Democracy and Elections in Africa

1. Introduction

chapter one Introduction This book is about how and why political systems develop the different qualities that characterize regimes as democratic, semidemocratic, or authoritarian. Such differences in political systems have been an object of study at least since Aristotle formalized the distinctions among monarchy, oligarchy, and anarchy. Many qualities of political regimes warrant closer inspection, but this study examines a very precise set, one that is of unique interest for the greater amount of freedom it provides for the people in the world: democratic qualities. To speak of democratic qualities implies that we know what democracy is. While there are many views on what democracy is—or ought to be—a common denominator among modern democracies is elections. Partly, this commonality is a consequence of the practical concerns, recognized by James Madison (1789/1961, 81–84), Thomas Jefferson (1816/1903–1904), and John Stuart Mill (1861/1958, 212–218), that larger democratic political systems require representative government (Seligson and Booth 1995, 6). But elections are also and more importantly an institutionalized attempt to actualize the essence of democracy: rule of the people by the people. Every modern definition of representative democracy includes participatory and contested elections perceived as the legitimate procedure for the translation of rule by the people into workable executive and legislative power. Elections alone are not sufficient to make a democracy, yet no other institution precedes participatory, competitive, and legitimate elections in instrumental importance for self-government (cf. Bratton and van de Walle 1997). By studying the electoral processes—the campaign, polling day, the immediate response to results, the acceptance or rejection of the outcome by various groups—we study the mechanism of translating people’s power to rule into governmental power as vested in systems of representative government. My approach focuses on three dependent variables—participation, competition, and legitimacy—as democratic qualities of elections. Operationalized well, these variables are empirically observable in actual electoral behavior and can measure de facto regime qualities. the role of elections My overall purpose in this book is to demonstrate the significance of elections, as the realization of rule by the people, in fostering democratization in Africa. I argue that elections in newly democratizing countries do not signal the completion of the transition to democracy but rather foster liberalization and have a self-reinforcing power that promotes increased democracy in Africa’s political regimes. Elections also facilitate the institutionalization of and deepening of actual civil liberties in the society and are a causal variable in democratization. This is not to say that elections are the only important factor in expanding civil liberties and democracy; however, they have so far not received adequate recognition in the literature. In pursuit of this overall purpose, a necessary first step was to create a comprehensive empirical data set of all elections in Africa from 1989 to 2003. The second research objective was an empirical chronicling of the democratic qualities of the elections, which would make it possible to test over time a set of empirical generalizations on the development of African politics that emanates from Bratton and van de Walle’s (1997) seminal contribution. Objective number three was to evaluate different methodological approaches to the study of elections as they relate to democracy, in order to show the limitations and fallacies inherent in some approaches. The literature on transitions to democracy and on elections in Africa hypothesizes about the development of the democratic content of elections after first or so called “founding” elections. The fourth objective addressed this second set of hypotheses and tested an alternative generalization about the power of elections: their self-reinforcing and self-improving quality. The final objective of the study was to develop a theoretical framework of causal links between the power of elections and further democratization in a society. This framework of the democratizing power of elections is corroborated by five tests and constitutes an addition to the literature on comparative democratization. Lastly, I reflect on the implications of this new evidence for the established theories of transition to and consolidation of democracy in the Third World. There are several benefits to pursuing these five interrelated objectives in a single coherent study. It allows for inquiry into some of the core hypotheses in the field 2 d e m o c r a c y a n d e l e c t i o n s i n a f r i c a [3.136.154.103] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 11...