Since the return of multi-partyism
to sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s, transfers of power between rival parties
have been rare. Presidents’ ability to control institutions and the flow of
patronage creates a strong incumbency bias that limits change during elections.
Why some power changes have occurred in some states can be described as a mix
of economic decline, falling support for incumbents, the ability or inability
of opposition parties to form a broad alliance, or sometimes the president is
not up for re-election. Open seat polls are rare, but they account for half of
all presidential transfers of power from one party to another between 1990 and
2009 (This article was written in 2010). If democratic consolidation requires
the removal of old authoritarian powers and turnover is an indicator of
democratic progress, open-seat elections may be a significant factor in
the democratization process. When an open-seat poll coincides with economic
hard times, government-related scandals, and a strong oppositions campaign,
turnover becomes not only possible, but likely.
The Impact of
Incumbency:
30 countries have instituted a
two-term presidential cap, but only 11 have honored the constitutional term
limitation. Many presidents have managed to change the constitution to allow a
third term, but those who have honored the term limitations have created a
significant number of open-seat polls. Cheeseman than looks at elections
between 1990 and 2009 to support his case that opposition parties perform worse
when running against a sitting president, and open-seat elections have a better
power transfer distribution. His study does not include results of
authoritarian systems where incumbents are re-elected in landslide victories. Ruling
parties without an incumbent struggle because 1) weak institutionalized party
structures and personalized politics mean that the battle to select a new
presidential candidate often results in a divided party, 2) nonincumbent
candidates cannot point to a record of accomplishment, so their promises to
client groups are less credible, 3) unless the outgoing president has
handpicked his successor, there may be a distance between the incumbent and the
party’s candidate.
Succession
Struggles:
The major challenge to the continued
hegemony of electoral authoritarian regimes is effectively managing the
succession process. Ruling parties typically either avoid asking incumbents to
stand for renomination or they employ rubber-stamp processes structured to
prevent intraparty competition. The succession process is often unregulated,
meaning that the outcome was governed by the informal balance of personal
networks within the party rather than the straightforward provision in the
party constitution. Unregulated successions cause political crises and violence
and can cause party divisions, making it difficult to run a campaign. Cheeseman
gives examples of this in Sierra Leone, Kenya, and Ghana, but then discusses
how South African African National Congress (ANC) overcame the succession
problem and managed a landslide non-incumbent victory.
The
Advantages of Incumbency:
Incumbents have advantages due to
their patronage networks and they are better placed to make believable promises
to prospective voters who can evaluate their past performance. This helps
attract swing-voters. Their capacity to construct political machines and make
credible clientelistic appeals gives them a comparative advantage. In highly
personalized systems, voters often identify with a particular individual rather
than a party, and the goodwill won by an incumbent may be hard to transfer to
his successor, which can be exacerbated by ethnic rivalries. This is why highly
diverse countries such as Kenya and Mali use multiethnic coalitions and rotate
the presidential candidacy.
Stay or Go:
Transfers of
power require meaningful elections and the willingness of the ruling party to
concede defeat. Open-seat elections create anomalous dynamics because the new
presidential candidate is nominally in charge of the party and the election
campaign, while the sitting president retains control of the state’s coercive
capacity until the elections results have been announced. Stealing an election
in most cases therefore requires the support of the outgoing president. When a
sitting president is succeeded by a candidate to whom he has little attachment,
he may be less willing to undermine the rules of the game and the opposition
candidate is able to better compete. When the relationship between the sitting
president and the presidential candidate is not close, the division of authority
may hamper electoral manipulation and make the retention of power through
unconstitutional means less likely. The combined impact of succession
struggles, of the difficulty that non-incumbent
candidates may have in mobilizing patronage networks, and of the greater
willingness of retiring presidents to oversee free and fair elections means that
open-seat polls represent real windows of opportunity for opposition parties in
Africa.
The Impact of
Term Limits:
Term limits increase the likelihood
of alternation of power, which promotes democratic consolidation. There are
three good reasons for thinking that turnover can play such a positive role in
the democratization process:
1.
Transfers
of power in non-incumbent elections have helped to remove entrenched corrupt,
and authoritarian parties from power, creating opportunities for further
political liberalization.
2.
Turnover
is important because it is perhaps the most powerful sign that key actors have
a genuine commitment to democratic values.
3.
Transfers
of power inject multiparty regimes with legitimacy – the stronger the popular
support for democracy, the more costly it is for leaders to abuse democratic
institutions and indulge authoritarian tendencies; thus initial democratic
gains are less likely to be eroded.
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. Ruling and opposition elites face greater
incentives to play by the rules of the democratic game when citizens maintain
moderate perceptions of institutional legitimacy. Thus, democratic
consolidation is facilitated by bringing “winners, independents, and losers” of
the electoral game towards a shared appreciation of the legitimacy of their
government institutions.
The article uses Afrobarometer statistical
models to show that nearly every African country for which there is data,
winners and losers on average have a highly polarized perceptions of the
legitimacy of their political institutions. Winners tend to view their
constitutions, courts, police, and so on as much more trustworthy, accountable,
worthy of consent, representative, and satisfactory while losers tend to
seriously question institutional probity. The African status quo is
dangerous for democracy; such sanguine winners are unlikely to sanction
favored leaders who chip away at democracy, while disenchanted losers may be
more likely to support electorally defeated elites who decide to pursue power
by undemocratic means. More importantly, this article suggests a single
plausible antidote: electoral turnovers have a significant moderating effect
on the citizens as winners and loser converge in their attitudes about the
legitimacy of their state institutions thus creating incentives for elites
on both sides to comply with the rules of the democratic game. The exercise of
political power is generally viewed to be legitimate when it is in accordance
with existing rules justified by shared beliefs and when citizens consent to
the arrangement. Based on this understanding, the author’s surveys uses popular
perceptions of state institutions to gauge their legitimacy.
There
are 3 reasons why winner-loser legitimacy gaps are the focus of this study:
1)
One
should be concerned about the attitudes of losers because they have greater
incentives to act
against the current system.
2)
This
more common concern regarding losers should be supplemented with an equally
important
attention to winners because inflated perceptions of legitimacy among
citizens aligned with ruling
elites can enable the gradual erosion of
democratic institutions by insiders.
3)
Polarization
of attitudes between insiders and outsiders makes tolerance, compromise, and
cooperation more difficult to achieve across political lines.
Before
presenting the survey data, the paper discusses 4 qualities of elections that
are likely to affect popular perceptions of legitimacy in emerging democracies:
1)
Turnover
of power: Democracy was accepted by elites as legitimate after two alternations
in power. The “two-turnover test” is an indicator signaling
consolidation of democracy. It is only when a peaceful turnover occurs that we
have unambiguous evidence that it would be accepted by losing incumbents and
that eth democratic institutions can deal with political change.
2)
Peaceful
process: The systematic use of violence constitutes a denial of democratic
values and rights.
3)
Acceptance
of election outcomes
4)
Free
and fair election
The article then
presents all of the data in lots of charts and formulas.
From 1990 to 2000, there was a large
shift towards democratization in Africa, as many countries changed from
single-party authoritarianism or military dictatorship to multiparty polities.
This article argues that the limited transitions from incumbent regimes and
the persistence of authoritarianism are a function of affecting political
liberalization without democratizing the political systems and the rules of the
game. (Political liberalization = legalization of opposition parties and
their freedom to contest political office)
Institutional
Design for Democracy:
The realization
of democracy is contingent upon rules of the game that provide for alternative
political parties competing against one another for the chance to govern within
institutional systems that guarantee fairness and a genuine opportunity for alternation
of power between parties. An electoral system is designed to do three things:
1)
It
serves to translate votes cast into seats won in a legislative chamber.
2)
It
serves as a conduit through which the people can hold their representative
accountable.
3)
Electoral
systems serve the normative function of structuring the boundaries of
acceptable political discourse and giving incentives for those competing for
power, especially political parties, to couch their appeal to the electorate in
distinctive ways.
This description
is followed by definitions Plurality-majority and proportional representation
systems, then are followed by examples from cases in Benin, Malawi, Mali, and
South Africa.
New Game, Old
Rules: Kenya and Zambia
In the time period discussed, these
two counties could not steady the transfer of power and is a function of
failure to redesign the electoral system in both countries in the early 90s to enhance multiparty
political competition and thus advance democratic progress. In Zambia, the
incumbent (President Kaunda) tried to rewrite the constitution to secure
victory in their first multiparty election. Pressure from the competing party
led to the President suspending the draft constitution for further
negotiations. The incumbent lost the election and the newly ruling Movement for
Multiparty Democracy (MMD) party established a Constitutional Commission to
revise the constitution along democratic lines. Running up to the 1996
election, the MMD changed the constitution again to protect their position of
power. The largest competing party, the United Party for National Development
(UPND) boycotted the election. In 2001, there were 10 opposition presidential
candidates who shared over 71 percent of the total votes, but the MMD candidate
took 28 percent of the votes and hence, the election.
In Kenya, there
was no redesigning of the electoral system before the first multiparty
elections in December 1992. The ruling KANU government was not forced to change
the section in the constitution that made Kenya a one party state by law.
Competing parties still went to the polls within the single party electoral
system design. The electoral system’s design was such that the odds were
stacked against the opposition in 4 ways:
1)
The
provincial administration was not delinked from the electoral process and was
thus used by the incumbent party to harass and intimidate the opposition.
2)
Because
of violence and intimidation, and arrests of opposition politicians and their
supporters and the declaration of so-called KANU zones in Moi’s stronghold of
the Rift Valley, 41 percent of the KANU candidates from the Rift Valley were
returned to parliament unopposed.
3)
The
opposition was denied access to the government controlled television and radio.
4)
The
opposition had no say in the appointment of the electoral commission, which was
single-handedly appointed by the incumbent.
In the 92 parliamentary election, KANU
received fewer overall votes, but won 100 seats compared to 88 for the
opposition. Moi won the presidential election with only 37 percent of the total
votes. This pattern was repeated in the 97 election as well. In 2000, through
an Act of Parliament, the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission was
constituted, and the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition beat KANU in the 2002
election. Bottom line, Kenya and Zambia went through political transition to
multipartyism without broad-based renegotiation of the rules of the game. Any
subsequent efforts at constitution making were either skewed in favor of the
incumbent regime, or stonewalled and torpedoed
altogether.
*In a
proportional representation system—people vote for parties, not individuals. If the Dems win 75%, then the dems take
their top 75% of candidates. This means
that the voters are disconnected from the population and that the leaders are
more accountable to party leadership.
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