The October 12, 2025, presidential election in Cameroon has culminated in a familiar, yet deeply contested, outcome. While the Cameroon Constitutional Council proclaimed the incumbent Biya as winner on October 27th, the political landscape is fractured by competing victory claims and allegations of electoral malpractices. Opposition candidate Issa Tchiroma, a former ally of Biya, has declared victory, a move mirrored by fervent supporters and key members of President Paul Biya’s ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM). This climate of dual claims creates a tense political stalemate, yet the ultimate institutional authority rests with the Constitutional Council, which is widely anticipated to declare Biya the winner, thereby extending his rule into a fifth decade. This recurring cycle of contested elections and institutional reaffirmation has once again ignited interest on the mechanisms of political survival in authoritarian-leaning regimes. Cameroon stands as a stark monument to the complexities of leadership longevity, presenting challenges to existing theories of political survival.

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Among the most influential frameworks for understanding this phenomenon is the selectorate theory of political survival, articulated most comprehensively by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow in their seminal work, The Logic of Political Survival. The theory posits a universal calculus through which leaders, by manipulating a core coalition of supporters within a larger body of potential backers, can engineer their own political permanence. At first glance, Biya’s Cameroon, with its entrenched patronage networks and a ruling party that has mastered the levers of state power, appears to be a textbook case of selectorate theory in action.

However, a deeper analysis reveals a significant puzzle. While the theory offers valuable insights, its application to Cameroon is fraught with anomalies that expose its limitations. The Cameroonian case demonstrates that the theory’s rational-choice core, focused on the strategic distribution of goods to a calculable coalition, struggles to fully account for the pervasive, informal, and often passive logics of a neopatrimonial state. This article, seeks to critically evaluate the explanatory power of selectorate theory for understanding Biya’s longevity. It will argue that while the theory provides a useful starting point, its inability to adequately incorporate the dynamics of systemic coercion, the strategic use of political inertia, and the insulating role of international actors limits its comprehensiveness in the Cameroonian context.

This article is structured in three parts. First, it outlines the core tenets of selectorate theory, establishing its theoretical framework. Second, it systematically analyzes the limitations of this theory when applied to Cameroon. Finally, the conclusion synthesizes these critiques and calls for a more nuanced, context-sensitive approach to theorizing political survival in Africa’s long-lasting regimes.

The Selectorate Theory of Political Survival

Selectorate theory is a formal model of politics that reduces the complexities of governance to a strategic game of coalition-building. Its power lies in its parsimony, explaining a wide range of political outcomes—from democratic accountability to kleptocratic dictatorship—using a few key variables. The theory divides the politically relevant population into three nested groups: the residents, who are the entire population subject to the government’s authority; the selectorate, which is the subset of residents with a formal role in selecting the leader (such as voters in a democracy or party members in a single-party state); and the winning coalition, defined as the minimal set of supporters within the selectorate whose endorsement is essential for the leader to retain power.

The central logic of political survival, according to the theory, revolves around the leader’s need to maintain the loyalty of this winning coalition. Leaders achieve this through the strategic distribution of two types of goods: private goods and public goods. Private goods are benefits that can be targeted exclusively to coalition members, such as bribes, cabinet positions, lucrative business contracts, and state jobs. Public goods, in contrast, are benefits that are non-excludable and available to all residents, such as national........

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