small states and drift into the Atlantic. Even if they could, small island democracies have flaws. Cape Verdeans complain about corruption, which ironically may stem from the same personal politics that allowed democracy to flourish. The Comoros are struggling with political instability. Seychelles experienced its first peaceful transition of power in decades just last year. What the study illuminates, however, is the potential for African countries to be democratic and well-governed, even if for now most are not. ■

This article appeared in the Middle East and Africa section of the print edition under the headline “Islands of Democracy”