African Elections Research Articles

African Elections as a Testing Ground: Comparing Coverage of Cambridge Analytica in Nigerian and Kenyan Newspapers

ABSTRACT In March 2018, British and American news outlets published extensive reporting on Cambridge Analytica’s (CA) ethically and legally questionable activities in political campaigns around the world. This reporting primarily focused on three issues: data privacy and protection, unethical political campaigning on social media, and foreign involvement in national elections. While much attention has been paid to CA’s work in the US and UK, these exposés also provided details about CA’s work in presidential elections in Nigeria and Kenya. Because little attention has been paid to CA’s work in Africa, we conducted a qualitative textual analysis of four Nigerian and Kenyan newspapers to understand how media in these countries grappled with CA’s role in their respective presidential elections. Our findings demonstrate, first, that newspaper coverage in both countries relied heavily on international reporting, and second, while Nigerian newspapers covered the scandal as an intranational conflict between competing political parties, the Kenyan press wrestled with the scandal’s implications for the country’s democratic institutions.

Voting Preferences of Protesters and Non-protesters in Three South African Elections (2014–2019): Revisiting the ‘Ballot and the Brick’

ABSTRACTThis article examines the relationship between protest and voting by revisiting Booysen's ‘ballot and the brick' thesis. Booysen argued that, in South Africa, protest forms part of a ‘dual repertoire' that poor communities use to fight for service delivery between elections but that protesters, ultimately, remain loyal to the African National Congress (ANC). Since Booysen first elaborated this argument the political landscape has altered considerably. The ANC has suffered declines in electoral support at a time when protest across many social spheres has been increasing. Yet, there is little scholarship that attempts to examine the relationship between these two phenomena. This article addresses this gap through the analysis of data collected in three surveys of South African voters. Our analysis reveals that while the ANC remains the party of preference of both voters who have not engaged in protest and those that have not, we find that opposition parties are, to a greater extent, characterised by voting protesters. We suggest that party loyalty to the ANC has become a much less binding constraint on voting protesters’ indirect and direct political actions.

The 2019 South African elections: Incumbency and Uncertainty

The 2019 South African elections: Incumbency and Uncertainty

Sleight is right: Cyber control as a new battleground for African elections

Abstract Sleight of hand in manipulating the computation of results has become the new might for deciding who wins presidential elections. It appears that whoever controls the computation exercises a right to take advantage and win, and whoever loses or relinquishes control of the computation loses the election. As incumbents do not want to be identified with direct interference or rigging, hacking has become an alternative means. This raises a serious challenge for election management bodies (EMBs) and a new frontier for international observation. As electronic data management has become a key battleground, international observers cannot restrict their monitoring to the manual process alone. However, individual states may have data sensitivity concerns about granting electronic monitoring access to partisan international observers. Institutionalizing internationally agreed protocols that would allow real-time monitoring of EMBs’ computer systems by international observers or forensic audits of any stage of the electoral process to investigate interference, manipulation, hacking, and counter claims, is now a necessity. At the same time, the extent to which international monitors can be trusted to be non-partisan is of equal importance and could reduce forum shopping over time.

Economic and Socio-political Views of Online Participants in Online Political Commentary during the 2014 South African General Elections

Economic and Socio-political Views of Online Participants in Online Political Commentary during the 2014 South African General Elections

Play as an Indicator of Public Opinion in Online Political Commentary: A Content Analysis of Online News Forums Leading Up to the 2014 South African General Elections

Play as an Indicator of Public Opinion in Online Political Commentary: A Content Analysis of Online News Forums Leading Up to the 2014 South African General Elections

Free and Fair?: Observation of Selected African Elections

The first large-scale election observation was of Zimbabwe’s 1980 independence elections. Since then, election observation has become a regular worldwide feature and many international organisations, official agencies, and non-governmental organisations field observation teams. They all use similar methodologies, largely derived from the original 1980 model. A third of a century later, it may be time to consider whether the use of electoral observation has outlived its usefulness – or is itself being used to mask forms of electoral cheating. This paper considers five 21st century African elections – in Kenya (2007), Zimbabwe (2008, 2013 and 2018) and Zambia (2016), through the reflections of a pioneer of the 1980s observation prototype.

The lack of listening: News sources in South Africa’s five general elections, 1994–2014

With most political journalism research focusing on Western elections, one tends to forget that mediatization exists in non-Western reportage too. Television news is still a powerful political tool, especially in developing democracies and particularly in South Africa – the case of this research. This article investigates the sources used on television news during five democratic South African elections, 1994–2014, and aims to shed light on the type of mediatized political reporting in and about a non-Western country. The main finding of this research is that news sources during the South African elections were made up increasingly of pundits and decreasingly of political leaders and citizens. The importance of ‘listening’ directly cannot be overstated, especially in developing democracies like South Africa. A solid link between journalist and politician as well as journalist and citizen is crucial to implement substantive information necessary to enable the media’s democratic duty. When journalists ignore citizen voices in favor of interpretive and evaluative sources, this link is steadily degraded. This article suggests reasons for the drop-off of political and citizen sources in South African election reporting, and, on the eve of the sixth general election in May 2019, argues a case for more ‘straight from source’ voices in political journalism.

The evolving state of African elections

General elections could take place this year in at least 12 African countries. Despite myriad social and political reforms, a smooth handover from one leader to a new one looks uncertain in some of the 12 countries, with sectarian conflict predicted in close to half them.

Evaluation of the political affiliation of online participants in online political discussion of online news forums during the 2014 South African elections

Evaluation of the political affiliation of online participants in online political discussion of online news forums during the 2014 South African elections

Could the outcome of the 2016 US elections have been predicted from past voting patterns?

Abstract. In South Africa, a team of analysts has for some years been using statistical techniques to predict election outcomes during election nights in South Africa. The prediction method involves using statistical clusters based on past voting patterns to predict final election outcomes, using a small number of released vote counts. With the US presidential elections in November 2016 hitting the global media headlines during the time period directly after successful predictions were done for the South African elections, the team decided to investigate adapting their meth-od to forecast the final outcome in the US elections. In particular, it was felt that the time zone differences between states would affect the time at which results are released and thereby provide a window of opportunity for doing election night prediction using only the early results from the eastern side of the US. Testing the method on the US presidential elections would have two advantages: it would determine whether the core methodology could be generalised, and whether it would work to include a stronger spatial element in the modelling, since the early results released would be spatially biased due to time zone differences. This paper presents a high-level view of the overall methodology and how it was adapted to predict the results of the US presidential elections. A discussion on the clustering of spatial units within the US is also provided and the spatial distribution of results together with the Electoral College prediction results from both a ‘test-run’ and the final 2016 presidential elections are given and analysed.

Remembering the Late Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela Through the Eyes of the Poet

This article seeks to explore the life and post-democratic work of President Mandela through the eyes of the poet. More specifically, two moments in time are captured and analysed, namely, Mandela’s release from prison together with the lead up to the first democratic South African elections in 1994; and his passing in 2013. This analysis includes the work of poets such as Bongani Sitole, Maya Angelou, Raphael d’Abdon and Thabo Mbeki. The mechanics of translation and the interrelatedness of orality and literacy are explored. The poetic memory contained in this article presents us with an approximation towards the collage of collective memory in a country where economics, politics, and society still present multiple challenges, and where political power often challenges the true collective memory.

Captured Countryside? Stability and Change in Sub-National Support for African Incumbent Parties

Many existing accounts of African elections assume that voters base their electoral decisions on cues and incentives that are anchored in highly stable ethnic cleavage structures. Yet several newer contributions to the study of African electoral politics have questioned the ethno-clientelistic voting thesis and highlighted other determinants of vote choice, such as class, ideology and performance evaluation. Existing research has, however, not dealt with geographic dimensions of electoral dynamics. In this paper we contribute to this literature by studying Government-Opposition Swing (GOS) voting in 7 African countries, 28 elections and 1900 parliamentary constituencies. We show that the likelihood of GOS differs from urban to rural, and across different types of rural constituencies. GOS is significantly more common in urban areas and in highly populated rural areas, but significantly less common in the president’s home region and in sparsely populated rural regions. The results suggest that electoral and voting dynamics vary across space, even within a single country. We draw inferences about how political and economic geography shapes prospects for autonomous vote choice and performance-related voting. (Less)

Managing Electoral and Political Competition in Africa: Lessons from Ghana 2016 General Elections

African elections are usually highly contested and competitive because of the winner takes all making of most of the political systems on the continent. Since the third wave of democracy (Huntington, 1991), due to the competitive nature of these elections, attention is usually focused on making these elections peaceful and often relatively credible. Little attention has been paid to documenting good practices across these retinue of elections with the bid to providing election practitioners opportunity to learn from good practices that could be applied in similar context and circumstances. This paper is an attempt at that. It chronicles some of the important measures deployed by different stakeholders towards successful 2016 General Elections in Ghana. It recommends that managing electoral competition in African election requires commitment of political stakeholders, development of mechanisms and measures for both political and judicial redress and commitment to rule of law through independence of the judiciary.

Racial animosity and political party partisanship in South Africa: the case of the African National Congress and the Black African majority

ABSTRACTAs it is in many countries, racial rhetoric is a feature of South African national government elections. The use of such rhetoric provokes the question, how much is political party support in the country driven by interracial animosities? Using the nationally representative public opinion dataset, the South African Social Attitudes Survey, this article looks at party closeness to the African National Congress (ANC) amongst the black African population. The ANC is one of the oldest and most powerful political parties on the African continent and currently dominates South Africa’s parliamentary government. Constructing four indexes of racial attitudes and behaviours, the article investigates whether partisanship with the ruling party can be predicted by racial animosity. The period under investigation is 2010–2014. Bivariate and multivariate quantitative techniques are employed to test the relationship between ANC partisanship and racial animosity. The results of this investigation show that racial enmity in the country is troublingly widespread. Public opinion analysis, however, found no correlation between racial acrimony and ANC partisanship. Other factors are driving black African identification with the country’s ruling party. The implications of these results for the study for political party support in South Africa are discussed and future avenues of research presented.

Perils of pluralism: Electoral violence and incumbency in sub-Saharan Africa

Why do some multiparty elections lead to political violence while others do not? Despite extensive literatures on democratization, civil war, and violence against civilians in civil war, the topic of electoral violence has received less attention. We develop a set of theoretical propositions to explain this variation, testing them on an original dataset on African elections from 1990 to 2008. We find that elections in which an incumbent presidential candidate is running for re-election are significantly more likely to experience electoral violence, both prior to the election and after voting has taken place. We argue that clientelism is behind this pattern, and that clients often resort to electoral violence to protect a reliable incumbent patron. On the other hand, when an incumbent candidate is not running for office, we argue that clients are less willing to assume the risks of participating in electoral violence because candidates in the election have not established a record of delivering patronage at the executive level. We further find some evidence that pre-existing social conflicts increase the risk of pre-election violence. We suggest that this finding is due to the tendency of political elites to mobilize voters around pre-existing political and economic grievances to promote their candidacies, in turn heightening tensions and divisions. We also examine, but find little support for, a number of other possible determinants of electoral violence, such as regime type, income level, international observers, ongoing civil war, pathway to power, and first elections after civil war. The article contributes not only to a small but growing literature on electoral violence but also to a burgeoning literature on political behavior in African elections.

Of demons and angels: The “international” gaze on electoral democracy in Africa

ABSTRACTThis article reflects on the role of international election observers in African elections, following the so-called wave of democratisation at the end of the Cold War. When analysed against the role of the “international” as a geopolitical entity and the construction of the political as an epistemic heritage of the West, international observation comes across as a western gaze over the gale of democratisation sweeping through Africa. This observation is not motivated by meeting the expectations and aspirations of generations of Africans who have been waiting for and working towards freedom, but by the convergence of elite interests locally and abroad. The article therefore suggests that international observation of Africa in a neo-colonised post-colonial environment raises suspicions of imperialist designs to impose on Africa the manner in which it must organise the political arena, and the kind of democracy that it should pursue.

Straining without training? Capacity-related problems facing African election executives and officials

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the empowerment of election officials and executives is usually overlooked, understated or simply ignored; yet elections cannot be conducted without plans in place to improve their efficiency and effectiveness; especially through training. As one of the foremost mechanisms for improving elections, training is crucial to organisational performance enhancement. However, training for election officials and executives is fairly new in many African countries. Generally incorporated in generic university or vocational institute courses globally, training is usually offered as a special tailor-made module for polling officials in western countries. Even then, it rarely covers the severe conditions election officials regularly face, especially in Africa. This article examines these issues based on a review of the extant literature, conceptual and theoretical reflection on election management, and practical interaction with some election authorities who participated as trainees in the Unisa Management of Democratic Elections in Africa (MDEA) course (2012–2014). The article concludes that the training of election officials and executives poses challenges for Africa; partly because some election management bodies (EMBs) prefer to “strain” rather than effectively train their members to ensure sustainable performance, and partly because others prefer short-term irrelevant training that undermines their organisational goals. These hurdles need to be overcome if Africa is to address its election-related challenges.

Ghana: The Ebbing Power of Incumbency

Despite pre-election fears, the victory of the opposition NPP over the ruling NDC in Ghana’s December 2016 elections became the prologue to a peaceful transfer of power, an outcome which suggests that the advantage of incumbency in African elections may be on the wane. Recent transfers of power in Africa have been driven by deteriorating economic conditions, opposition learning, more effective and dynamic electoral processes, and increasingly assertive voters. When leaders follow the democratic rules of the game, as in Ghana’s and Nigeria’s most recent elections, incumbents are likely to lose their seats. When they do not, as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, the result is instead greater repression, as presidents seek to insulate themselves from the rising risk of defeat. The factors that account for recent opposition victories thus also help to explain an upsurge in attacks on civil liberties across much of the continent.

Gifts, threats, and perceptions of ballot secrecy in African elections

Gifts, threats, and perceptions of ballot secrecy in African elections