Workshop - Internal Functioning of Political Parties: Fostering Intra-party Democracy in Tanzania
EISA will be holding a workshop in Tanzania on 30 September 2004. The objective of the workshop is to draw on the Tanzanian experience in addressing the issue of intra-party democracy. It aims to assess the extent to which political parties are democratic in Tanzania by particularly looking at parties' organisational strengths/failures, such as structures and functions of party decision-making and executing organs; primary election processes; financing sources and regulatory mechanisms; and women participation in decision-making processes within parties. A series of analytical papers will be commissioned from specialists in Tanzania and together with debates and discussions will form the basis for a post workshop report.
In an effort to build synergies with other departments, we plan on linking this workshop with other work that EISA does. The interest for EISA here is to assess the needs of Tanzanian political parties in managing and administering primary elections and in turn use this opportunity to introduce its activities to the Tanzanian political parties. The objective is to fill the existing capacity gaps political parties have in internal election management by creating knowledge, imparting skills and providing appropriate information on primary election planning, managing and administration.
Workshop Discussions
The workshop will be structured in two sessions. Session one aims to assess the general state of political parties in Tanzania, where as session two will examine the various facets of intra-party operations from primary elections to organisational and management structures.
Session One: Overview and Regional Experience
- Regional paper - An analysis of intra-party dynamics of political parties; a comparative survey of experiences in SADC
- A paper on the State of Political Parties in Tanzania - An examination of Tanzania's political landscape as it relates to the existence, functioning and dynamics of multiparty politics in Tanzania
Session Two: Thematic areas
Quite often a discussion of multiparty politics in the region takes a national focus which largely studies the impact of political party deficiencies on democracy at the national level and thereby either ignores or marginalises the internal processes of political parties. Increasingly however intra-party democracy is being recognised as a necessary aspect of a healthy democracy and thereby an important area for discussion in particular for countries with political parties that lack such democratic internal processes. With regards to transitional democracies, what has tended to occur often is a political environment in which parties are ill organised, insufficiently institutionalised and lack transparent and accountable regulatory mechanisms toppled with non-democratic leadership styles. The following themes will therefore aim to bring to the fore these exact issues by highlighting the trends in Tanzania for each specific internal-party feature, the existing difficulties/challenges parties experience in nurturing a democratic culture on that feature, and the impact it has on the development of Tanzania's nascent democracy.
- Primary elections The research paper on this theme will provide a critical analysis of the primary election processes deployed within each party; in other words it will seek to establish how candidates within political parties are selected; it will identify the different methods that parties deploy for the selection process; examine the extent to which these methods are democratic; identify the challenges parties face and reasons for failing to institutionalise this conventional feature of internal party democracy.
- Internal Party Organisational structures This research paper seeks to describe the institutionalisation of the main Tanzanian parties, primarily focusing on institutional building as well as the main factors that appear to limit institutional development. An analysis of the institutional developments of Tanzanian parties will essentially require a look at the following main dimensions; internal party values; management and organisational structures. A party at best during its formative stages requires certain organisational arrangements to be institutionalised for it to function. The paper will describe these arrangements whether formal or informal such as methods of task execution, internal functioning, structuring of the organisation in the form of committees and administrative agencies. It will in addition assess the extent to which these structures have been institutionalised; and how a lack of them affects the operation and stability of a political party.
- Political Party financing Equally important is an analysis that focuses on the availability of financial resources; how these are distributed to candidates and regulated within the party. An analysis of party financing will aim to draw attention to the various challenges parties face with this phenomenon; how parties plan to overcome these challenges and more importantly how this has affected the overall development of parties in Tanzania.
- Women's Participation in party politics This research paper is meant to describe the various developments initiated to date that are geared towards rectifying gender imbalance in political participation within political parties. The discussion should focus on the factors that seem to account for gender imbalance in political parties, give an overview of the current trends of gender gaps in various parties; as well as an analysis on the efforts employed by parties to rectify this imbalance and whether these have made a difference or not.