• Electoral systems & reforms

Electoral systems & reforms

Although many African states made the transition from autocracy to democracy, the shift has not been an easy one. Recent elections in Zimababwe, Kenya and Nigeria have exposed vote-buying, ballot fraud and highly-publicised election violence. Indeed research of ‘new’ democratic processes in Africa have illustrated that elections produce no improvement in government performance except in the rare instance when the incumbent is defeated; and that democracy significantly increases proneness to civil war and other forms of violence.

This paper explores the issue of violence in an election setting – focusing on the Nigerian election of 2007. The authors state that their research is the first to formally analyse electoral violence and specifically aims to investigate which candidates are most identified with electoral violence and how intimidation changes voter behaviour.

Indeed regarding the latter the authors designed a 'campaign’ - in conjunction with ActionAid Nigeria - against election violence. The campaign sought to positively effect voter turnount and encourage voters to back a 'non-violent' candidate and was delivered via town meetings, street theatre, and the distribution of materials in particular locations. By surveying those in the chosen areas the authors were able to ascertain the effect of the action. 

Regarding the campaign the authors found that:

• it succeeded in countering the reduction in turnout. It did this by emboldening people not to be intimidated by threats. However, a campaign aimed only at emboldening people cannot hope to eliminate the power of threats to intimidate
  
• the message not to vote for violent candidates had the potential to make violence counter-productive. An implication is that political violence can be effectively countered by a rather straightforward measure

More broadly the paper declares that:

• the electoral violence in Nigeria systematically reduced voter turnout. More surprisingly, it was systematically associated with non-incumbent groups
  
• the two other important illegitimate strategies of gaining votes, ballot fraud and vote-buying, were both rife alongside violence, but these were employed quite differently - predominantly used by the incumbent party and deployed most vigorously where the electoral contest was expected to be particularly tight.
  

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