Multiparty Elections Research Articles

Inter-Party Competition in Taiwan since the 1990s

This paper compares the state of party competition before and after the change of ruling party in Taiwan in 2000. First the balance of power between Taiwan’s main political parties is discussed—the KMT’s electoral hegemony has come to an end, the DPP has won two presidential elections and become Taiwan’s largest parliamentary party. However, there is much continuity in Taiwan’s party politics, with the same two parties electorally dominant today as at the outset of multi-party elections in the late 1980s. The second part of the article analyses election propaganda to consider how the policy content of party competition has changed and proposes that there have been more signs of continuity than change in party issue emphasis over the last four years.

Africa Between Despair and Hope

AFRICA BETWEEN DESPAIR AND HOPE Ebere Onwudiwe and Minabere Ibelema, eds. Afro-Optimism: Perspectives on Africa's Advances. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. ix + 176 pp. Index. $64.95. Cloth. Torild Skard. Continent of Mothers, Continent of Hope: Understanding and Promoting Development in Africa Today. London: Zed Books Ltd., 2003. xi + 238 pp. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $22.50. Paper. Tony Addison, ed. From Conflict to Recovery in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. UNU/Wider Studies in Development Economics, xvi + 287 pp. Maps. Index. £50. Cloth. Kempe Ronald Hope. From Crisis to Renewal: Development Policy and Management in Africa. Leiden: Brill, 2002. xiii + 182 pp. References. Index. $53.00. Paper. Despite their considerable endowment in natural resources, most of Africa's nation-states have proved themselves to be economically unviable as independent sovereign entities. Their inability to integrate effectively has resulted in an unfavorable record of economic and political performance compared to the rest of the developing world (Mistry 2000:554). At the dawn of this new millennium, Africa's record in the realms of economic and social development leaves much to be desired. An overhaul of the continent is in order if Africa is to make up lost ground. The effect of unfulfilled promises of global development strategies has been felt more sharply in Africa than in other parts of the world. Indeed, rather than resulting in an improvement in the situation, successive strategies have made African economies stagnant and more vulnerable than those of other regions to the economic and social crises suffered by the industrialized countries. At the same time, African leaders have for decades adopted policies that have alienated their citizens and made development extremely difficult because of their misunderstanding of the nature and causes of Africa's economic woes (Adedeji 2002). If the end of the cold war and the subsequent second independence (Legum 1990:129-40) were really meant to liberate Africans, the news so far is gloomy at best. African politics seems to remain essentially chaotic. By a curious inversion, corruption, mismanagement, nepotism, civil war, disease, malnutrition, and drought seem characteristic of functioning African polities, not collapsing ones; conversely, struggles for peace, democracy, and social progress appear dysfunctional, almost retrograde (Harrison 2002:158-9). While many countries have held multiparty elections, they lack traditions of democratic culture and institutions. Despite democratization, the gap between governments and citizens continues to widen. A symbiotic relationship between state, civil society, individual citizens, and democratic structures is missing, forcing Africans to put all their hope in the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). However, given the record of African leaders, only a genuinely new paradigm can bring hope to the continent. In their attempt to offer some hope, the books under review focus on positive undertakings or hopeful signs of political, economic, and social recovery. Tackling this daunting task, the contributors to Afro-Optimism have tried to show that Africa has made more progress than its dismal image suggests (3). In his introduction, Onwudiwe sets for himself a moral imperative to rectify distortions that have negatively affected the continent. He delves into history to find legacies that he maintains are holding Africa back. Subsequent chapters tackle related themes. Thus Ibelema shows the importance of people's ways of thinking in the development process and claims that Africans need to reconcile modernity with tradition, while Irele demonstrates the vibrancy of African culture through a cogent analysis of achievements in creative work. Snipe uses Senghor's Senegal to scrutinize cultural policy and its place in politics and national identity. Ekeh examines the historical contributions of kinship and related institutions to the general welfare of Africans. …

Post-Conflict Elections or Post-Elections Conflict: Sierra Leone 2002 and Patterns of Voting in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sierra Leone is just one of a growing number of countries that has experienced the current globally popular tool of conflict resolution, the multi-party election. This method of endeavouring to put a final cap on a peace process has a mixed record in Africa. There have been some successes, but the installation of unsuitable over-powerful governments and/or the return to war have more often been the case. The article examines firstly the outcomes of the 2002 Sierra Leone elections, and then situates these consequences on a spectrum of African post-conflict elections outcomes. Finally, possibilities for avoiding or mitigating the negative effects of post conflict polls, particularly those emanating from the inevitable lack of security, are examined and posited.

Comparing and Contrasting the Uses of Two Graphical Tools for Displaying Patterns of Multiparty Competition

We compare two tools for displaying, in graphical form, information about vote outcomes in multiparty elections at the constituency level. One was recently proposed by Nagayama and introduced to the English-speaking world by Reed, who applied this method to Japanese and Italian election data. Reed labels the method Nagayama diagrams. Recently, Taagepera has shown how the domain of potential uses of Nagayama diagrams can be expanded significantly. A second graphical device has been used by a number of authors for various types of election analyses, but is not that well known in the comparative parties literature. This method, which uses barycentric coordinates (i.e. triangular) rather than the more familiar rectangular coordinates, has gone under a variety of names (e.g. trilinear plot, toroidal diagram and simplex representation), but we have chosen to use the last of these labels. We make use of both methods to visually present election data (by constituency) for the Italian national elections of 1994, 1996 and 2001. We show how different types of information may be readily gleaned from the two types of graph, and, perhaps most importantly, illustrate how we may improve the ready intuitive interpretability of each type of graph by specifying boundary constraints to define particular regions of the graph – a technique we call ‘segmentation’.

Democracy in Africa

The Liberal Model and Africa:Elites against Democracyby Kenneth GoodPalgrave, 2002, 256 pp., ISBN0333717082 The 1990s, so we are widely told, ushered in a ‘second liberation’ in Africa. The Berlin Wall collapsed, the Cold War ended, dictatorships fell or liberalized, and military governments gave way to civilian. The African populace rose in protest against domestic oppressions and demanded and often seized back the liberties they were promised but denied at independence. Multi-party elections now became fashionable and well-meaning election monitors swarmed all over the continent passing judgement on whether contests were ‘free and fair’. African populations breathed more freely and ostensibly or substantively lived in less fear. They were now set up to enjoy the fruits of ‘good governance’. Democracy was enabled to enjoy a belated triumph.

The Democratic Qualities of Competitive Elections: Participation, Competition and Legitimacy in Africa

This article analyses the democratic qualities of core institutions of representative democracy: multiparty elections. Focusing on the three basic democratic values participation, competition and legitimacy, the empirical examination of Africa compares both over time and between founding, second, third and following elections. The results, based on 203 observations of presidential and parliamentary elections, show that there are significant improvements of democratic qualities in Africa and breakdowns typically occur only after founding elections. The core institutions of representative democracy may have a future in Africa. Hence, there is a cotinuing case for demo-optimism on the continent.

Democracy as Idea and Democracy as Process in Africa

Democracy is an idea. It is deployed as an analytic concept, a normative ideal, a political prescription, and an empirical description. Its meanings slide among these usages. The idea of democracy is real in its far-reaching consequences. Democracy is, therefore, also a process. (1) The first part of this essay, on democracy as idea, starts from the argument that political such as democracy are essentially contested: we cannot, therefore, necessarily agree on their meaning. Their meanings will depend on the ways in which they are used in specific historical contexts. This perspective opens a bridge between historical narrative and conceptual analysis with which both historians and political philosophers tend to feel uncomfortable. It then explores the elementary forms of democratic politics and the non-democratic conditions of democracy. It critically examines alternative conceptions of democracy, showing that they cannot get round the essential contestedness of the concept. It rejects the teleological assumptions implicit in theories of democratization. The second part, on democracy as process, explores the themes of nationalism, community, class, development, economic strategies, international debt, and multi-party elections and their implications for democratic politics. The conclusion argues that democratic politics requires us to create scope for permanent dialogue. DEMOCRACY AS AN ESSENTIALLY CONTESTED CONCEPT In 1956 W. B. Gallie argued that aesthetic, ethical, and political such as Art, or Democracy, are essentially contested. (2) Though we may agree broadly on the elements that constitute a concept and on classic exemplars of its meaning in use, we cannot always expect to reach agreement on its meaning or its proper application. These will be a matter for continuing argument. We cannot necessarily agree on an ineliminable core or find an anchor or lay down the outer limits to a concept. (3) The contest is over its essence. (4) Since essentially contested concepts are used to appraise works of art, private and public actions, or social institutions, the contest may appear to be over the ways in which we each use them to suit our own aesthetic, moral, or political arguments. Are we confusing different by attaching the same word to them and arguing past one another? Gallie's argument has deeper roots than the observation that we suit our to our political purposes. Essentially contested concepts, such as democracy, liberty, state, or power, are complex clusters. (5) They share family resemblances; like Wittgenstein's thread, their strength does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. (6) Their past and current usages include different elements, which are often in tension with one another. We may disagree on the relative weighting and priority of different elements, or on the ways in which they need to relate to one another. These are incomplete in themselves. They acquire their full meanings only when they are deployed in specific arguments and are used in specific social and historical contexts. There is thus scope for continuing dialogue as we each advance reasons for our preferred conceptions and applications of concepts. There are better and worse arguments, but no or best possible answers. (7) THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS Alternative conceptions of democracy elaborate Lincoln's aphorism: Government of the by the for the people, and of the conditions needed for its realization. (8) They do not resolve the problems of complexity and ambiguity. L. Diamond, J. Linz and S. M. Lipset define democracy as meaningful and extensive competition ... for ... positions of government power through regular, free, and fair elections ... inclusive political participation in the election of leaders and policies, such that no major social group is prevented from exercising the rights of citizenship. …

For a Few Euros More

Although perceived by candidates and parties as important in affecting political outcomes, the link between spending and success in multi-candidate, multiparty election campaigns remains unproven. Not only are there relatively few studies of campaign spending effects in multi-party systems, there are none examining the effect under the Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system. Our study examines spending effects in the Irish local elections of 1999 using STV with district magnitudes between 3 and 7 seats, contested by a median of 10 candidates in each district. Using detailed data on 1,838 candidates from 180 local constituencies and 30 councils, we provide precise estimates of the relationship between campaign spending at the candidate level in each district and electoral success, including the probability of winning. In a context where spending is miniscule relative to other contexts, and takes place under a completely different electoral system, our results echo previous studies from other contexts showing a strong effect of challenger spending and only weak effects of incumbent spending. Once allowance is made for the endogeneity of incumbent spending, however, we find a much less substantial difference between the effectiveness of spending by challengers and by incumbents, except on the marginal effect of spending on the probability of winning, where challenger spending is shown to be much more important.

Somaliland: choosing politics over violence

Since breaking away from Somalia in 1991, the people of Somaliland have charted a different path from Somalia away from violent conflict towards constitutional politics. Unrecognised by the international community, political reconstruction in Somaliland has largely been an internal affair. While lack of formal recognition has had its costs, it has also has given Somalilanders the opportunity to craft a system of government rooted in their local culture and values that is appropriate to their needs. For the past decade this has comprised a system of government that fuses traditional forms of social and political organisation with Western-style institutions of government. In December 2002 Somaliland took the first step towards changing this system by holding multi-party elections for district councils. These were followed in April 2003 by presidential elections. This paper describes the process of political transition in Somaliland and the first democratic elections in this region for 33 years.

Explaining the unexpected: electoral reform and democratic governance in Burkina Faso

The parliamentary elections of May 2002 in Burkina Faso saw the ruling party loose its exclusionary grip on power. For the first time since the restoration of democracy in 1991, the parliamentary opposition now represents a sizeable group. While it retains the majority, the ruling party has to share legislative power with the opposition. These elections marginally alter the structure of power in a deeply presidential system of government. Several institutional and electoral reforms have played a critical role in strengthening the mechanisms of ‘vertical accountability’ and representative democracy. By assessing recent electoral reforms in Burkina Faso, the article underlines the importance of the electoral system in multiparty elections and thus contributes to our understanding of the effects of changes in electoral rules on the distribution of political outcomes. In particular, it underscores the contribution that institutional engineering and electoral reform can make to further democratisation in a semi-authoritarian context. While many challenges to democratic governance and the rule of law remain, the new political landscape holds the promise of changes in the style of government and the emergence of more consensual modes of governance.

Multinomial probit and multinomial logit: a comparison of choice models for voting research

Several recent studies of voter choice in multiparty elections point to the advantages of multinomial probit (MNP) relative to multinomial/conditional logit (MNL). We compare the MNP and MNL models and argue that the simpler logit is often preferable to the more complex probit for the study of voter choice in multi-party elections. Our argument rests on three areas of comparison between MNP and MNL. First, within the limits of typical data—a small sample of revealed voter choices among a few candidates or parties—neither model will clearly appear to have generated the observed data. Second, MNP is susceptible to a number of estimation problems, the most serious of which is that the MNP is often weakly identified in application. Weak identification is difficult to diagnose and may lead to plausible, yet arbitrary or misleading inferences. Finally, the logit model is criticized because it imposes the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) property on voter choice. For most applications the IIA property is neither relevant nor particularly restrictive. We illustrate our arguments using data from recent US and French presidential elections.

Presidentialism and clientelism in Africa's emerging party systems

This paper analyses the parties and party systems that have begun to emerge in sub-Saharan Africa's fledgling multiparty systems. Using a data base of 87 legislative elections convened in the 1990s, the paper identifies three trends. The position of parties late in the decade is primarily tributary of their performance in the first multiparty election conducted in the early 1990s. Parties that won founding elections are almost invariably still in power. Secondly, the typical emerging party system has consisted of a dominant party surrounded by a large number of small, unstable parties. Thirdly, party cleavages have been overwhelmingly ethno-linguistic in nature, while ideological and programmatic debates have been muted and rare. The second half of the paper provides tentative explanations for these striking patterns. It emphasises the illiberal nature of most of the new African democracies, their characteristic centralisation of power around the presidency, and the pervasive clientelism that structures the relationship between the state and the citizenry. These characteristics shape the incentives faced by individual politicians and thus much of their behaviour.

Multi-party elections in the Arab world: Institutional engineering and oppositional strategies

Recent moves toward multi-party competition for elected legislatures in numerous Arab countries constitute a significant departure from earlier practices there and create the basis for democratic activists to gradually chip away at persistent authoritarian rule. This article explores the institutional mechanism by which incumbent authoritarian executives seek to engineer these elections. It documents examples for rulers changing electoral systems to ensure compliant legislatures and demonstrates the prevalent use of winner- takes-all electoral systems which generally work to the regimes advantage. The author then reviews various strategies of opposition forces--boycotts non- competition agreements election monitoring and struggles over election rules-- and the dilemmas that these entail. Surmounting differences in terms of ideologies as well as short-term political goals and prospects is a central challenge. The future should see greater electoral participation among opposition activists along with cleaner elections. As vote coercion and ballot box stuffing is restricted by opposition pressures electoral institutions will take on greater importance and struggles for proportional representation are likely to increase. (authors)

Democracy and Multiparty Politics in Africa: Recent Elections in Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho

The shift from one-party to multiparty politics in many African countries has made the issue of democratisation a crucially equally important part of the development agenda. Efforts to create an economically enabling environment and build administrative and other capacities will be wasted if the political context is not favourable. This article focuses on political developments in Zambia to illustrate how a government elected on a ‘democratic ticket’ can become corrupted by the conscious development of a personality cult, and how the hunger for power can lead to the erosion of democratic values, electoral fraud, and the near breakdown of a relatively well-functioning multiparty system. A brief note on Zimbabwe is presented to amplify the Zambian case, and reform of the electoral system in Lesotho is outlined to suggest that the successful completion of elections on 25 May 2002 may serve as an excellent example of how, and under what conditions, ‘free and fair’, multiparty elections can be conducted in an African country.

Parties, Protest and Pluralism in Cambodia

In the 1990s, early post-Cold War optimism regarding the rapid spread of democracy in the South faded, as multiparty elections in new democracies were observed to exacerbate conflicts of identity rather than ameliorating the effects of conflicts of interest. Research in Cambodia suggests, however, that the promotion by political parties of identity-based conflict offers opportunities for individuals and groups to attempt to insert a more pragmatic interest-based agenda. Party activities also offer an exemplar for political advocacy and activism, which is useful to non-party interest groups and social movements. Cambodia's electoral experience further suggests that parties attempting to respond to such interest-based agendas may be rewarded by voters at the polls. Analytical focus upon the efforts of individuals and non-party movements to make use of the opportunities offered by political parties, rather than upon the mobilizational strategies and rhetorics of party leaders, offers a more optimistic prognosis for democracy in the third world.

Political Transition in Cambodia 1991–1999. Power, Elitism and Democracy. By David W. Roberts. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. 259p. $40.00.

In this book David W. Roberts provides an interesting descriptive account of recent Cambodian politics. The guiding principle of his study is the evaluation and implementation of the Paris Peace Agreement (PPA), which was signed in 1993. The main thesis in the book is that the content of the PPA mainly served the interests of international actors such as the United States and China, without taking into account the Cambodian political reality. In Roberts's view, the PPA developed from the Western ideal of liberal democracy, with multiparty elections as its central component and with total disregard for the Cambodian political context.

Application of Theil group logit methods to district-level vote shares: tests of prospective and retrospective voting in the 1991, 1993, and 1997 Polish elections

Political scientists often wish to test hypotheses in the context of district-level vote-share models of elections involving more than two parties. Although a group logit framework for estimating such models was developed many years ago by Henri Theil, the complexity of its variance–covariance structure has prevented it from being widely applied. The authors demonstrate how data can be transformed to take account of the Theil variance–covariance structure so that seemingly unrelated regression can be used to estimate vote-share equations on either an intra- or inter-election basis. This method offers a simpler and more accessible way to analyze multiparty elections than the method proposed recently by Katz and King [Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 97 (1999) 15]. The demonstration involves testing hypotheses about incumbency (retrospective) and policy (prospective) voting in the 1991, 1993, and 1997 Polish elections. The authors find that the estimations favor the policy voting hypothesis.

Democracy in Africa?

M. BRATTON and NICOLAS VAN DE VALLE, Democratic Experiments in Africa. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. A. OLUKOSHI (ed.), The Politics of Opposition in Contemporary Africa. Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1998. J. DANIEL, ROGER SOUTHALL and MORRIS SZEFTEL (eds.), Voting for Democracy: watershed elections in contemporary anglophone Africa. Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999. M. COWEN and L. LAAKSO (eds.), Multi-party Elections in Africa. Oxford, James Currey, 2002. M. G. SCHATZBERG, Political Legitimacy in Middle AfriCa. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2001. `Democracy' was a new beginning, and shari'a is what people democratically want as their new beginning. Madeleine Albright, when visiting Kano recently, was taken aback when thanked (albeit ironically) for introducing shari'a: `but it's due to democracy,' she was told. [Last, 2000] Not so long ago people of broadly liberal persuasion were writing about democracy in Africa in tones of wonder: it was a second `liberation', a second `independence'--indeed, if not a Second Coming then at least a `virtual miracle'. More, democracy seemed to be the magic key to further treasures: accountability, transparency, equality, social justice, even conflict resolution and `development'. This is curious, as people of liberal persuasion elsewhere (in the past and now) have been reserved, even scathing, about democracy. Schumpeter's gloomy ruminations (1954) are of course well known, but the ritual reference to these points hardly captures the extent of the deeply sceptical nature of liberal reflections on democracy. WHAT'S THE PROBLEM WITH DEMOCRACY? These misgivings tend to turn on two sets of issues: what democracy is supposed to do and its claims to moral superiority. Simplifying somewhat, the first issue comes down to what exactly democracy aggregates. There is a bewilderingly large list of candidates (as it were), including wants, preferences, interests or wills, and, to make things worse, attached to them all are complex theoretical issues and debates. Since it is these that tend to shape stances on the more familiar issues of representation, accountability, legitimacy, trust and the like it is clear that, to say the least, there is a formidable clutch of problems. Not the least is the possibility that democracy does not actually aggregate anything at all. For analytical purposes these issues can be separated (though in reality, of course, the two constantly interweave) from the second set of explicitly normative issues concerning the moral claims of democratic institutions and values. Here again there is the possibility that democracy may not embody persuasive normative superiority. (1) Both sets of issues are additionally posed on what may be called extrinsic terrains. On the more sociological side, what effects is democracy likely to have, and on the normative side whether its presumed superiority concerns its effects rather than its intrinsic virtues. One may note finally that, in the current global situation, these sets of issues make another appearance as regards the feasibility of and justification for imposing such political orders on others who may be judged to be without them. Adopting a now familiar usage in political theory, one might suggest two kinds of responses to these problems. `Thin' theories may be said to comprise those positions which see democracy, and particularly elections, as essentially aggregating individual choices of policies (invariably presumed to be an effect of given `interests' or `preferences') and, realistically, as these are packaged by competing political parties, themselves largely identified with particular leaders. Such minimalist accounts of democracy cohere well with the minimalist understanding of the liberal state itself in which the state is purely an enabler, little more than a neutral mechanism providing the security to allow free, equal individuals to pursue their life projects, unhindered by others. …

Centrifugal Incentives in Multi-Candidate Elections

This paper analyzes factors that affect candidates’ position-taking incentives in multi-candidate and multi-party elections. Following Cox (1990), we define centrifugal incentives as those that motivate vote-seeking candidates to take more extreme positions relative to the center of the voter distribution. For a multivariate vote model that includes a Left-Right policy component, a party identification component and an unmeasured term that renders the vote choice probabilistic, we present theoretical and computer simulation results that quantify candidates’ incentives to shift their policies away from the center in the direction of their partisan constituencies’ mean policy preferences. Centrifugal incentives are found to increase with (1) the salience of policies and party identification, (2) the size of the candidate field, (3) the size of a candidate’s partisan constituency and (4) more extreme constituency policy preferences. Thus, ceteris paribus, candidates who represent large constituencies are motivated to present more extreme policies than are candidates who represent small ones.

Multi-party elections in Africa

Multi-party elections in Africa