Center for African Studies

Nicholas N. Kerr, UF.

“Election Commissions & Opposition Behavior in Africa’s Multiparty Regimes: Does Institutional Performance Matter for Election Boycotts and Losers’ Compliance?”

March 15 | 3:00pm EST

Register to attend on Zoom.

As the second wave of democratization swept through Africa in the early 1990s, scholars and policymakers heralded independent election commissions (ECs) as institutional innovations. The hope was that ECs would enhance election legitimacy and deepen democracy by 1) insulating the running of elections from incumbents who had a penchant for electoral manipulation, and 2) creating the institutional capability to organize elections in contexts where state institutions lacked the capacity to supervise the largest peacetime mobilization of a country’s resources. However, after almost 30 years of multiparty rule in Africa, our collective understanding of whether ECs matter for promoting free, fair and credible elections remains underdeveloped.

This talk, which is based on a chapter from a larger book project titled Election Commissions & Democratization in Africa, explores the consequences of the performance election commissions (ECs) on the behavior of political elites. Specifically, I argue that because of the centrality of ECs to the legitimacy of African elections, political elites have an incentive to monitor the de facto autonomy and capacity of the institution and incorporate this information when deciding whether 1) to boycott elections and 2) to challenge election results. Using election-level data across 40 African countries since 1990, the results suggest that pre-election boycotts are more likely when ECs lack de facto autonomy, whereas EC de facto capacity is associated with a reduced likelihood of post-election challenges. These findings have implications for institutional theories by suggesting that the legitimacy of elections and regime processes in Africa are reflective of the performance of electoral governance institutions.