Page 48 - IIUM Press Rights Catalogue 2020

46

Party Constitutions and Political Challenges in a Democracy: Nigeria
in the Fourth Republic
Aliyu Mukhtar Katsina
ISBN 978-967-418-407-0
Pages : 267
Price : RM60.00 / € 30.00
Year : 2016
Party Constitutions and Political Challenges in a Democracy: Nigeria
in the Fourth Republic is a book about political parties in Nigeria’s
Fourth Republic – their nature, character, behavior – and how they
use constitutions to set their priorities and tackle political challenges
inherent in their environment. The discourse on parties as important
democratic institutions and that of party politics as indispensable
component of electoral and representative democratic governance in
Nigeria’s Fourth Republic is intriguing. What other reason(s) exist(s)
to compel parties to adopt constitutions; how do political parties navigate their way using their
respective constitutions through the maze of challenges that exist in their environment; how
do they respond to these challenges; and how and why do their responses differ from each
other.

In this book, Aliyu Mukhtar Katsina focuses on the major political parties of Nigeria’s Fourth
Republic – their nature, character, behavior, experience, ideologies, challenges and priorities
to answer these interesting questions and to illuminate in a fascinating way how political
parties generally use their constitutions to perform functions in the political system that are
much more than mundane and normative in nature.

The book shows that party constitutions are active documents with which political parties
respond to challenges of inter-party rivalry that subsists in multi-party democracies; internal
conflict which is ever-present in complex political organizations; ideological orientation as a
means of self-differentiation in the political system; legitimating party decisions; and, of course,
party laws that require political parties to adopt constitutions as one of the pre-conditions
for registration. The book demonstrates that differences in how political parties frame their
constitutions depend on a number of variables – the interests of their founders; their electoral
successes; their respective ages; their historical experiences; and party laws that condition
their perception of their environment and the challenges intrinsic to that environment.