Daniel N. Posner is Total Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and coauthor of Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (2009).
Despite sweeping political and constitutional changes in Africa, a notable feature of the ancien régime survives—the imperial presidency. African presidents may be term-limited, but they have not been tamed.
Although Senegal has often been regarded as a democracy, its regime should more properly have been classified as competitive authoritarian. Will the 2012 election of a new president prove to be a…
