The surprising significance of African elections

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 139-151

  Lindberg, Staffan I ^a  

^a KENT STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 32944470692     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2006.0011     Document Type: Review

References (18)

1. Thomas Carothers, "The End of the Transition Paradigm," Journal of Democracy 13 (January 2002): 16.
2. Joel D. Barkan offered some suggestions in "PR and Southern Africa: Elections in Agrarian Societies," Journal of Democracy 6 (October 1995): 106-16;
3. and "Protracted Transitions Among Africa's New Democracies," Democratization 7 (Autumn 2000): 227-43.
4. On Mexico, see Todd Eisenstadt, Courting Democracy in Mexico: Party Strategies and Electoral Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
5. On Central America, see Mitchell A. Seligson and John A. Booth, Elections and Democracy in Central America Revisited (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
6. For example, Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) posited founding elections as the hallmark of a completed transition to democracy.
7. See also Larry Diamond, ed., Political Culture and Democracy in Developing Countries. (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993)
8. and Larry Diamond, ed., Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
9. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) argue that the date of the first election should be considered the end of the transition process.
10. This idea was then incorporated in Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
11. See www.freedomhouse.org. Freedom House does not provide a score for each indicator but only a composite rating, which implies a certain limitation on this analysis. Some readers may argue that Freedom House's two scores - civil liberties (CL) and political rights (PR) - are closely related, and that CL rankings are influenced by PR scores. Since PR scores are based in part by assessment of electoral activities, however, taking PR scores into consideration would undermine the present analysis. The two scores are based on different evaluation criteria and are devised to assess different conditions. For example, while a flawed election is likely to lead to a downgraded PR score, it can still have the effect of improving the CL ranking - which is indeed exactly what my analysis shows.
12. This is to some extent moderated by the timing of the election during the election year. Some countries (for instance Kenya and Ghana) hold their general elections in the last quarter of the election year; in these cases, the year before election year is not included in the elections period, but the year following the election is. This seems to be the most reasonable way to account for variations using the Freedom House scores, considering that rankings are yearly and do not account for when significant changes occurred.
13. Michael Bratton, "Second Elections in Africa," Journal of Democracy 9 (July 1998): 51-66.
14. Larry Diamond, "Elections Without Democracy: Thinking About Hybrid Regimes," Journal of Democracy 13 (April 2002): 21-35;
15. Terry Lynn Karl, "The Hybrid Regimes of Latin America," Journal of Democracy 6 (July 1995): 72-86;
16. and Robert Luckham, "Dilemmas of Military Disengagement and Democratization in Africa," IDS Bulletin 26 (April 1995): 49-61.
17. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), chs. 4 and 5.
18. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).