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Abstract
This paper explores the process and outcome of Afghanistan’s 2014 presidential election from a limited access social order perspective, building on the influential work of Douglass North and colleagues on violence and social orders. Under the threat of postelection violence, nontransparent, internationally overseen bargaining led to a negotiated result that accommodated the runner-up in the initial vote count by creating a new high-level government position and giving him a share in ministerial nominations. Applying the North et al. framework and related analysis, the paper discusses the contradictions, clashes, and perverse effects that can arise when democratic institutional forms such as elections are imposed on a limited access order, especially a fragile one like Afghanistan. It argues for modest expectations and longer time horizons, focusing less on each individual election and more on developing effective political institutions (including not least robust political parties), avoiding international interventions that inadvertently worsen outcomes or create problems for the future, and not combining elections with other major ‘turning points’ such as withdrawal of foreign troops or sharp reductions in aid and international political support.
Acknowledgements
Comments from Jonathan Goodhand, Andrew Wilder, Scott Smith, Colin Cookman and two anonymous peer reviewers are gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S Institute of Peace, which does not take policy positions.
Notes
1. As noted in Democracy International, Afghanistan Observation Mission 2014, 47, ‘A peaceful transfer of power did occur, but the process that led to it was not democratic’.
2. North et al., Violence and Social Orders.
3. This evidence is presented in Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, chapter 2.
4. State control over organised armed forces is a central element of the classic Weberian state.
5. The distinction between limited access orders and open access orders is similar to that between ‘extractive institutions’ and ‘inclusive institutions’ in the framework advanced by Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail. In their framework, however, the dynamics of political-economic evolution are based on social conflict between elites and non-elites, whereas in the North et al. framework the focus is on intra-elite contestation.
6. Such organisations include limited-liability business corporations, and also civil, philanthropic, and religious organisations.
7. Manifestations of greater economic and political access include the free establishment of businesses and their entry into the marketplace (as opposed to earlier restricted issuance of charters by the government) and elections based on increasingly widespread suffrage (moving towards universal male suffrage and then belatedly including women).
8. The empires created by European countries during the nineteenth century, when the most prominent among them were themselves becoming open access orders, created new limited access orders or built on existing ones throughout the world. Post-World War II decolonisation resulted in the creation of numerous new countries, the vast bulk of them limited access orders.
9. See North et al., Shadow of Violence, for a discussion of the application of the violence and social orders framework in the contemporary world along with some case studies of individual countries.
10. These issues are briefly alluded to in Byrd, ‘Understanding Afghanistan’s 2014 Presidential Election’, Box 1, 6.
11. See de Waal, ‘Mission without End?’ and Real Politics of the Horn of Africa.
12. See Goodhand, Contested Transitions and Goodhand and Mansfield, Drugs and (Dis)order, respectively.
13. Goodhand, Contested Transitions, provides an overview.
14. See Byrd, ‘Changing Financial Flows,’ for a brief discussion of the main economic and financial resources over which elite contestation and bargaining have occurred since 2001.
15. Violent conflict over underground mineral resources is a good example, where Taliban elements are sometimes involved but the underlying driver is access to resources. See Noorani, Afghanistan’s Emerging Mining Oligarchy and Integrity Watch Afghanistan, Plunderers of Hope?, which contain a few examples. Specifically with regard to lapis lazuli, Afghanistan’s signature gemstone, see Global Witness, War in the Treasury of the People.
16. A notable example of cooperation crossing ethnic and other divisions is the illicit narcotics industry. See Shaw, ‘Drug Trafficking’ for an early discussion of the role of the Ministry of Interior in ‘regulating’ the drug industry and ensuring smooth shipments across geographical and ethnic boundaries. Undoubtedly the system has evolved since that analysis was conducted, and the role of the Taliban has increased as the insurgency expanded. More generally, while there are examples of violent conflict over access to opium revenues and transport routes (including sometimes between different Taliban groups), the lucrative profits involved also provided a strong incentive for cooperation in the interest of smooth functioning of the drug industry.
17. In the cases in which elections were held, only a small proportion of the male population was eligible to vote, typically based on restricted citizenship and some form of property or wealth ownership as the most common eligibility criterion.
18. See, among others, Mansfield and Snyder, Electing to Fight, chapter 1 and elsewhere.
19. See North et al., Shadow of Violence, 341.
20. The risk that early elections in post-conflict countries lead to a new outbreak of inter-state or civil war is argued to be especially high by Brancati and Snyder (‘Time to Kill’), among others.
21. See Mansfield and Snyder, Electing to Fight, who argue that emerging democracies are more prone to engage in inter-country wars as well as civil wars. See Zakaria, Future of Freedom, for a discussion on the pitfalls of electoral democracy in the absence of liberal checks and balances, effective political parties, strong civil society organisations, etc.
22. Collier, Wars, Guns, and Votes.
23. See Pritchett and de Weijer, ‘Fragile States’.
24. The need for collective action to produce and preserve public goods, and the obstacles to collective action, were set forth in Olson, Logic of Collective Action, generating a large literature and numerous applications.
25. See Keefer, ‘Collective Action, Political Parties’ and Booth, Development as a Collective Action Problem, among others.
26. See Keefer, ‘Organizing for Prosperity’.
27. Ibid., 18–20.
28. See, among others, Larson, Political Parties in Afghanistan.
29. See, among others, Reynolds, ‘Curious Case of Afghanistan’; also Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan, Evaluation of the SNTV Electoral System.
30. For a detailed account of the presidential election, see International Crisis Group, Afghanistan’s Political Transition; see also Democracy International, Afghanistan Observation Mission 2014.
31. Indeed, the two presidential candidates who subsequently got the highest number of votes in the first round and went on to contest for the presidency in the second round, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, would have at the outset of the election process in 2013 been widely considered as among the least favoured by Karzai of the 11 presidential candidates who contended in the first round.
32. The preliminary vote totals reported by the IEC were 4,485,888 (56.44 per cent) for Ghani and 3,461,639 (43.56 per cent) for Abdullah. See Clark, ‘Elections 2014 (37)’.
33. Given the large vote gap between the two candidates in the second round preliminary tally, and also because there undoubtedly was fraud in favour of both candidates, there would have had to be anywhere from two million (if one-fourth of the fraud favoured Abdullah) to three million (if one-third of the fraud favoured him) fraudulent votes for the election outcome to be reversed. So in the range of 25–40 per cent of the eight million votes initially recorded would have had to be fraudulent for the election to have been close enough that Abdullah might have been the actual winner. However, Democracy International, Afghanistan Observation Mission 2014, 41, noted that ‘The audit was imperfect, but the process revealed that it was much harder to find evidence of fraud in this election compared to previous elections’.
34. The IEC did present a plaque to President Ghani, indicating his percentage of the post-audit total vote (55.27 per cent). The post-audit election results (total and by province) subsequently were leaked and made public; see Ruttig, ‘Elections 2014 (52)’.
35. Abdullah had come in second in the first round of the 2009 presidential election, and then under pressure bowed out of the second round, gifting that election to Karzai. So, from his standpoint, not getting anything out of the 2014 election would have meant waiting a full decade, with uncertain prospects that he would be a viable and realistic presidential candidate in 2019.
36. The prevalence of dispute resolution in Afghanistan by violence or threat thereof, and that this occurred during the 2014 presidential election, is noted by Ruttig, ‘Elections 2014 (50)’ among others.
37. Afghan elites were accustomed to this kind of intra-elite bargaining from the jihadi politics of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as from President Karzai’s political management during his nearly 13 years at the helm of leadership.
38. In 2009 there was a bitter dispute between President Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah (the two top candidates) over fraudulent votes and whether the former had passed the 50 per cent threshold to win outright victory in the first round. In the end, under international pressure, Karzai agreed to accept that there would be a second round, though Abdullah subsequently withdrew, obviating the need to actually hold the second round of voting in that election.
39. Although some Ghani supporters do command militias, there is nothing like the access Abdullah’s supporters have to armed forces, including networks in the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).
40. Rather than adopting a principle of transparency and releasing the audit’s results, parts of the international community on the contrary condemned it in the press, with the European Union calling the audit process ‘unsatisfactory’ (see European Union Election Assessment Team press release).
41. Indeed, van Bijlert, ‘Electoral Reform’, argues that electoral reforms may degenerate into a struggle for control over Afghanistan’s electoral institutions—that is, to ‘capture’ them so as to increase the probability of victory in future elections.
42. Fortunately, SNTV is not enshrined in Afghanistan’s constitution but is part of the electoral law, which can be changed through the legislative process.
43. Mansfield and Snyder, Electing to Fight and Brancati and Snyder, ‘Time to Kill’, among others, emphasise the need to develop institutions before trying to achieve full-blown electoral democracy.
44. From a different perspective, this has been argued by Mansfield and Snyder, Electing to Fight, and others.