Extended Stay: Factors Contributing to Success or Failure When African Presidents Attempt to Amend Constitutions to Hold On to Power - Lessons From Burkina Faso's Overthrow of Compaore

This report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. This study addresses why some African leaders have succeeded in extending their mandates while others have not. Specifically, the study focuses on societal factors that impose constraints upon leaders attempting to extend or abolish term limits, paying particular attention to the influence of urbanization, formal education, and the functioning of civil society organizations. Using a within-case methodology, the study investigates Blaise Compaore's twenty-seven-year rule in Burkina Faso, comparing his successful extension of his mandate in 2005 to his failed attempt in 2014. Comparative case analysis is used to determine what societal changes may have occurred between the two attempts. The analysis suggests that urbanization and the functioning of civil society organizations were factors important to the difference in outcomes. The factor of formalized education was not found to be important. In 2014, new grassroots, pro-democratic civil society organizations capitalized on urban demographic changes to mobilize pro-democracy opposition to Compaore. The organizations used a number of effective strategies to accomplish this, including civic education and pro-democracy consensus building. These insights offer potential guidance to democracy promoters as they search for opportunities to assist pro-democracy civil society organizations.

This research will be based on the hypothesis that, in 2014, there were additional effective constraints on President Compaore and that these constraints likely came from public sentiment and civil society within Burkina Faso. In order to conduct this analysis, I will rely on previous accounts and research conducted on the individual events in order to compare and decipher what social changes occurred in the approximate decade between the events that allowed the public to organize and prohibit Compaore from extending his stay in office as he had before. Data will be collected from scholarly sources as well as from respected contemporaneous sources when available. Most importantly, primary data from in-country interviews conducted by the author and project advisor with Burkina Faso government officials and civil society representatives will be relied on heavily for context and understanding of the societal changes in Burkina Faso. This thesis consists of four parts. Following this introductory study, Study II will discuss social opposition to President Compaore as it existed between 1997 and 2005, the time of his successful mandate extension. Study III will trace and explain changes in society between 2005 and the successful overthrow of Compaore in 2014, preventing his second attempt at mandate extension. The concluding study, Study IV will analyze driving forces of the changes in society and explore what predictive value they have for assessing the likelihood that leaders in other African countries may be able to extend their mandates.