african elections as vehicles for change

African Elections as Vehicles for Change

Nic Cheeseman

Journal of Democracy, Volume 21, Number 4, October 2010, pp. 139-153(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/jod.2010.0019

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african electionsas vehicles for change

Nic Cheeseman

Nic Cheeseman is university lecturer in African Politics at Oxford Uni-versity. He has published widely on African democratization in journals such as African Affairs and the Journal of Modern African Studies. His monograph Democracy in Africa is forthcoming from Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Since the return of multipartism to sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s, transfers of power between rival parties have been rare—even in those countries where an increase in political rights has gone hand in hand with greater respect for civil liberties. Instead, presidents’ ability to control state institutions and the flow of patronage has generated an incumbency bias so strong that numerous countries in Africa have witnessed elections without change. Since 1989, only twelve sub-Saharan Africa countries have experienced opposition victories, and of those only Benin, Ghana, Madagascar, and Mauritius, have met Samuel P. Huntington’s famous, if crude, “two-turnover” test for a consolidated democracy.1

Explanations of why transfers of power have occurred in certain Af-rican countries but not in others have typically taken the form of fine-grained case studies that describe a complex mix of economic decline, falling support for incumbents, and the ability or inability of opposition parties to form a broad alliance.2 Comparative analysis has been rare, and the literature has said little about a general pattern that merits more at-tention than it has so far received: In presidential systems, the prospects for opposition success are conditioned by whether or not the incumbent stands for reelection. In other words, when a sitting president cannot run because of term limits, health, or internal party rules, the ruling party is likely to perform significantly worse at the polls.

The importance of incumbency in Africa is one manifestation of a more general trend noted by Gideon Maltz in these pages in 2007. Com-paring all elections in electoral authoritarian regimes between 1992 and 2006, Maltz finds that while incumbents retained power in 93 percent

Journal of Democracy Volume 21, Number 4 October 2010© 2010 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press

140 Journal of Democracy

of the elections that they contested, their successors won just 52 percent of the time.3 The pattern that Maltz identifies is especially noteworthy in the African context, where weak institutions and personalized power tend to magnify the advantages of incumbency. Although open-seat polls have been relatively rare, they account for half of all presidential transfers of power from one party to another between 1990 and 2009 (see Table 1 above). Indeed, most of the elections cited as evidence of real demo-cratic gains in Africa—such as the Ghanaian election of 2000 and the Kenyan election of 2002—occurred after term limits forced presidents to step down.

Despite the clear significance of incumbency to political change around the world, there have been few attempts to trace the mechanisms through which nonincumbent elections create fresh opportunities for opposition parties or to assess whether open-seat polls are more likely to lead to transfers of power in some regions rather than others. These lacunae rep-resent significant limitations on our understanding of electoral competi-tion, because incumbency matters for different reasons in different politi-cal contexts.

Consider the United States, where in the last thirty years only George H.W. Bush lost as an incumbent and transfers of power between parties have historically resulted from open-seat polls, the most recent example being the election of Barack Obama.4 Much of the extant work on the significance of incumbency in the United States and other established de-mocracies focuses on the claim that because the electorate is faced with lesser-known candidates in open-seat elections, the significance of retro-spective voting (casting one’s ballot based on a candidate’s past perfor-mance) is reduced, to the likely detriment of ruling parties. Although this literature offers many insights into the advantages conferred by incum-bency in Europe and North America, it is not very helpful in accounting for the character of nonincumbent elections in Africa.

First of all, voting behavior in Africa is typically less well-explained by retrospective-voting models, and in any case evaluations of party and individual performances are often more heavily shaped by patronage rela-tions and communal identities than is the case in established democracies.

Elections

Transfers in Incumbent Polls

Benin (1991, 1996), Cape Verde (1991), Madagascar (1993, 1996, 2001), Malawi (1994), Senegal (2000), Zambia (1991)

Transfers in Open-Seat Polls

Benin (2006), Cape Verde (2001), Côte d’Ivoire (2000), Ghana (2000, 2008), Kenya (2002), Mali (2002), Niger (1993), Sierra Leone (2007)

Table 1—PresidenTial Transfers of Power in MulTiParTy africa, 1990–20091

1Sample includes all sub-Saharan African polities holding direct multiparty presidential elections. Transfers are excluded if they were immediately preceded by a coup and there-fore held in the absence of a ruling party.

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Second, the distinctive way in which political competition is conducted in contemporary Africa exaggerates the significance of incumbency. The weakness of political parties, the salience of ethnic identity, and the im-portance of neopatrimonial politics combine to create an electoral land-scape in which institutions are typically weak and power is concentrated in political leaders. Thus, while open-seat elections are likely to be even more strongly correlated with transfers of power in Africa, the mecha-nisms through which incumbency works are likely to be distinctive. Fi-nally, because the existing literature addresses democratic polities only, it has little to say about the interrelationship of incumbency, turnover, and democratization. Yet if democratic consolidation requires the removal of old authoritarian powers and turnover is an indicator of democratic prog-ress, open-seat elections may be a significant factor in the democratiza-tion process.

This essay draws on a comparative data set of African elections in the multiparty era to demonstrate that open-seat polls are particularly likely to result in opposition victories in sub-Saharan Africa for two reasons: because of the challenges that they pose for ruling parties and because they are often more transparent and fair. While this combination does not ensure a transfer of power, it does create a rare window of opportunity for political change. When an open-seat poll coincides with economic hard times, government-related political scandals, and a strong opposition campaign, turnover becomes not only possible but likely. Thus interna-tional and domestic actors seeking to enhance the prospects for political change would do well to prioritize the introduction of, and respect for, term limits. Of course, turnover does not guarantee democratic gains, as the recent experience of Kenya demonstrates, but it may help both to build trust in the rules of the game and to boost the legitimacy of the political process, and it is ultimately necessary for the institutionalization of com-petitive multiparty politics.

The Impact of Incumbency

The vast majority of African political systems now feature constitutions that place a two-term limit on the presidency. Of the thirty countries where term limits have been reached, presidents refrained from seeking a third term in Benin, Cape Verde, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, S~ao Tomé and Príncipe, Seychelles (three-term limit), Sierra Leone, and Tanzania.5 In their 2007 article in these pages, Daniel Posner and Daniel Young cited these cases, as well as the inability of the presidents of Malawi, Nigeria, and Zambia to secure unconstitutional third terms, as evidence that Afri-can politics was “institutionalizing.”6 Subsequent events, however, have demonstrated that respect for term limits has not been ingrained across the continent. To date, incumbent presidents have succeeded in amending the constitution to remain in office in Angola, Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti,


Gabon, Namibia, Niger, Togo, and Uganda.7 Nonetheless, over the last two decades the enforcement of term limits in a range of countries has resulted in a significant number of open-seat polls, making it possible for the first time to examine the impact of incumbency on electoral outcomes in Africa.

If one looks at all direct presidential elections in Africa between 1990 and 2009, it is clear that opposition parties perform far worse when run-ning against a sitting president. Although there were nine cases in which ruling parties lost despite fielding an incumbent, four of these defeats oc-curred during the rather exceptional circumstances of founding elections (Benin in 1991, Cape Verde in 1991, Malawi in 1994, and Zambia in 1991), and three are accounted for by just one country (Madagascar). By contrast, the transfers of power resulting from open-seat elections have been spread more evenly, both geographically and chronologically (see Table 1). Moreover, a comparison of all nonfounding elections (see Table 2) reveals that opposition parties were almost four times more likely to win nonincumbent elections, while the vote share of ruling parties dropped on average by 12 percent when they had to put up a new candidate. Even when incumbent parties won, their margin of victory fell by 10 percent in open-seat polls.

Significantly, these results are not driven by the inclusion of electoral authoritarian systems, in which landslide victories and incumbent elec-tions inevitably go hand in hand. Even when excluding all countries rated as Not Free by Freedom House, the share of elections won by the ruling party in incumbent and open-seat polls remains virtually unchanged at 64 percent and 50 percent, respectively. Nor is it the case that presidents abide by term limits only in full democracies. Thus the pattern reported here does not emerge simply because open-seat elections occur only in countries with less repressive political environments that are more con-ducive to opposition victories. Even when the sample is limited to Af-rica’s electoral democracies, ruling parties fare worse in open-seat polls. In short, incumbency has an independent impact on the performance of the opposition.

Three main factors explain why ruling parties struggle without an in-cumbent candidate. First and most fundamentally, weakly institutional-ized party structures and highly personalized politics mean that the battle to select a new presidential candidate often results in a divided party un-

Incumbent (%) Open-Seat (%) DifferenceRuling-party vote share 65 53 -12Winning margin where ruling party won 41 31 -10Voter turnout 65 62 -3Rate of turnover 12 45 +33

1Sample includes all sub-Saharan polities holding direct multiparty presidential elections.

Table 2—The iMPacT of incuMbency on nonfounding-elecTion ouTcoMes, 1990–20091

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able to roll out a united campaign. Second, nonincumbent candidates can-not point to a record of accomplishments, and so their promises to key cli-ent groups are less credible. At the same time, nonincumbent candidates may face greater obstacles in funding their election campaigns. Finally, unless the outgoing president has handpicked his successor, there may be a distance between the incumbent and his party’s candidate. The presi-dent, who retains ultimate control over the machinery of government until a new leader is inaugurated, may thus feel that he has less at stake in the polls and prove more willing to preside over a free and fair contest.

Succession Struggles

Maltz has argued that the major challenge to the continued hegemony of electoral authoritarian regimes is effectively managing the succession process.8 Ruling parties in Africa are well aware of the danger posed by leadership battles. Thus, they typically either avoid asking incumbents to stand for renomination or they employ rubber-stamp processes struc-tured to prevent intraparty competition. Where term limits exist and are respected, however, ruling parties are forced to engage in the unsettling act of choosing a new leader. This is a huge hurdle for parties in Africa, because the centrality of the executive to political life and the low institu-tionalization of political parties tend to magnify the stakes of succession politics. Rodger Govea and John Holm find that, as a result of the weak-ness of formal party structures, the majority of succession processes (61 percent) between 1963 and 1988 were “unregulated,” meaning that the outcome of the process was governed by the informal balance of personal networks within the party rather than a straightforward provision in the party constitution. Moreover, many unregulated successions deteriorate into political crises and violence.9 Less dramatically, the mismanagement of the succession process can entrench internal party divisions, leading to greater infighting and, in extreme cases, the breakup of the party, all of which makes it harder to put together a coherent and united election campaign. The primary process is typically destabilizing for most politi-cal parties—even in well-established democracies. It is even more likely to lead to lasting divisions where parties are poorly institutionalized, as in sub-Saharan Africa.10

The story of Sierra Leone’s ruling party during the 2007 election cycle provides a good example. In September 2005, the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) selected the sitting vice-president, Solomon Berewa, to re-place outgoing president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, thwarting the presidential ambitions of Charles Margai. Margai, son of the country’s second prime minister, ultimately decided to abandon the party and establish the rival People’s Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC). The PMDC repre-sented a major challenge to continued SLPP rule for two reasons. First, the new party appealed to some of the same constituencies as the SLPP


and threatened to siphon support away from the ruling party in its strong-holds in the south and east of the country. Second, the SLPP already faced a severe electoral challenge from Ernest Bai Koroma, the candidate of the All People’s Congress (APC).11 In the first round of the presidential elec-tion, Margai secured 14 percent of the vote, denying Berewa the 55 per-cent that he needed to avoid a second round. Then, in the runoff between Berewa and Karoma, Margai turned his back on his former colleagues in government and urged his supporters to back the opposition, enabling the APC to make inroads into traditional SLPP areas and helping Karoma to win the additional votes needed to secure a rare opposition victory.

In Kenya, the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU) paid a similarly high price for failing successfully to manage the battle to replace Daniel arap Moi in the run-up to the 2002 election. Moi’s controversial decision to impose his favored successor, Uhuru Kenyatta, resulted in a number of prominent political leaders abandoning KANU to join the op-position—a turn of events that directly contributed to KANU’s defeat by the National Alliance Rainbow Coalition (NARC).

In Ghana in 2008, a divisive contest to replace President John Kufour left the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) riven and marred its public im-age, opening the door to an opposition win at the polls. The seventeen candidates who contested the NPP presidential primary spent vast sums of money during a period of economic hardship, giving the impression that the party was out of touch with the common man. Intraparty competition intensified as Kufour meddled in the process in a bid to prevent longtime rival Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo from securing the post. Although Akufo-Addo ultimately won a relatively easy victory, the primaries left the NPP deeply divided. The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) made effective use in its campaign not only of presidential candidate John Evans Atta Mills but also of former president Jerry John Rawlings. Presi-dent Kufour, by contrast, refused to campaign for Akufo-Addo and would not even return the phone calls of his own party’s campaign manager.12

The deep divisions that ran through the NPP extended to the selection of constituency members of parliament (MPs). Losing primary candidates reported that senior political leaders had “interfered” in their contests in order to favor an ally from the “other side,” and consequently refused to accept the legitimacy of their defeat.13 Following the party primaries, a significant number of losers felt sufficiently infuriated that they decided to run as independents—a relatively rare occurrence in a strongly two-party system. These breakaway candidacies had a huge impact on the parliamentary elections and even the presidential election. Not only did the former-NPP independents not campaign on behalf of Akufo-Addo, they also diverted the attention of the official NPP candidates—who were now embroiled in divisive local battles—away from campaigning for their party’s presidential contender. In the end, Mills beat Akufo-Addo by just 29,419 votes in a runoff, leaving NPP supporters to rue these internal

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cleavages. The NPP also suffered in the parliamentary polls, where inter-nal tensions most likely cost the party 3 seats where former NPP candi-dates won as independents, and 5 to 10 seats where official and dissident NPP candidates split the vote, allowing for an NDC victory. Given that the NDC won only 7 more seats than the NPP (114 to 107), it is easy to see why senior NPP leaders believe that it was disunity that cost them the election.14

Of course, the challenges posed by succession battles are not insur-mountable. In the much discussed case of South Africa, the African Na-tional Congress (ANC) went through an extremely divisive succession battle to choose Thabo Mbeki’s successor, who then went on to lead the ANC to yet another landslide victory in a nonincumbent election. Yet even in this case, where the ANC’s legitimacy as the party of liberation continued to underpin its electoral dominance, the succession struggle left its mark. The rivalry between Mbeki and his main adversary Jacob Zuma intensified competition within the ANC, and a period of heated infighting found its ultimate expression in the decision of a number of ANC lead-ers to leave the party to form the Congress of the People (COPE). COPE presidential candidate Mosiuoa Lekota may have secured only 1.3 million votes (7.4 percent), but this was still a significant performance given that COPE had been formed just months earlier. In short, succession battles and open-seat elections tend to produce internal strains and challenges for ruling parties, even though these are not always fatal.

The Advantages of Incumbency

Incumbents enjoy considerable advantages in presidential systems where power and control over patronage are heavily centralized, but these advantages may not extend to the successor in open-seat polls. Neopat-rimonial political structures limit the constraints on executive action and enable incumbents to treat public funds as personal largesse. Thus many African presidents have been remarkably adept at building political ma-chines while in office by diverting resources to their “homelands” in order to reward supporters and punish enemies. The instrumental use of patron-age to play divide-and-rule politics has characterized regimes as diverse as Moi’s in Kenya, Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s in Malawi, Gnassingbé Eyadema’s in Togo, and Joseph Kabila’s in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Significantly, building an effective political machine is a long-term strategy that must begin anew as soon as each election is over; as Mwai Kibaki learned recently, voters are likely to turn their backs on last-minute appeals if they feel that they have been abandoned for years.

Precisely because they are in power and can construct durable patron-age networks, incumbents have a considerable advantage. They are also better placed to make believable promises to prospective voters, who can use a leader’s past performance to evaluate the reliability of his pledges to


provide more goods in the future. This is significant, because in electoral systems with few swing voters, electoral success is largely determined by candidates’ ability to maximize the turnout of their core supporters. As recent research on Kenya has shown, the distribution of patronage and the location of parties’ rallies strongly suggest that parties consciously and strategically work to generate the highest turnout possible among their base and to attract some swing voters, while largely ignoring opposition strongholds.15 Incumbents’ capacity to construct political machines and make credible clientelistic appeals gives them a comparative advantage in generating turnout, so long as they have been sufficiently generous.16

The advantage of incumbency may not weigh so heavily in open-seat polls, however. While nonincumbent candidates are likely to be wealthy, they will not have had the same level of access to state resources. If the sitting president will not bankroll the campaign of his successor, the re-source gap between government and opposition candidates narrows. This appears to have been the case in Kenya, where Moi’s backers refused to fund Uhuru Kenyatta’s campaign, forcing him to rely instead on the Ke-nyatta family fortune; consequently, in the 2002 contest KANU spent just a third of the $100 million that it had lavished on the 1992 campaign.17 Nonincumbents may also find it difficult to convince voters of their cred-ibility, and may struggle to win the loyalty of their predecessor’s support-ers. In highly personalized systems, voters often identify with a particular individual rather than a party, and the goodwill won by an incumbent may be hard to transfer to his successor.

This problem can be exacerbated by ethnic rivalries, especially if the incoming leader represents a different ethnic group or community from that of his predecessor; supporters of the outgoing leader may be reluctant to turn out en masse for the new man, while the new candidate’s support-ers are less likely to be fully incorporated into the party’s political ma-chine. The multiethnic nature of many African countries means that open-seat elections will often result in a change in the ethnic identity of the ruling party’s presidential candidate. In fact, in highly diverse countries such as Kenya and Mali, successful parties must be multiethnic coalitions in which the presidential candidacy rotates among the different groups. (This practice has been institutionalized in Nigeria.) Kenya and Ghana well illustrate the challenges to ruling parties posed by the ethnic rotation of presidential candidates. In Kenya in 2002, it was partly in recognition of the groundswell of frustration with 24 years of “Kalenjin rule” that Moi chose Uhuru Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, as his successor. But Kenyatta had no credibility among many of the smaller ethnic groups that Moi had care-fully knitted into his ruling alliance. A huge number refused to transfer their allegiance to Kenyatta, contributing to a landslide election victory for Kibaki and the NARC.

The NPP faced a similar, if less dramatic, problem in Ghana when John Kufour, an Ashanti, was replaced by Akufo-Addo, an Akyem. Ashanti

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voters were less enthusiastic about Akufo-Addo’s campaign than they had been about Kufour’s in 1996 and 2000. Moreover, given the tension be-tween the Kufour and Akufo-Addo blocs, the NPP struggled to persuade Ashanti voters that they would be looked after by an Akufo-Addo admin-istration.18 Conversely, although both the Ashanti and the Akyem have historically formed part of the NPP’s Akan voting bloc, many Akyem felt that their support had been disregarded during Kufour’s tenure as party leader. As a result, turnout in NPP strongholds was far lower than ex-pected, leaving the party vulnerable. In the end, the NPP missed out on an absolute first-round majority in the presidential election by only 0.9 percent, and ultimately lost the runoff by just 40,586 votes. Many NPP leaders believe that the party’s complacent attitude toward its own sup-porters contributed to its downfall.19

To Stay or Go?

Transfers of power require meaningful elections and the willingness of the ruling party to concede defeat. The impact of nonincumbency on these two processes is not straightforward. Open-seat elections create anomalous power dynamics because the new presidential candidate is nominally in charge of the party and the election campaign, while the sitting president retains control of the state’s coercive capacity until the election results have been announced. Stealing an election in most cases therefore requires the support of the outgoing leader. This bifurcated au-thority structure can play out in dramatically different ways. Where a sit-ting president handpicks his successor or the death of an incumbent means that the presidential candidate becomes acting president, state power may be deployed to ensure a ruling-party victory in highly competitive con-tests. Events in Togo following the death of longtime dictator Gnassingbé Eyadema in 2005 followed this pattern, as members of the ancien régime cracked down on the opposition in an attempt to ensure the succession of the dictator’s son, Faure Essozimma Gnassingbé.

When a sitting president is succeeded by a candidate to whom he has little attachment, however, he may be less willing to undermine the rules of the game and more inclined to consider his own legacy. Should this be the case, the opposition candidate is able to compete on a more level play-ing field, as in Ghana in 2000 and 2008, Kenya in 2002, and Sierra Leone in 2007. These processes are not easily measurable, as no comprehensive data set of electoral fairness exists, and the two divergent outcomes pro-duced by this bifurcated authority structure are likely to cancel each other out in any “large N” analysis.

However, looking at a series of elections within a given country sug-gests that nonincumbent elections may be significantly more open. Kenya is a case in point. Desperate to remain in power, Moi prepared for the elections of 1992 and 1997 by inspiring ethnic clashes, distorting the reg-


istration process, and—just to be sure—stuffing ballot boxes on polling day. Clearly, the prospect of ceding power sat ill with Moi. In contrast to this dismal picture, the 2002 open-seat election stands out as remarkably free and fair. This is reflected in Table 3 above, which shows the Freedom House scores for the year of the first three multiparty elections in Kenya (1992, 1997, and 2002) and Ghana (1992, 1996, and 2000) in order to give an indication of the political climate within which the polls were held. Not only were the 2002 elections Kenya’s only polls to date with no civil un-rest, but the counting process was widely seen to be accurate. Having been forced to respect term limits, Moi proved to be far less invested in securing a win for Kenyatta, even though Moi had hoped to wield power behind the scenes under a Kenyatta presidency.

Ghanaian elections have followed a similar path. The opposition boy-cotted the 1992 polls, citing irregularities. Although the 1996 election represented a considerable improvement (in part due to the building of interparty trust through the Inter-Party Advisory Committee established by the electoral commission in 1994), the political environment was far from free and open, with few commentators confident that Rawlings was prepared to lose.20 By contrast, the nonincumbent election of 2000 was the most transparent that Ghana had seen, as indicated by the significant im-provement in Freedom House scores. Of course, the transfer of power also owed much to Ghana’s gradual democratization under Rawlings and the emergence of one of Africa’s most independent and professional electoral commissions, but it was also significant that Rawlings’s personal power and pride were not at stake.

The Ghanaian elections of 2008 offer an opportunity to trace the deci-sion-making process of a defeated ruling party operating within a bifur-cated power structure. When an NDC victory became inevitable, Akufo-Addo came under enormous pressure from party activists and a significant number of NPP leaders to reject the results.21 Party hard-liners felt that the reported NDC intimidation of NPP agents in some constituencies justified defying the electoral commission if the margin of victory was slim. A heated meeting of Akufo-Addo’s campaign team that was called to decide the party’s response to its defeat was reportedly split down the middle, despite the self-professed commitment of the NPP to constitu-tionalism. Significantly, even though the election team ultimately agreed to concede defeat, the decision was taken out of their hands by the sitting

Founding Election(incumbent)

2nd Election (incumbent)

3rd Election (nonincumbent)

PR CL Total PR CL Total PR CL TotalKenya 4 5 9 6 6 13 4 4 8Ghana 5 5 10 3 4 7 2 3 5

1PR = political rights, CL = civil liberties. Freedom House scores range from 1 to 7, with lower scores signifying more freedom.

Table 3—elecTion-year freedoM house scores in Kenya and ghana1

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president, John Kufour. While the election team was meeting to thrash out its response, Kufour went on Ghanaian radio and, without consulting those in the meeting, announced that the NPP would respect the decision of the electoral commission. This declaration effectively ended the elec-tion; without Kufour’s backing, Akufo-Addo lacked the control over state security forces that he would have needed in order to hold on to power in the face of inevitable NDC protests. The president’s rivals within the NPP see this as further evidence that Kufour, who had done little during the campaign itself, was all too happy to frustrate Akufo-Addo’s personal ambitions.22

The transfer of power in Sierra Leone was underpinned by a similar dy-namic. President Kabbah initially promoted Berewa’s candidacy, but by the time of the 2007 campaign relations between the two had soured. The tension between the outgoing president and the new party standard-bearer enabled the newly reconstituted National Electoral Commission (NEC) to maintain its independence from the ruling SLPP during an extremely close and controversial contest. The vote count for the presidential runoff re-vealed that in a number of polling stations more people had voted than were registered. The NEC decided to invalidate all votes from these polling sta-tions, thereby rejecting both fraudulent and legitimate ballots in these con-stituencies. Because the polling stations in question were largely in SLPP strongholds, the ruling party planned to serve the head of the NEC with an injunction to prevent her from declaring the election result, thus giving the regime an opportunity to reassert control over the electoral process.

According to Berewa, however, Kabbah’s stance toward his succes-sor and lack of support during the election completely undermined this strategy. Having denied his party the usual advantages of incumbency, Kabbah’s refusal to intervene on Berewa’s behalf helped to weaken the SLPP’s momentum and to embolden the NEC to declare an opposition victory. At the SLPP party conference in 2009, Berewa blamed the former president for the party’s defeat, declaring that the “thing that Kabbah did that hurt me a lot was when he broadcast that he was neutral. How can you be neutral against your own party?”23

Of course, such rivalries are not inevitable. The sitting president and the party’s candidate may pull in the same direction, resulting in a fur-ther compression of democratic space, as occurred in Nigeria in 2007. In that case, departing president Olusegun Obasanjo and candidate Umaru Yar’Adua presided over the most farcical of polls, which were controlled by the government from start to finish. Although nonincumbent elections do not always produce a more level playing field, in cases where the rela-tionship between the sitting president and the presidential candidate is not intimate, the division of authority may hamper electoral manipulation and make the retention of power through unconstitutional means less likely.

The combined impact of succession struggles, of the difficulty that nonincumbent candidates may have in mobilizing patronage networks,


and of the greater willingness of retiring presidents to oversee free and fair elections means that open-seat polls represent real windows of oppor-tunity for opposition parties in Africa. This finding is consistent with the work of Marc Morjé Howard and Philip G. Roessler, whose analysis of a global data set on competitive authoritarian regimes suggests that nonin-cumbent elections are more likely to have liberalizing outcomes, though this is not inevitable.24

Of course, open-seat elections can only be part of the explanation for any transfer of power. In Kenya in 2002, Moi’s defeat was underpinned by continued economic decline and a learning process among the opposi-tion. In Ghana in 2008, the global economic downturn, accusations of cor-ruption, and a sense that it was time for a change contributed to the NPP’s defeat. Furthermore, open-seat elections may not lead to turnover at all if other conditions are unfavorable—as in South Africa in 2009, where the ruling ANC retained power despite a succession battle that exacerbated intraparty rifts. Thus more work is needed to understand the conditions under which opposition coordination and nonincumbency create the nec-essary conditions for political change.

The Impact of Term Limits

Another topic deserving of greater scholarly attention is whether term limits, by increasing the likelihood of alternations in power, promote democratic consolidation. There are three good reasons for thinking that turnover can play such a positive role in the democratization process. First, transfers of power in nonincumbent elections have helped to re-move entrenched, corrupt, and authoritarian parties from power, creating opportunities for further political liberalization. The defeat of KANU in Kenya is perhaps the most striking illustration of this. Until the nonin-cumbent election of 2002, the reintroduction of multipartism in Kenya had not resulted in an improvement in governance or civil liberties. It was not the introduction of multiparty elections but the removal of Moi from power that opened up political space in Kenya. This is not an isolated ex-ample. Comparing the twenty countries in which opposition parties were able to capture the presidency in nonfounding elections between 1992 and 2006, Maltz finds that turnovers were typically followed by a significant improvement in the quality of political rights and civil liberties.25

Second, turnover is important because it is perhaps the most powerful sign that key actors have a genuine commitment to democratic values. As Huntington has argued, we can only say that democracy is consoli-dated when both the previous authoritarian ruling party and the party that defeats it have demonstrated that they will willingly release the reins of power at the appropriate time.26 But an alternation in leadership does more than simply prove a commitment to democratic values—it can also foster them. The experience of witnessing a ruling party gracefully accept defeat

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builds confidence among a range of actors that political leaders intend to follow the rules of the game, and thus moves countries closer to a point where democracy becomes the only game in town.27

Democratization is an iterative process composed of a number of tiny steps. It is advanced when democratic rules are followed and set back when they are broken. In one of the only attempts to identify the micropro-cesses that may connect turnover and democratic consolidation in Africa, Devra Moehler and Staffan I. Lindberg have recently shown that turnover serves to reduce the gap in institutional trust between winners and losers. Although this positive effect of turnovers erodes over time, Moehler and Lindberg conclude that, in the short run, alternations in power help “to establish a self-reinforcing equilibrium by providing incentives for elites on both sides to play by the democratic rules of the game.”28

Similarly, although Afrobarometer survey data have shown that the first two decades of multipartism in Africa saw a gradual downward trend in popular support for democracy, Michael Bratton finds that this was offset in countries that had experienced an alternation in power, such as Ghana and Mali.29 In other words, transfers of power injected multiparty regimes with a much needed dose of legitimacy. This is a significant finding be-cause the stronger the popular support for democracy, the more costly it is for leaders to abuse democratic institutions and indulge authoritarian tendencies; thus initial democratic gains are less likely to be eroded. Taken together, all this suggests that—in addition to the obvious gain of simply removing authoritarian leaders—nonincumbent elections can play an im-portant role in the evolution of a national consensus in favor of democracy. Clearly, there are good reasons to believe that the more turnover we see, the more confidently we can speak of democratic consolidation.

Yet it is also clear that the relationship between nonincumbency and de-mocratization is complex and that the extent and lasting significance of the democratic gains from turnover are questionable. Most obviously, there is no guarantee that the opposition, when in power, will rule in a more demo-cratic and transparent manner than their predecessors. In Benin, the victory of Prime Minister Nicéphore Soglo in the 1991 presidential election led to a steady process of democratic consolidation that has seen two turnovers, but the process has been far from straightforward. Having lost the founding election, authoritarian leader Mathieu Kérékou made one of Africa’s most remarkable political comebacks to regain power at the 1996 polls. Turnover may have aided the consolidation process in Benin then, but not because it permanently removed the leader of the ancien régime from power.

Other countries have had far more bleak experiences with turnover. In Zambia, it was opposition leader and trade-union hero Frederick Chiluba who, having defeated Kenneth Kaunda in the founding election of 1991, established the most corrupt and venal regime in the country’s history. Kenya has suffered a similarly mixed fate following the victory of oppo-sition forces. Most obviously, the flawed polls of 2007 demonstrated that


Kibaki was no more willing to give up power than Moi had been in 1992 and 1997. In part because of these events, Kenyans, who had been among the world’s most optimistic people in 2002, just years later had become some of the most pessimistic. Yet despite the calamitous fallout from the “Kenya crisis,” in which more than a thousand people died and more than a hundred-thousand were displaced, Kenya remains a more open country now than it was during the final fifteen years under Moi.

The cases of Benin, Kenya, and Zambia suggest that the impact of turnover can be fully understood only in retrospect, as the gains of an isolated electoral turnover may prove to be illusory. Nonetheless, the po-tential for term limits to generate nonincumbent elections that contribute to processes of democratic consolidation is clear. There are good reasons, therefore, for international actors to push for term limits to be included in constitutions and to insist that they be respected. At a time when inter-national confidence in, and commitment to, African democracy appears to be on the wane, this is good news: Term limits are remarkably easy to monitor compared to other forms of political and economic conditional-ity, and they are a goal around which a wide range of international and domestic actors are keen to coalesce, as was witnessed in anti–third-term campaigns in Malawi, Nigeria, and Zambia. Supporting these movements will not guarantee democratic change, but it will improve its prospects.

NOTES

1. Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Cen-tury (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

2. Lindsay Whitfield, “‘Change for a Better Ghana’: Party Competition, Institutional-ization and Alternation in Ghana’s 2008 Elections,” African Affairs 108 (August 2009): 621–41.

3. Gideon Maltz, “The Case for Presidential Term Limits,” Journal of Democracy 18 (January 2007): 134.

4. Thomas M. Holbrook, “Incumbency, National Conditions, and the 2008 Presidential Election,” PS: Political Science & Politics (October 2008): 709–12.

5. Term limits are not employed in Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.

6. Daniel N. Posner and Daniel J. Young, “The Institutionalization of Political Power in Africa,” Journal of Democracy 18 (July 2007): 126–40.

7. Posner and Young, “Institutionalization of Political Power in Africa,” 132.

8. Maltz, “The Case for Presidential Term Limits.”

9. Rodger Govea and John Holm, “Crisis, Violence and Political Succession in Africa,” Third World Quarterly 18 (March 1998): 129–48.

10. Marty Cohen et al., The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (London: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

153Nic Cheeseman

11. Magnus Ohman, “The 2007 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in Sierra Le-one,” Electoral Studies (December 2008): 764–68.

12. Author’s interview with Konadu Apraku, NPP election-campaign manager, Accra, Ghana, 8 July 2009.

13. Author’s interview with Nana Yaw Ofori-Kuragu, independent NPP-affiliated MP, Accra, Ghana, 11 July 2009.

14. Author’s interview with Ambrose Dery, NPP MP and deputy minority leader in Par-liament, Accra, Ghana, 7 July 2009.

15. Simeon Nichter, “Vote Buying or Turnout Buying? Machine Politics and the Secret Ballot,” American Political Science Review 102 (February 2008): 19–31; Jeremy Horowitz, “Ethnic Groups and Campaign Strategy in Kenya’s 2007 Election,” Working Group in Afri-can Political Economy Working Paper 17, December 2009.

16. Pedro C. Vicente and Leonard Wantchekon, “Clientelism and Vote Buying: Lessons from Field Experiments in African Elections,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 25 (Sum-mer 2009): 292–305.

17. David Throup, “The Kenya General Election: December 27, 2002,” CSIS: Africa Notes 14 (January 2003).

18. Author’s interview with Ben Ephson, political editor of the Daily Dispatch, Accra, Ghana, 10 July 2009.

19. Arthur Kennedy, Chasing the Elephant into the Bush: The Politics of Complacency (Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, 2009).

20. Richard Jeffries, “The Ghanaian Elections of 1996: Towards the Consolidation of Democracy?” African Affairs 97 (April 1998): 189–208.

21. Author interview with Elizabeth Ohene, former NPP minister of education, Accra, Ghana (16 July 2009).

22. Author interview with Yaw Osafo-Maafo, former NPP minister of finance, Accra, Ghana (18 July 2009).

23. Silas Gbandia, “Ex-President Kabba Weeps as Berewa Says He Is a Sell-Out,” Si-erre Leone News, 6 March 2009, www.thesierraleonenews.com/national/122-ex-president-kabba-weeps-as-berewa-says-he-is-a-sell-out.

24. Marc Morjé Howard and Philip G. Roessler, “Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes,” American Journal of Political Science 50 (April 2006): 365–81.

25. Maltz, “Case for Presidential Term Limits,” 135.

26. Huntington, Third Wave.

27. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

28. Devra Moehler and Staffan I. Lindberg, “Narrowing the Legitimacy Gap: Turnovers as a Cause of Democratic Consolidation,” Journal of Politics 71 (October 2009): 1463.

29. Michael Bratton, “The Alternation Effect in Africa,” Journal of Democracy 15 (Oc-tober 2004): 147–58.

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