Abstract
Violence in African Elections: Between Democracy and Big Man Politics is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on electoral violence. It is a pleasure to read these well-informed accounts of experts who often spent years in the field. The very similar make-up of all the chapters makes them easy to follow and suggests that either the contributors were unusually disciplined or that the editors did an excellent job.
Africa is a huge continent and clearly, in a book where each chapter is a case study of one (part of) a country, choices have to be made. Unfortunately, because case selection is never explained, the reader does not learn why the book focuses on Kenya (twice), Nigeria (twice), Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Moreover, the list of countries reveals two kinds of bias that limit the possibility to generalize the findings and that potentially affect the analysis. First, the fact that many of the countries are post-conflict societies never becomes an explicit theme. Second, no systematic attempt is made to examine the relationship between electoral violence and regime type. Some of the countries covered are not “electoral” (p. 11) or even “emerging” (p. 250) democracies, but electoral authoritarian regimes. The case studies of Burundi, Uganda, and Zimbabwe in particular reveal the central role of electoral violence in the strategy of authoritarian incumbents to ward off opposition challenges.
What the book does very well is to link macro-level factors at the national level to micro-dynamics at the local level. A recurring theme is how big man politics and elections in regular cycles connect local supply of the capacity for violence with the demand of national politicians for electoral support. Another strength is explicit attention to the questions of “Why, where, when, who?” Even in the same country, some elections are more violent than others and some places suffer more than others. To find out what can explain this variation, it makes sense to follow a “bottom-up perspective” (p. 2). Less felicitous is the notion of the “everyday politics of electoral violence” (p. 2), which combined with an “inductive empirical approach” (p. 7), results in a lack of focus. In several chapters, electoral violence only figures at the margins.
Arguably, more explicit attention to case-based research methods could have strengthened the conclusions of the individual chapters. For example, the analysis of electoral violence in the context of Uganda’s competitive authoritarian regime is empirically rich and analytically rigorous. Still, it convinces more as a hypothesis-generating study with insights to be tested elsewhere than as proof that “learning processes matter” (p. 61). The chapter on Côte d’Ivoire identifies four enabling conditions for electoral violence (lack of integration of migrant populations, autochthons’ loss of land, the disputed nature of land sales, the weakening of chieftaincies). This invites a comparison of electoral violence in those parts of the country where these conditions hold with those where they do not, or do so to a lesser extent. An analysis in terms of sufficient and necessary conditions could have helped to clarify exactly how the factors are “interrelated” (p. 77).
The introduction warns that the risk of electoral violence may increase in Africa as democracy takes hold and electoral competition grows stronger (p. 15). In other words, more democracy on the continent, paradoxically, might result in more violent elections. The conclusion, in contrast, cautions that “illiberal democracies” are especially prone to electoral violence. In other words, it is the lack of democracy that makes elections more violent. Whatever the cause, the editors believe that the trend can be reversed. The first of five policy implications formulated in the conclusion is to lower the stake of the elections. Several chapters note the winner-take-all nature of Africa’s political regimes. The story of ex-combatants involved on both sides of the presidential elections in Liberia provides a particularly telling example. For the editors, the lesson is to reduce the benefits of winning and to enlarge the role for political losers in the system (p. 259). This can be done through institutional reform, including a strengthening of parliament, more power to local government, and “electoral reform.” The editors do not explain what kind of electoral reform they have in mind, but it is clear that winner-take-all electoral systems should make way for more proportional electoral systems. Another obvious way to reduce the concentration of power that characterizes Africa’s presidential politics would be a change to a parliamentary system of government.
Readers of Party Politics will be struck by the marginal role of parties in the analysis. This is partly a result of choices made by the editors and the contributors, partly a reflection of the weakness of African parties and the prevalence of big man politics. It does beg the question, though, what is special about electoral violence in African elections? Whether, say, a similar collection of contributions on electoral violence in South-East Asia would have painted a different picture and reached different conclusions. At a minimum, the editors could have reflected on the advantages and limitations of choosing to study electoral violence within one world region. Hopefully, the next step in research on electoral violence will be comparative area studies.