African regimes commonly use strategies of balanced ethnic representation to build support. Decentralisation reforms, often promoted in order to improve political representation and state access, can undermine such strategies. In this article we use the example of the DR Congo to show the extent to which the multiplication of decentralised provinces is upending a political system largely based until now upon collective ethnic representation in the state. Not only are Congo's new provinces more ethnically homogeneous than their predecessors, but many of them have also witnessed political takeover and monopolisation by the province's dominant ethnic group. In addition, the increased number of Congolese who now find themselves non-autochthonous to their province of residence heightens their vulnerability and the potential for local conflict. Decentralisation, whose intent was proximity to governance, might well end up excluding more Congolese from the benefits of political representation. The article uses original empirical evidence on provincial ethnic distributions to support its claims.

Since 2017, four provincial legislatures have introduced bills invoking the controversial notwithstanding clause. We present an original dataset of news articles from 10 different outlets that discussed the clause while these bills were being debated in Saskatchewan and Ontario. Empirically, although the clause is typically portrayed accurately, we find over one-fifth of articles about the clause did not indicate that it must be included in legislation. Normatively, the clause was twice as likely to be portrayed negatively as it was positively, and the type of portrayal was strongly associated with the ideological orientation of the news outlet. The rate of negative portrayals was similar across the two provinces, which suggests that attitudes toward the clause may endure beyond the policy issue itself or the level of media visibility.