Patterns of Electoral Governance in Africa's Emerging Democracies
| Author | Shaheen Mozaffar |
| Date | 01 January 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512102023001005 |
| Published date | 01 January 2002 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Patterns of Electoral Governance in Africa’s
Emerging Democracies
SHAHEEN MOZAFFAR
ABSTRACT.This article describes and explains patterns of electoral
governance in Africa’s emerging democracies through a systematic
examination of election management bodies (EMBs), the formal units
principally responsible for the organization and conduct of elections.
The effectiveness of EMBs as institutional linchpins of electoral
governance depends largely, but not exclusively, on their autonomy from
the government. The article measures the degree of autonomy of EMBs as
an indicator of the varying patterns of electoral governance in Africa’s
emerging democracies and employs an ordered probit model to account
for them. The model confirms the expected combined effects of the
institutional legacies of colonial governance and postcolonial
neopatrimonial regimes, ethnopolitical fragmentation and political
negotiations over new democratic institutions on the relative autonomy
of EMBs. Predicted probabilities calculated from the probit coefficients
accurately predict the separate impact of each independent variable on
the likelihood of African countries choosing non-autonomous, semi-
autonomous or autonomous EMBs.
Keywords: Africa • Democratization • Election management bodies
Elections • Electoral governance
Elections, while commonplace, have a checkered history in sub-Saharan Africa. In
the colonial period, very few elections were held and these were restricted to the
European population and selected African elites. After 1945, the independence
bargain struck between the departing European rulers and the emerging African
nationalist elites led to the rapid extension of the franchise, and most African
countries gained independence in the 1960s via competitive elections. Since then,
competitive elections have been held regularly in long-standing democracies
(Botswana, Mauritius, Gambia until 1994, and Senegal since 1979) and
intermittently in countries that experienced alternating democratic governments
International Political Science Review (2002), Vol 23, No. 1, 85–101
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and military rule (such as Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone).1As
authoritarian regimes steadily replaced democratic governments across the
continent in the 1970s, single-party regimes held regular semi-competitive
elections (as in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia), while some military
regimes organized tightly controlled plebiscitary elections to secure nominal
legitimacy (Chazan, 1979; Collier 1982; Hayward, 1987; Nohlen, Krennerich, and
Thibaut, 1998).
Since 1989, however, the spread of democracy in sub-Saharan Africa has
endowed competitive elections with special significance. They have become the
organized method of peaceful democratic transition, a salient indicator of
democratic consolidation, and the principal institutionalized means for large
numbers of people to participate peacefully in forming and changing democratic
governments afterwards. Credible competitive elections have thus become a
necessary, albeit insufficient, source of behavioral, if not attitudinal, legitimacy in
Africa’s emerging democracies (Diamond, 1999). This significance of competitive
elections also underscores the empirical importance and the analytical challenge
of electoral governance in contemporary Africa.
Empirically, effective electoral governance is obviously crucial in securing
credible elections. But, as the controversies surrounding the results of the 2000 US
presidential elections in Florida showed, electoral governance attracts critical
scrutiny when it occasionally produces bad elections, not when it routinely
produces good ones (Mozaffar and Schedler, this issue). In Africa’s fragile
democracies, however, the characteristic uncertainties of democratic transitions
and the resulting strategic dilemma of accommodating the inherent tension
between legitimacy and control that exists in political life magnify the significance
of the routine causal link between the effectiveness of electoral governance and
the credibility of democratic elections. Reinforcing this magnified significance,
extensive international election monitoring activities and assessments docu-
mented in technical reports, as well as the associated influx of large amounts of
financial and technical assistance, attest, usually correctly, to the weakness of
electoral governance as an important cause of flawed elections and hence to the
necessity of creating effective systems of electoral governance in these
democracies.2
Analytically, the challenge is to provide theoretical grounding to the practical
concerns with improving electoral governance found in the extant literature on
the topic with systematic examination of the origins, unfolding political logic, and
outcomes of the structures and processes of electoral governance (Elklit and
Reynolds, 2000; Lehoucq and Molina, forthcoming).3This requires framing the
problematic of electoral governance in terms of two broad and related tasks. The
first involves the systematic clarification of how the strategic calculations of
political actors interact with path-dependent contingencies and contextual factors
to shape the choice of rules that configure the institutional framework of electoral
governance. The second involves examining the impact of the structures and
processes that make up this framework on securing credible democratic elections
by keeping their outcomes within the unacknowledged margins of error that exist
in all democratic elections without substantially affecting those outcomes.
I undertake the first task in this article. My main goals are (a) to provide a
systematic overview of the structural patterns of electoral governance in
contemporary Africa, and (b) offer some tentative explanations for these patterns.
I focus specifically on election management bodies (EMBs), the formal units
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