About

The provided page text does not contain a professional biography or detailed information about Professor Michael Lofchie's research focus, background, or key contributions. Therefore, the JSON output is an empty string for the biography.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Socioeconomics

Selected publications

• Political Constraints on African Development

  University of California Press eBooks · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law
  PublisherDOI

• ZANZIBAR

  University of California Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Contesting Constitutional Multi-Culturalism in Tanzania: The Trials of Christopher Mtikila

  Journal of Political Science and International Relations · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Law

  Conflicts over the permissible limits on speech that weaponizes racial, religious, and ethnic identities are a global phenomenon. Tanzania’s constitutional and legal debates over this matter are a microcosm of a global dialogue. Since the early years of independence, Tanzania has imposed constitutional and legal restrictions on speech that speech that espouses ethnic, religious, or racial divisions. These restrictions are the surviving portion of founder-President Julius Nyerere’s multi-faceted effort to construct a multi-cultural political environment. Tanzania’s early leaders were deeply aware that ethnic rivalries had come to cominate the political life of other countries in their region. They were determined that Tanzania should become and remain the non-Sudan, non-Rwanda, and non-Kenya of Eastern Arica. They did so by introducing constitutional and restrictions on ethnic political appears into the country’s constitution and electoral laws. Since independence, each iteration of the Tanzanian Constitution has forbidden the registration of political parties that base their electoral appeal on these forms of speech. Tanzania has also embedded these limitations in its electoral laws, which limit candidacy for electoral office, at both national and local levels, to candidates nominated by registered parties. These limitations have given rise to more than twenty years of constitutional litigation. This article presents a study of the key constitutional cases. The methodology of this article is a close examination of a series of trials in which Tanzania’s constitution and electoral laws have been subjected to litigation. Four trials are of utmost significance: two, before the Tanzanian High Court; one, before the Tanzania Court of Appeal, and one before the African Court of Human and People’s Rights. Despite adverse court rulings, Tanzania’s political leaders appear determined to retain the restrictive portions of their constitution and electoral system; these remain in place to the present time.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reflections on the Tanzanian Trajectory:

  Boydell & Brewer eBooks · 2019-04-19 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Reflections on the Tanzanian Trajectory: Decline and Recovery

  2019-04-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The U-shaped arc of Tanzania's post-independence economic trajectory is broadly familiar. It divides into two periods of unequal length. After a brief period of growth immediately following independence, Tanzania entered an era of economic decline that lasted for about twenty years, from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s. This was followed by economic reforms that have led to three decades of economic expansion, from the mid-1980s to the present. Several questions suggest themselves: What caused the economic decline? Why did it persist for so long? Why did Tanzania change its policies in the mid-1980s? And, what has the change meant for ordinary Tanzanians? Introduction Academic discussions of Tanzania frequently begin – and often end – with consideration of the influence of founder-president Julius Nyerere. His humanistic socialism portrayed a self-reliant society that would devote its resources to improving economic conditions for the poorest Tanzanians. Nyerere's philosophical idealism provides ongoing subject-matter for nostalgic discussions in scholarly conferences and required reading in university classes on African politics. It also provides a counter-culture of social justice against which some Tanzanians judge the current administration. Some narrators abet this imagery by portraying the Tanzanian story as one of Nyerere's personal idealism brought low by a fatal combination of forces including self-interested political opponents, the class interests of those who might lose out under socialism, and the corrosive force of individual acquisitiveness (Mwakikagile 2009). Not all agree. Coulson (2013) directs attention to the dissonance between Nyerere's vision and the dismal reality of an economy whose failings placed its most valued components, universal access to primary education and basic health services, at risk. Tanzania's decline is well documented. The World Bank's classic study of Africa's economic crisis, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (World Bank 1981), known as the Berg Report , singled out Tanzania alongside Ghana as one of Africa's leading examples of poor economic performance. The Berg Report (p. 26) emphasized the loss of foreign exchange earnings caused by a decline in agricultural exports: During the last 15 years, the volume of exports in Tanzania has declined dramatically. In 1980, the total exports of the country's major commodities (cotton, coffee, cloves, sisal, cashew nuts, tobacco and tea, which account for two-thirds of the nation's export earnings) were 28 percent lower than in 1966 and 34 percent lower than in 1973.

  PublisherDOI

• 3 Reflections on the Tanzanian Trajectory: Decline and Recovery

  Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2019-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The murder of Wilbert Klerruu: collective agriculture on trial in Tanzania

  Journal of Eastern African Studies · 2018-09-29 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article uses the idea of a “tipping event” to help explain why the Government of Julius Nyerere called an abrupt end to the collective aspect of its policy of collective villagization. Perhaps the most striking feature of the program was its precipitous trajectory; intensive efforts at collectivization between 1970 and early 1973 gave way to an abrupt de-emphasis on the collective aspect of the program that may have begun to manifest itself as early as mid-1972. Of all the Tanzanian government's ambitious efforts to build a socialist economy, which included nationalization of the banking system, rental housing, and large industries as well as the creation of a state monopoly over the procurement, processing, and marketing of food staples, collective agriculture was the most short-lived. On Christmas Day 1971, an Ismani farmer, Saidi Abdallah Mwamwindi, shot and killed the Iringa Regional Commissioner, Dr. Wilbert Andrew Klerruu. As the murder trial proceeded during 1972, even the most ideologically inclined of Nyerere's allies became aware that their choice of agricultural policy was imposing deep political costs on the governing party in the form of declining rural support.

  PublisherDOI

• The Political Economy of Tanzania

  University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2014-01-16 · 68 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Roots of Civic Peace in Tanzania

  Palgrave Macmillan eBooks · 2013-11-15 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Roots of Civic Peace in Tanzania

  Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks · 2013-01-01 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Tanzania’s1 postindependence politico-economic trajectory is familiar in every major respect but one. In the economic realm, its well-documented decline replicated the economic experience of a host of other newly independent African nations. The two decades following independence in 1961 were a period of deepening economic crisis, as the country suffered a decline that sharply lowered real per capita income. Tanzania’s postindependence political trajectory also followed a familiar pattern, as the lively multiparty democracy of the early independence period was replaced by a single-party system that maintained itself principally through a host of repressive mechanisms and oppressive laws. Within a short time of independence, Tanzania had become a one-party autocracy. However, Tanzania has differed markedly from the vast majority of African countries in a third important respect. It possesses a culture of civic peace that contrasts with the political atmosphere in African countries where ethnic or religious animosities are the basis for political conflict. In Tanzania, ethnicity, religion, and race do not provide the principal bases of political affiliation or party identification, and Tanzanians recoil at political parties or leaders that seek to politicize these factors for their political advantage.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Richard L. Sklar

  12 shared

• Gerald J. Bender

  University of California System

  9 shared

• Robert H. Bates

  9 shared

• C Goncharov

  8 shared

• Michael D. Intriligator

  6 shared

• William C. Potter

  6 shared

• Harvey Glickman

  5 shared

• Stephen Commins

  5 shared