Do electoral systems affect how citizens hold their government accountable? Evidence from Africa

ABSTRACT

A large body of literature suggests that electoral system type has an impact on voting behaviour, but little work has been done looking at its effects on other forms of democratic accountability, such as contacting elected representatives and protesting. Using data from 36 African countries, we find that the type of electoral system has a significant relationship with these other forms of participation. Citizens in PR systems are significantly more likely to protest than those in majoritarian ones, while those in majoritarian systems are more likely to contact elected representatives. We argue that this is because the connection between citizens and representatives in majoritarian systems is clearer, closer, and more responsive, making contact an effective strategy and providing an efficient “safety valve” when citizens want to hold their government accountable. The lack of a similar connection in most PR systems, in contrast, leads citizens to turn to protest more regularly.

KEYWORDS:

• Electoral system
• protest
• contact
• accountability
• Africa

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Robert H. Bates, Michael Bratton, Gwyneth McClendon, Robert Mattes, participants at MPSA, and attendees of workshops at Harvard University and the University of Cape Town, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of this article. Statistical support was provided by data science specialist Steve Worthington at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Bellamy and Palumbo, Political Accountability; Collier, Conflict, Political Accountability and Aid; Sen Poverty and Famines. Following Fearon, “Electoral Accountability”, we define accountability here as follows: An elected representative (A) is accountable to a citizen (B) if it is understood that A is supposed to act on behalf of B, and if B is able – through formal institutional or informal rules – to sanction and reward A for his activities in this regard.

2 Barro, “The Control of Politicians”; Ferejohn, “Incumbent Performance and Electoral Control”; Fiorina, Retrospective Voting American Elections. Though see Fearon, “Electoral Accountability” as a partial challenge to a pure sanctioning argument.

3 Ackerman, “Co-Governance for Accountability”; Jelmin, Democratic Accountability in Service Delivery; Joshi, “Producing Social Accountability”. Vertical accountability mechanisms are those, like elections, that allow citizens to hold their government accountable by exerting direct pressure. This contrasts with horizontal accountability mechanisms, in which different elements and agencies within the state hold each other accountable, usually on the basis of pre-established constitutional or legal checks and balances.

4 Smulovitz and Peruzotti, “Social Accountability in Latin America.”

5 Aksoy and Carter, “Electoral Institutions and Terrorist Groups”; Mattes and Mozaffar, “Proportional Representation in Africa.”

6 Norris, Electoral Engineering. Electoral systems are the set of rules that lay out how votes will be aggregated in a democracy to determine who will hold office. Although there are a number of different electoral systems, scholars generally categorize them into three main families: plurality or majoritarian systems, proportional representation (PR) systems, and mixed systems. Majoritarian systems usually depend on single-member constituencies and award the seat to the candidate with the most votes. In PR systems, multi-member districts are the norm, and the distribution of seats reflects the percentage of votes cast. Finally, mixed systems employ some combination of both the PR and majoritarian approaches. See Norris, Electoral Engineering for a more comprehensive description of these different electoral systems and their subtypes.

7 Sartori, “Political Development and Political Engineering,” 273.

8 Duverger, Political Parties, Organization and Activity; Rae, Political Consequences. For examples of more recent research on the topic see, Itzkovitch-Malka and Hazan, “Unpacking Party Unity”; Sanders, “Classifying Electoral Systems.”

9 Gosnell, Why Europe Votes.

10 Blais and Dobrzynska, “Turnout in Electoral Democracies”; Lijphart, “Unequal Participation”; Milner, “Does Proportional Representation Boost Turnout?”, Norris, Electoral Engineering.

11 Blais and Dobrzynska, “Turnout in Electoral Democracies”; Gray and Caul, “Declining Voter Turnout”; Norris, Electoral Engineering; Verba, Nie, and Kim, Participation and Political Equality.

12 Blais and Dobrzynska, “Turnout in Electoral Democracies”; Lijphart, “Unequal Participation”.

13 See, for example, Bratton, Mattes and Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion, Democracy and Market Reform, as well as Jelmin, Democratic Accountability.

14 Afrobarometer Data, “34 countries, Rounds 2–6”. This question has not been repeated in more recent rounds of the Afrobarometer survey.

15 Norris, “Choosing Electoral Systems”; Pilet, Freire and Costa, “Ballot Structure, District Magnitude.”

16 Persson and Tabellini, Political Economics.

17 Raffler, “News, Accountability and Electoral Rules”. See Norris, Electoral Engineering for more on the role of party leadership in the various PR subtypes.

18 See Gabriel, Bollow and Rabuza, “Does Contact Improve Trust?”; Norris, “Choosing Electoral Systems” for a fuller discussion of the ways in which majoritarian systems can improve the responsiveness of representatives.

19 Barkan et al., “The African Legislatures Project.”

20 Ashworth and de Mesquita, “Delivering the Goods”; Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina, “The Personal Vote”; Carey & Shugart, “Incentives to Cultivate”; Norris, Electoral Engineering.

21 Dalton, Citizen Politics; Kriesi, Duyvendak, and Guignu, New Social Movements; Kronenwetter, Protest.

22 We remain agnostic throughout this article about the precise process through which protests emerge, and argue that whether they are organized by regional or local elites (see Bates, Markets and States; and Cooper, Democratization and African Society), or emerge spontaneously at the grassroots level (see Harris and Hern, “Taking to the Streets”), the effect of the electoral system remains the same. We also acknowledge that not all protests in a country are necessarily political or target elected representatives (see Harris and Hern, “Taking to the Streets”), however we argue that this fact again does not undermine the functioning of the proposed mechanism.

23 Massicotte and Blais, “Mixed Electoral Systems”.

24 Ibid.

25 Bogaards, “Crafting Competitive Party Systems”; Massicotte and Blais, “Mixed Electoral Systems.”

43 Afrobarometer Data, “34 countries, Rounds 2–6”. Although there are currently seven rounds of Afrobarometer surveys available, we decided to rely on Round 6 and not pool the data for our analysis. See Appendix C for more information.

44 See, Blais and Dobrzynska, “Turnout in Electoral Democracies”; Bowler, “Reasoning Voters”; Carey and Shugart, “Incentives to Cultivate Personal Vote”; Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy.

45 Coppedge et al., “V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date].”

46 The combination of the large number of variables used in our analysis, the fact that some questions were not asked in all countries, and the varying proportions of “don’t know” responses required close attention to the problem of missing data in our data set. For more information on how we dealt with this, as well as a breakdown of missingness by regime type, see Appendix B.

47 For a more detailed breakdown of respondents’ reported protest and contact rates across rounds and by electoral system, see Appendix D.

48 Because Afrobarometer relies on self-reported participation data, we also explore the rates of protesting across the different electoral systems using alternate protest data as a robustness check. For more information, see Appendix E.

26 Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems; Powell and Whitten, “Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting”; Strøm, “Delegation and Accountability.”

27 Dalton, Citizen Politics; Krishna, “Gaining Access”; Putnam, Making Democracy Work.

28 Cutts, Fieldhouse, and John, “Is Voting Habit Forming?”; Franklin, Voter Turnout and Dynamics of Electoral Competition; Gerber, Green, and Shachar, “Voting May Be Habit-Forming”. Though see Dinas, “The Formation of Voting Habits” for a dissenting view.

29 Powell and Whitten, “Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting”; Wang, “Satisfaction with Democracy.”

30 See Flacks, “Knowledge for What?”; Jenkins, “Resource Mobilization Theory”; Oberschall, “Theories of Social Conflict” for more detailed discussions of the limitations of grievance-based theories in explaining participation.

31 Breuer, Landman, and Farquhar, “Social Media and Protest Mobilization”.

32 Scarritt, McMillan, and Mozaffar, “Interaction between Democracy and Ethnopolitical Protest”.

33 Eisinger, “Conditions of Protest Behaviour”; Hendrix, Haggard, and Magaloni, “Grievance and Opportunity.”

34 Brady, Verba, and Schlozman, “Beyond SES”; Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality.

35 Brady Verba, and Schlozman,“Beyond SES”; Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi, Public Opinion, Democracy and Market Reform; Dalton, Citizen Politics; Franklin, “The Institutional Context”; Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality.

36 Ahuja, “Electoral Status and Representation”; Booysen, The African National Congress; Shapiro et al., “Linking Constituency Opinion and Senate Voting Scores.”

37 Rodden, “Back to the Future.”

38 See, Andrews and Jackman, “Strategic Fools”; Boix, “Setting the Rules of the Game”; Persson and Tabellini, The Economic Effect of Constitutions.

39 Reilly and Reynolds, “Electoral Systems and Conflict”. See also Taagepera, “How Electoral Systems Matter for Democratization.”

40 Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies. However, see Horowitz, A Democratic South Africa? for a critique of this argument.

41 Farrell, Electoral Systems; Mozaffar, “Democratization, Institutional Choice, and Management of Conflict.”

42 Pottie, “Electoral System and Opposition Parties”; Shin, “Choice of Electoral Systems.”

49 The finding that youth are more likely to protest is not uncommon in the literature (see Bedasso and Obikili, “A Dream Deferred”; McVeigh and Smith, “Who Protests in America”), although it is contested, and some studies have found that age is not a good predictor of protest activity (see Resnick and Casale, “Political Participation of Africa’s Youth”; Lavery, “Protest and Political Participation in South Africa”). In relation to contact, similarly, the role of age is contested, with some studies finding (as we do) that young people participate less in these forms of accountability, and others disagreeing (see, for example, Mattes and Richmond, “South Africa’s Youth a Ticking ‘Time Bomb’?”).

50 Curtice and Shively, “Who Represents Us Best?”

51 See, Fjelde and Höglund, “Electoral Institutions and Electoral Violence”; Aksoy and Carter, “Electoral Institutions and Terrorist Groups”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah J. Lockwood

Sarah J. Lockwood is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar and Lecturer at Columbia University. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa at the University of Cape Town.

Matthias Krönke

Matthias Krönke is a PhD student in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Cape Town, and a graduate researcher at the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa.