Political instability in independent black Africa.

The article presents information on the political instability in independent black Africa. This paper is an attempt to (1) clarify conceptual approaches to the study of political instability, conflict and violence; (2) summarize and compare existing quantitative investigations of these phenomena in national political systems and (3) investigate empirical relationships between different kinds of political instability in contemporary African nations, which have been largely omitted from existing published work. Political systems are those structured social relationships in which values are authoritatively allocated, or in which it is determined "who gets what, when, how." Put otherwise, political relationships are that sub-set of social relations concerned with the goal-attainment of the society, or with getting and distributing the values which groups in society want. In social systems of maximum value-congruence, political behavior is literally the administration of valued things, but in societies where goals are not universally shared, politics is the distribution of things by authorities, whose social roles are based on the expectation that members of the society who do not receive the rewards they want will either voluntarily comply with authoritative decisions or be forced to comply.