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Abstract
Many opposition parties in electoral-authoritarian regimes identify as democracy movements. I ask: what ideologies do they publicly express? The first-glance answer is 'democratic ones', but there are many theories of liberal democracy, and they say little about living under or indeed confronting authoritarian regimes. I analyse the public messages of two such democracy movements: Chadema (Tanzania) and the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC, in Zimbabwe). I argue that they each articulate a homegrown vision of democracy in which they adapt democratic theory to make sense of their electoral-authoritarian circumstances. They do so by articulating that theory through the 'populist logic' conceptualized in the discourse-theoretic perspective. I call them anti-authoritarian (and democratic) populisms. Previous research has overlooked the distinctiveness of these ideologies because it has adopted concept configurations which invisibilize them. I argue that there are reasons to expect there to be a wider body of anti-authoritarian populisms articulated by democracy movements in electoral-authoritarian regimes in Africa, and indeed, worldwide.

Campaign costs have risen in Africa. I ask: what has driven this cost inflation? Studies of Western parties attribute it to campaign modernization as mediatization. Studies of African parties do not recognize this campaign advancement. They attribute these it to another cause: spiraling clientelism. I argue that there is a third, hitherto overlooked driver of such inflation and adaptation: the hybridization of rallies with capital-intensive practices. This capitalization of rally production amounts to an alternative form of campaign modernization which diverges from those found in the global north. I trace this process in Tanzania, but this theory has wider reach. Many African campaigns are rally-intensive and have fewer authoritarian retardants of party competition than Tanzania. This makes it likely that other countries' experiences resembled or surpassed Tanzania's in Africa and beyond. Altogether, I demonstrate that there is ongoing innovation at rallies which is driving significant rises in campaign costs.

Authoritarian populists offer a vision of state. This ideologically fixed imaginary provides an electoral-authoritarian template for how to shape states once in power. Yet not all those called populists are populist. Some are elitist plebeians. They construct themselves as 'the moral elite' above which fights for 'the people' below against 'the corrupt'. I argue that elitist plebeianism contains a distinct vision of government as elected guardianship. Like populists, elitist plebeians advocate extending executive power. Yet they envisage this not as the realization of the people's will, but as the projection of accountability downwards. To them, divisions of power are acceptable as divisions of guardian labour. Rival opinions are not illegitimate, just irrelevant, but opposition is intolerable. Therefore, studies of populist authoritarianism should be revisited. Elitist plebeian visions of state may have been misread as authoritarian populist ones. I examine President Magufuli (Tanzania) as an exemplar and identify other potential elitist plebeians worldwide.

I ask where African opposition parties organize. Party-building is communicative; it involves persuading people to become activists. The literature suggests that opposition parties organize where people are receptive to their messages and build outwards from there. I study Chadema's opposition party-building through site-intensive fieldwork. Chadema organized primarily in such receptive areas, but also in four unreceptive constituencies. I use these deviant constituencies to refine the literature. Prior theory neglects the heterogeneity of party-building. I decompose party-building into three modes as follows: by touring leaders, branches and concentrating leaders. Concentrating leaders dedicate their organizing to single places. They employ small rallies which afford interactive, individualized and iterative communication. This personalized communication enables them to overcome initial unreceptiveness to their messages. I conclude that opposition parties can organize in unreceptive areas, but only through the personalized methods of these 'lone organizers'. Altogether, I show how and through whom opposition parties organize in hostile environments.

I consider how to characterize and classify election campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa. I revisit the typology proposed by Pippa Norris, which distinguishes between premodern, modern, and postmodern campaigns. This typology, and others like it, homogenizes ground campaigns. Ground campaigns only feature by virtue of their centrality in premodern campaigns and their peripherality in modern and postmodern campaigns. I argue that the prominence of the rally varies across ground campaigns. By trivializing rallies, current typologies obscure this variation between African campaigns and between campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world. To accommodate these differences, I propose a schema of campaign ecologies, adapted from Norris' own, which incorporates a distinct ideal-type: the rally-intensive campaign. This revision internationalizes this hitherto Western-bound typology and may illuminate the features of campaigns in other middle- and low-income countries too. Equally, it throws into relief differences between historic premodern campaigns in Western countries. I contend that rally-intensiveness is a definitive feature of election campaigns from which other features stem. To illuminate such typical features, I study Tanzania, which has the most rally-intensive campaigns in Africa. I draw on ethnographic research and original survey data to identify the four following typical features of the rally-intensive campaign. Local as well as national leaders hold rallies frequently. Local rallies are better attended in aggregate than national ones, and accordingly, campaign contact is direct. Mass meetings dwarf the canvass as a means of campaign contact, and local party networks concentrate their efforts on "producing" rallies.

"Election Campaigns and Political Mobilization In Africa" published on by Oxford University Press.