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A considerable literature examines the effect of voter information on candidate strategies and voter–politician interactions in the developing world. The voter information literature argues that information can improve accountability because more informed voters are harder to woo with traditional campaign tools, such as ethnic appeals and vote-buying. However, this literature has largely ignored the reaction of political candidates and thus may reach conclusions that are overly optimistic regarding the impact of information on electoral accountability. We argue that voter information can increase electoral violence in developing countries where politicians face fewer institutional constraints on their campaign tactics. When violence is used as a campaign strategy, more informed electorates are more at risk because they are harder to sway through alternative campaign techniques. Using data from 35 African countries, we show that respondents receiving their news predominantly from newspapers are a good proxy for informed voters because they differ in terms of their political attitudes from respondents consuming no news or receiving it via other channels. Combining the geo-coded survey data with pre-electoral violence event data, we find a robust positive association between newspaper readership and fear of and exposure to campaign violence. This finding contributes to the micro-foundations of election violence and adds a cautionary note for voter information programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on electoral violence has focused on its causes as well as its scope, ignoring the implications for citizens trying to practice their political citizenship. Informed citizens are a central part of a functioning democracy. The emotive response to violence may play an important role here. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of how the voter responds to violence. Recent work on the role of emotions in politics has demonstrated its positive role for cognition, as fear can increase the individual’s propensity to amass information and reevaluate attitudes and behavior. This is tested in a hitherto unexamined context, namely, Sub-Saharan Africa, using the Afrobarometer survey (20 different countries). In general, political fear is a significant predictor of political knowledge, but in the opposite direction compared to the hypothesis. The affective intelligence hypothesis only receives partial support using this data, namely, in countries with high levels of political violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The developing world currently loses more money via capital flight than it receives through foreign aid and foreign direct investment combined. This "leakage" of capital produces many pernicious consequences for developing economies. What factors influence capital flight? I argue that it follows an electoral cycle. Greater uncertainty prior to elections incentivizes those in the business sector to take their money elsewhere. Using data from thirty-six African countries from 1971 to 2009, I find support for my argument: capital flight is higher during election years than it is otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In democratic Africa, where ethnicity is a key driver of vote choice, politicians must attract voters across ethnic lines. This article explores one way politicians can do this: by appealing to a coethnic bond through their spouse. We propose that cross-ethnic spouses can help candidates send credible signals of coalition building before an election. We test this argument with a survey experiment in Benin, where President Yayi has married across ethnic lines. Our results confirm that priming the first lady’s ethnicity increases support for President Yayi among her coethnics. We generalize these results by combining new data on leader-spouse ethnicity with Afrobarometer survey data. Our results suggest that cross-ethnic marriages are one tool leaders can use to shore up support in multiethnic elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The utility of post-conflict elections in sub-Saharan Africa has been the subject of lively academic and policy debates. While some scholars associate several electoral outcomes with votes for peace, others argue that post-conflict elections exacerbate existing cleavages and could reproduce the conditions that led to civil war if the right electoral system is not employed. This paper examines these contesting claims using electoral data in a comparative study of the first truly post-conflict elections in Sierra Leone and Liberia. The analysis shows that political leaders in both countries received votes across numerous cleavage lines in contradiction with an ethnic census. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of multiparty competition around the world following the Cold War raises the specter of rising civil violence during election periods in emerging democracies and hybrid regimes. Yet there are also plausible theoretical reasons to expect dropping civil violence around elections in these states or, alternatively, no significant change in the level of such conflict. This article tests these hypotheses in Africa with the aid of event data on the daily rate of civil violence incidents (1997–2013). It asks if civil violence in that region is more frequent, less frequent or constant during election cycles compared to other times. To guard against definitional and data selection problems encountered in some prior cross-national studies of elections and use of force, the research design emphasizes the relative risk of social conflict at the national level. The analysis suggests three distinct patterns in Africa. Given countrywide norms, election periods in most countries run the same relative risk of a day with violent events as do non-election periods. A subset of African countries exists, however, with more civil violence during elections when judged against the national reference line for conflict. There is a smaller group of countries where the risk of electoral civil violence is comparatively low. While caution should be exercised in interpreting the findings, the policy implication is that no general reason exists to preclude or defer elections in Africa as a way to minimize social conflict associated with political campaigns, although there may be specific reasons to do so in particular countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over 90 per cent of the world’s states currently select their national leaders through multiparty elections. However, in Africa the quality of elections still varies widely, ranging from elections plagued by violence and fraud to elections that are relatively ‘free and fair’. Yet, little is known about trade-offs between different strategies of electoral manipulation and the differences between incumbent and opposition actors’ strategies. We theorize that choices for specific types of manipulation are driven by available resources and cost considerations for both incumbents and opposition actors, and are mutually responsive. We also suggest that costs of manipulative strategies are shaped by the level of democratization. We test our hypotheses on a time series, cross-sectional data set with observations for 286 African elections from 1986 to 2012. We find that democratization makes ‘cheap’ forms of electoral manipulation available to incumbents such as intimidation and manipulating electoral administration less viable, thus leading to increases in vote buying. The future of democracy in Africa thus promises elections where the administration of elections becomes better and better but at the same time vote buying will increase. Not all things go together, at least not all the time. The future of democracy in Africa will mean more money in politics, more patronage and more clientelistic offers thrown around, at least in the short to medium term. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The conventional wisdom regarding party system fragmentation assumes that the effects of electoral systems and social cleavages are linear. However, recent work applying organizational ecology theories to the study of party systems has challenged the degree to which electoral system effects are linear. This paper applies such concepts to the study of social cleavages. Drawing from theories of organizational ecology and the experience of many ethnically diverse African party systems, I argue that the effects of ethnic diversity are nonlinear, with party system fragmentation increasing until reaching moderate levels of diversity before declining as diversity reaches extreme values. Examining this argument cross-nationally, the results show that accounting for nonlinearity in ethnic diversity effects significantly improves model fit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proponents of democratization often claim that liberal institutions have a palliative effect on the level of conflict within societies. Critics, however, suggest that the instruments of democracy, especially elections, can spark political violence, particularly in weakly institutionalized settings. Using the newly available Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD), we examine the relationship between executive elections and social conflict in Africa for the period 1990-2009. We also assess the conditions which make elections more or less violent. We examine elections in (1) countries faced with armed conflict, (2) post-conflict settings, (3) elections in autocracies, and (4) in relatively poor countries. We also look at characteristics of elections themselves, including the margin of victory, the presence of observers, and allegations of vote fraud. Results show that while elections can sometimes spark violence, free and fair elections in genuinely democratic contexts are much less conflict prone, while illiberal elections are especially problematic. We do not find that current or recent armed conflict on a country's territory makes elections more violent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At first glance, ethnically based and populist forms of mobilization appear to be contradictory and ultimately mutually exclusive phenomena. Appealing to voters on the basis of a shared sense of economic grievance against powerful or wealthy sections of society does not fit well with the emphasis on sectional divisions that is required to rally support on the basis of ethnicity or region. Yet over the past ten years a number of opposition political parties in Africa have risen to prominence by fusing populist and ethnic constituencies, a form of political mobilization we call “ethnopopulism”. This article employs a pairwise comparison of Kenya and Zambia to explain how leaders have been able to harness this apparently incompatible combination to considerable electoral effect. We argue that in order to fully overcome the tensions at the heart of ethnopopulism leaders need to identify and incorporate shared narratives of exclusion felt by different communal and interest groups. But we also show that the narratives available to political entrepreneurs are shaped both by the structure of society and the ideas and networks left over from past episodes of political mobilization. Finally, we argue that variation in the reach of the urban political economy and the extent to which ethnic identities have historically been politicized shape the potential for populist mobilization to overcome ethnic divisions, and hence challenge prevailing patterns of “ethnic politics”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Electoral coordination has been a primary concern for scholars of African politics, interested in topics such as ethnic conflict mitigation and democratisation, for decades. However, understanding of micro-level electoral coordination in Sub-Saharan Africa is generally still very limited. This study is the first to investigate voter coordination in Sub-Saharan Africa using constituency-level election results. Studying 20 single-member district elections during the period 1990–2010 in five Anglophone African countries (Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and Zambia) demonstrates that many African elections continue to show low levels of electoral coordination. Using a multi-level regression analysis, the study shows that the most important explanation for low levels of coordination across Africa is high voter volatility. It is argued that insufficient information makes it hard for voters and candidates to act strategically. However, the level of democracy, which has been emphasised in earlier aggregate level research, does not significantly affect the level of coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article the authors conduct focused case studies on Zambia and Ghana to investigate the increasingly diverse popular reactions to Chinese engagement throughout the region of sub-Saharan Africa. In this effort they challenge the existing binary exploitation/opportunity paradigm through which growing Chinese engagement in sub-Saharan Africa is often analyzed. Instead, they propose an alternative framework, which centers less on the positive or nefarious nature of Chinese involvement and more on the institutional structures of African regimes. As opposed to closed autocracies and consolidated multiparty democracies, fluid transitional states create opportunities for the appearance of anti-Chinese populist movements akin to Michael Sata and the Patriotic Front in Zambia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Alongside the spread of democracy in the developing world, vote buying has emerged as an integral part of election campaigns. Yet, we know little about the causes of vote buying in young democracies. In this paper, we analyse the sources of vote buying in sub-Saharan African. Using data from the Afrobarometer, we focus on the impact of poverty on vote buying at the individual- and country-level. Results from multilevel regressions show that poor voters are significantly more likely to be targets of vote buying than wealthier voters. This effect increases when elections are highly competitive. Thus, micro-level poverty seems to be an important source of vote buying in Africa and has major implications for the way electoral democracy operates. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Orderly turnover of executive office between political parties and their leaders in elections following a foundation election is widely identified as a benchmark in the entrenchment of procedural democracy. This paper addresses turnover of power between political parties and presidents in new African democracies. What conditions and settings facilitate orderly turnovers? The paper considers a set of relatively successful cases of such successions as well as cases in which incumbent parties have refused to concede electoral defeat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars blame high levels of ethnic heterogeneity for many social and political ills, including poor economic growth, corruption, and policy gridlock. But it can be argued that, in seeking reelection, politicians will join multiethnic coalitions to pass policies in this endeavor. Further, government expenditure increases with coalition size, as each politician seeks policies that benefit his or her own constituents. Subnational data from Zambia, the use of which helps control for country-level factors hindering standard cross-national studies of fiscal politics, indicate that government spending increases with ethnic heterogeneity. This evidence challenges studies which ignore the incentives generated by political institutions and claim that ethnicity leads directly to undesirable outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses democratization processes in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing in particular on the creation of political legitimacy through elections. The author critiques scholarship on electoral fraud and manipulation as exaggerated, examines the attitudes of Africans to democratic political participation, and investigates incidents of political violence in the wake of elections.

In seeking to maintain their power, many African regimes rely on strategies of extraversion, converting their dependent relations with the external world into domestic resources and authority. This article assesses the relationship between extraversion and political liberalization, a dimension of African democratization that has been somewhat underappreciated in recent empirical studies. African countries vary in their extraversion portfolios, or the dimensions of their relations to the outside world that they can instrumentalize, and these variations correspond both to different degrees of vulnerability to the demands of foreign donors and to different preferences from the donors themselves. We find four quantitative measures of extraversion vulnerability to be statistically associated with the initial transitions of the 1989–1995 period and with the ‘consolidations’ at different levels of democracy observable between 1995 and 2011. These findings shed new light on both democratic and hybrid regime trajectories in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents the full May 2012 issue of the "Africa Research Bulletin: Political, Social and Cultural Series." It reports on the elections in Guinea Bissau in April that were forestalled by a military coup. It announces the appointment of Augustin Matata Ponyo as Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by President Joseph Kabila. It also talks about candidates for the first post-revolution presidential election of Egypt in May.

Africa has entered the era of democratic government and economic globalisation. The first steps on this road are not free from growing pains, nor can we predict that democratic government will assume the same form in all African countries, any more than their style of participation in a global economy. In this respect South Africa remains a shining example to African countries of relative success in these two fields. This article focuses on the evolution of African democracy from the angle of power-sharing problems, which are often the sequel to unsuccessful elections. African diversity requires the establishment of a culture of effective power sharing, which is viewed in the context of style of government and economic realities. The case of Zimbabwe is highlighted. The question is whether there are ethical norms to provide guidelines for power-sharing negotiations. It is discussed with reference to a biological hermeneutics of desire, scarcity and self-interest. The democratic ideal of citizens' involvement in processes of government is outlined in terms of Hannah Arendt's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic consolidation depends on common perceptions of institutional legitimacy among citizens aligned with governing and opposition parties. Elections always result in winners and losers, but if they also create subservient insiders and aggrieved outsiders, the future of the democratic system will be uncertain. This article theorizes about why certain electoral qualities (elections that produce turnovers, are peaceful, accepted by opposition parties, and free and fair) should reduce winner-loser gaps in perceived institutional legitimacy. The hypotheses are tested using a hierarchical two-step statistical procedure to analyze three rounds of Afrobarometer microlevel data combined with national-level data on African elections between 1989 and 2006. The analyses indicate that electoral turnovers (and only turnovers) have a significant moderating effect on the citizenry. Following alternations of power, winners and losers converge in their attitudes about their institutions, thus furthering the consolidation of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides insights on the elections, electoral systems and political conflict in Africa. Democratization and self-sustaining peace process are said to depend on elections. The importance of electoral system design to democratic stability in Africa is explained. Also cited are some of the principles underlying a successful design, one of which is the fair access to representation provided to women and minorities. The national elections in Sudan are considered as a test of the ability of a power sharing agreement to promote political stability.

The electoral rules under which African countries hold elections are different. For example, Botswana and Zimbabwe conduct elections under first-past-the-post plurality systems while Namibia and Burkina Faso use list PR systems. Despite these institutional differences, the outcomes of legislative elections in Africa are nonetheless similar in that almost all legislative elections there result in some form of dominant party system. This is true for those where dominance is sustained by authoritarian politics as well as those where transitions to democracy have occurred, and we explain this pattern of single-party dominance as the product of ruling party strategy. Specifically, we focus on how different electoral systems are used by ruling parties to divide different electorates in ways that achieve and sustain their electoral dominance. In this paper, we map these patterns and illustrate the dynamics of this process using Afro Barometer data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Eastern Europe's totalitarian regimes, a consensus seems to have emerged, worldwide, for the introduction of new standards into international standards, commonly called 'democratic clauses'. The aim of these clauses is to promote the emergence of and contribute to the development of states based on respect for certain democratic principles in the world, particularly in Africa. However, the impact of these standards and principles seems to have been relatively limited. As a continent which, in 45 years, has experienced almost 85 coups d'état, as well as one-party regimes, states hooked into the 'sacrosanct' principle of non-interference in internal affairs, dictatorships known as among the worst in the world, and which was the theatre, between 1963 and 1998, of nearly 26 armed conflicts which affected about 61 per cent of its population, Africa urgently needed to call on these standards and principles in order to promote the return to peace, security and stability in certain of its regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The battle for democracy on the African continent has been long and arduous. In many African countries the absence of democracy was first experienced as political authoritarianism, enforced by quickly constituted regimes mostly characterised by their totalitarianism; their intent was to dominate practically the whole lives of their citizens, and not to tolerate any serious opposition to their aims and objectives. Under the pretext of needing to build fledgling nations, or to foster social and economic development, the political powers in charge showed little respect for civil liberties or the right to object. The seriousness of elections and their role in conflicts - and thus conflict resolution - in West Africa, can only be understood against the background of the role of elections as a primary source of conflict within these states. This paper outlines and explores that background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the development of human rights enforcement mechanisms in Africa in 2002, such as the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights and the policies of the African Union. Economic, banking, and election laws in Africa are discussed in terms of human rights, and organizations such as the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child are mentioned.

Examines the background and dimensions of the electoral crisis in Africa within the democratization process on the continent. Theoretical correlation between elections and democracy; Limits and ecology of the electoral process and electoral politics; Implications for democracy.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses elections in Africa in early 2000.

The article reports on political developments in African countries as of April 2007. The legislative and senatorial by-elections in Gabon will be conducted on June 10 and July 1 respectively. Alex Tyler has been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives in Liberia. The parliamentary elections in Togo will be held on June 24.