Incumbency Turnover of Local Government Councillors in Malawi

ABSTRACT

Since Malawi adopted democratisation in 1994, local government elections have been erratic. To date, only three rounds of local government elections have been conducted against six rounds of Presidential and Parliamentary elections. The first local government elections took place in 2000. When the first term of office expired in 2005, local government councils were dissolved. Thereafter, local government elections were postponed for a variety of reasons, until 2014 when the country conducted its first tripartite elections. The most recent local government elections took place in 2019 and have seen a huge turnover rate for incumbent councillors. This paper draws from the 2014 and 2019 elections data and Afrobarometer round 7 survey data, to explore the extent, origins and drivers of the 2019 councillor incumbency turnover rate under a single-member district electoral system. Are voters expressing dissatisfaction with these representatives as has been argued about Members of Parliament, or does this high turnover have other origins?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Afrobarometer is a pan-African, non-partisan research network that conducts public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, economic conditions, and related issues across more than 30 countries in Africa. Eight rounds of surveys were conducted between 1999 and 2019. Afrobarometer conducts face-to-face interviews in the language of the respondent’s choice with nationally representative samples that yield country-level results with a margin of sampling error of ±2% (for a sample of 2400) or ±3% (for a sample of 1200) at a 95% confidence level. The Malawi survey used a sample of 1200.

2 A Handbook for Councillors and Other Council Members in Malawi. Malawi Local Government Association (MALGA 2014, 34–35).

3 A Handbook for Councillors and Other Council Members in Malawi. MALGA (2014, 36).

4 While the paper has identified both pre-electoral and electoral turnover, we have limited our subsequent analysis towards electoral turnover and the factors driving this turnover.