Abstract

The Portuguese-speaking African countries offer particularly interesting case studies when the objective is to examine the political influence of the Internet. ¹ Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Sao Tome and Principe ² share the same language and a similar historical background of nearly five centuries of Portuguese colonization, and although with very different degrees of success, these countries are also commonly considered new democracies. In the early 1990s, the third wave of democratization (Huntington 1991), which had started in 1974 with the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, spread to Africa, and several sub-Saharan African countries initiated democratic reforms, mainly by adopting new constitutions, multiparty regimes, and elections as the means to select rulers. These four countries also share the particular feature of having started their democratization processes simultaneously with the worldwide expansion of the Internet.