Madagascar’s Fluid Party System: Authoritarian legacies and an uneven playing field in an enduring competitive authoritarian regime1

Party systems are expected to grow and mature with time; however, the case of Madagascar is one of high fluidity: parties and leaders rise and fall from one election to the next and there is a low entry cost for new contenders. This study explores the role of authoritarian legacies and elites’ efforts to skew the playing field as key factors for understanding why the Malagasy party system has failed to institutionalise since the start of the Third Republic. The findings show how leadership centralisation, ethnicity, personalism and clientelism shaped party formation during the authoritarian era and beyond; and also how incumbents’ attempts to create asymmetries in access to resources, media and law have been ineffective and successfully countervailed by the opposition.