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ABSTRACT
This article introduces a special issue on candidate nomination, intra-party democracy, and election violence in Africa. Although a burgeoning literature on African democratization has focused on the topic of electoral violence, little attention has been given to violence during party nominations. When local-level or national-level competition between parties is low, as in much of Africa, electoral politics become a matter of intra-party rather than inter-party competition. Nominations are a part of the electoral process often left to the discretion of poorly institutionalized parties, free of the involvement of electoral management bodies and external monitors, and violence often results. Rather than developing an elaborate theoretical framework on the causes of nomination violence, our ambition in this introduction is to introduce the concept of nomination violence and situate it in the literatures on intra-party democracy and election violence. We also offer new descriptive data on nomination rules and nomination violence across parties on the African continent. The data show that nomination violence is a prevalent problem across both democracies and electoral autocracies. However, the level of nomination violence varies significantly between parties in the same party system and we recommend further research into the effect of parties’ selection procedures on nomination violence.
Acknowledgement
Merete Bech Seeberg and Michael Wahman are the main authors of this article, and they have contributed equally. Svend-Erik Skaaning has mainly taken part in developing the core ideas behind the article (and the special issue) and through several rounds of detailed comments. The authors would like to thank Christian Bay-Andersen, Kristian Voss Olesen, and David Ulrichsen for excellent research assistance and Yonatan Morse and Lars Svåsand for excellent comments on the paper. Merete Seeberg thanks the Electoral Integrity Project and the Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellowship, Australian Research Council, for sponsoring her research fellowship at the University of Sydney. We wish to thank the CODE research group in Aarhus, the EIP research group in Sydney, and the contributors to the special issue for helping us developing the ideas for the article and the special issue as a whole. Finally, we wish to thank participants of the EIP workshop on Contentious Elections, Conflict and Regime Transitions (Poznan, July 2016), participants of the workshop on Legitimität in jungen Demokratien (Bonn, November 2016), and the anonymous reviewers for constructive comments to the paper. The project has benefited from financial support from Innovationsfonden (4110-00002B).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Rakner and van de Walle, “Opposition Weakness in Africa”; Lynch and Crawford, “Democratization in Africa 1990–2010”; Cheeseman, Democracy in Africa.
2. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.
3. Bhasin and Gandhi, “Timing and Targeting of State Repression in Authoritarian Elections.”
4. Bogaards and Elischer, “Democratization and Competitive Authoritarianism.”
5. E.g. Hyden and Leys, “Elections and Politics in Single-Party Systems”; Chazan, “African Voters at the Polls.”
6. See the empirical analysis of the effect of low inter-party competition in Reeder and Seeberg in this issue.
7. Gallagher and Marsh, Candidate Selection in Comparative Perspective.
8. According to our data, presented later in this article, 21 out of the 25 countries in our sample had at least one party that experienced violence in the nomination process prior to the latest election.
9. Basedau, “Ethnicity and Party Preference in Africa”; Elischer, Political Parties in Africa; Wahman, “Nationalized Incumbents and Regional Challengers.”
10. Dunning, “Fighting and Voting”; Goldsmith, “Electoral Violence in Africa Revisited.”
11. Birch, Electoral Malpractice; van Ham and Lindberg, “From Sticks to Carrots.”
12. Norris, Why Elections Fail.
13. Bratton, “Vote Buying and Violence.”
14. Electoral authoritarian regimes, according to the definition of Schedler (The Politics of Uncertainty, 2) are regimes that formally establish the institutions of liberal democracy, but subvert them in practice by systematic manipulation
15. Lindberg, “What Accountability Pressures do MPs in Africa Face”; Ichino and Nathan, “Primaries on Demand?”
16. We acknowledge that non-violent forms of manipulation also distort nomination processes in both democracies and autocracies – and that the trade-off between violent and non-violent forms of manipulation is an interesting object of study (see for instance van Ham and Lindberg “From Sticks to Carrots”) – but we restrict the attention of the special issue to the underexplored topic of nomination violence.
17. Höglund, Jarstad and Kovacs, “The Predicament of Elections in War-Torn Societies”; Höglund, “Electoral Violence in Conflict-Ridden Societies.”
18. Höglund, Jarstad, and Kovacs, “The Predicament of Elections in War-Torn Societies”; Salehyan and Linebarger, “Elections and Social Conflict in Africa.”
19. Fjelde and Höglund, “Electoral Institutions and Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
20. Wilkinson, Votes and Violence; Höglund, Jarstad, and Kovacs, “The Predicament of Elections in War-Torn Societies”; Fjelde and Höglund, “Electoral Institutions and Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa”; Salehyan and Linebarger, “Elections and Social Conflict in Africa.”
21. See Hazan, “Candidate Selection”; Norris, “Recruitment.”
22. Norris, Passages to Power; Hazan and Rahat, Democracy within Parties; Gallagher, “Introduction.”
23. Hazan and Rahat, Democracy within Parties.
24. We define a dominant party as a party that has won three consecutive national elections and won an outright majority in parliament (Sartori, Parties and Party Systems). Party systems are competitive when there is no dominant party and competitiveness increases the more equal the vote share of the winning party and the runner up.
25. Randall and Svåsand, “Party Institutionalization.”
26. Höglund, “Electoral Violence in Conflict-Ridden Societies”, 417.
27. PMnews Nigeria, “APC Primary.”
28. Mangongera, “A New Twilight in Zimbabwe? The Military vs. Democracy.”
29. Although threats ought to be part of our definition of nomination violence, it is important to acknowledge that threats are often hard to observe and that data on violence is likely to under-report on threats. For this reason some of the empirical contributions in this issue will not include threats in their measurement of violence.
30. Sisk, Elections in Fragile States.
31. Ranney, “Candidate Selection”, 75.
32. Gallagher, “Introduction”; Hazan and Rahat, Democracy within Parties.
33. Ranney, “Candidate Selection”, 103.
34. Reilly and Reynolds, Electoral Systems and Conflict in Divided Societies; Fjelde and Höglund, “Electoral Institutions and Electoral Violence.”
35. Rahat and Hazan, “Candidate Selection Methods”, 298.
36. Rahat and Hazan, “Candidate Selection Methods”, 298–309; see also Gallagher, “Introduction”; Ashiagbor, Political Parties and Democracy.
37. Ashiagbor, Political Parties and Democracy, 8.
38. Hazan, “Candidate Selection”, 108.
39. See (e.g.) Siavelis and Morgenstern, Pathways to Power.
40. Teorell and Hadenius, “Pathways.”
41. Senegal, Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Gabon, Chad, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, and Botswana.
42. Although nomination violence can happen at every conceivable level of the political system, it has often occurred “down ballot” for positions such as Governors, MPs, mayors, and councillors. In cases where party organizations are highly personalized there will be less competition for the top ticket, but even the most personalized parties need to create coalitions of local elites to expand their reach and incorporate voters at the local level. Therefore, we focus our first effort at collecting cross-national data on parliamentary elections.
43. Nomination violence also existed in the African one-party state. However, since there are no contemporary African one-party states (Wahman, Hadenius, and Teorell, “Authoritarian Regime Types Revisited”), our inference is limited to multiparty states.
44. Flesken, “Expert Survey on Party–Citizen Linkages.”
45. We chose to carry out an expert survey to make sure that the data collection was based on context-sensitive and detailed knowledge of particular cases and because of the relatively low costs compared to alternatives, such as hiring students to code the question, which would be more demanding in terms of finding the relevant information and resources. We did so well-aware that expert surveys also have some potential shortcomings, such as inconsistencies in the experts’ understanding of concepts and thresholds, biases in recruitment patterns, and individual and national differences in access to and selection and weighing of evidence.
46. Coppedge et al., V-Dem Codebook v6.
47. Norris et al., The Expert Survey of Perceptions.
48. Basedau et al., “Ethnicity and Party Preference in Africa”; Elischer, Political Parties in Africa; Wahman, “Nationalized Incumbents and Regional Challengers.”
49. Hazan and Rahat, Democracy within Parties, 36.
50. Bratton and van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa.
51. For each party on each of the three questions, we have taken the average of the experts’ judgements and rounded to the nearest integer.
52. We have aggregated the categories on the dimension of inclusiveness so that parties score 0 on inclusiveness if candidates are selected by the party leader or party elites. They score 1 if delegates are involved in selecting candidates either alone or along with the party leadership. They score 2 if candidates are selected by party members, supporters, and/or all voters.
53. The categories on the dimension of institutionalization have been aggregated so that parties score 0 if rules are informal and unclear, 1 if there are rules, but these are disregarded either at the local or national level, and 2 if clear rules (written or unwritten) are followed.
54. Using the timing of the survey – from July to November 2016 – as the baseline.
55. Fjelde and Höglund. “Electoral Institutions and Electoral Violence.”
56. Bratton, ”Vote Buying and Violence.”
57. Straus and Taylor, “Democratization and Electoral Violence.”
58. Strauss, “It’s Sheer Horror Here.”
59. Brass and Cheeseman, Beyond Ethnic Politics.
60. We define a dominant party as a party that has won three consecutive national elections and won an outright majority in parliament (Sartori, Parties and Party Systems). In cases where parties changed names, but maintained the same president we counted the new party as a continuation of the old party. We did not count parties as dominant in countries with less than three uninterrupted electoral cycles.
61. E.g. Mainwaring and Scully, Building Democratic; Hicken, Building Party Systems.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Merete Bech Seeberg
Merete Bech Seeberg is assistant professor of political science at Aarhus University and affiliated with the CODE project on conflict and democratization. Her research centers on authoritarian elections, electoral manipulation and violence, and democratization.
Michael Wahman
Michael Wahman is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science, Michigan State University. He specializes in democratization and elections in new democracies, particularly on the African continent. His earlier work is published in journals such as Comparative Politics, Democratization, Electoral Studies, Journal of Peace Research, and Party Politics.
Svend-Erik Skaaning
Svend-Erik Skaaning is professor of political science at Aarhus University and co-principal investigator of the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. His research interests include the conceptualization, measurement, and explanation of democracy and the rule of law. He has published numerous books and articles on these issues.