The impact of elections: voting, political behaviour and democracy in sub-Saharan Africa

This research project analyses the chequered history of elections in sub-Saharan Africa. While ballots in much of the continent continue to be linked to corruption, violence and political instability, recent elections in some countries have apparently confirmed a democratic transition. Combining the techniques of history and political science, the project will re-examine the relationship between an individual's experience of elections and their political attitudes and behaviours. Do particular experiences of elections predispose individuals to reject malpractice or, alternatively to accept, or even demand it? If so, do voters become one of the barriers to, as well as the agents of democratic consolidation? The project will focus on three African countries whose political and electoral histories have been very different - Ghana, Kenya and Uganda. Our findings will foster greater understanding of democratisation in these three countries and beyond, and will inform the continued efforts of policy-makers and practitioners to promote transparent and accountable government through free and fair elections.

This comparative project brings a team of historians and political scientists together to ask why it is that elections work better in some places and times than others. It aims to test the extent to which the quality of elections is shaped by popular expectations and demands, and challenges the idea that poor elections are solely the product of the undemocratic attitudes of state officials. It considers how different sorts of electoral experiences can lead individuals to have different political attitudes and expectations, and investigates when and how the evolution of anti-rigging attitudes and good electoral practice supports positive cycles of democratic consolidation. One of our key aims is to demonstrate how such cycles come into being so that we can show how positive experiences of democratic consolidation can be encouraged in previously authoritarian contexts.

The project covers about sixty years of history, from the immediate pre-independence elections to the present day. It covers three countries - Kenya, Uganda and Ghana. These were similar in their institutional colonial legacy: all were British territories, which saw the rapid elaboration of an electoral system in the very last years of colonial rule - but their post-independence histories differed substantially. All now share first-past-the-post and multi-party electoral systems, but with very different levels of democratic consolidation.

Our research will use multiple research techniques to interrogate a diverse body of material, from archival records to qualitative interviews to quantitative survey data and cutting-edge 'laboratory' work. This will allow the project team to focus on the processes of the elections themselves, and how these have both revealed and remade ideas about political action. Elections were - and are - performances which draw in vast numbers of people, and consume vast state and public resources and energy. But they are also negotiated events, the product of influences that are international, national and sometimes very local. Although the practice of election is typically intended to be uniform and consistent, the experience of voters and of politicians and election officials actually varies within any given election, and across time.

Drawing on this innovative combination of research methods, the project will make a major contribution to academic debates, and will achieve consistent high-level policy engagement through consistent engagement with policy-makers and timely production of briefings tailored to the needs of governments, international agencies and research users. As a result, the project will inform a range of players involved in the making and remaking of elections across the continent.

This project speaks directly to the question of the conditions under which democratisation is successful, a topic of great significance to the millions of people who live in emerging democracies.
Non-academic users
The project is primarily concerned with questions of the management of elections, public attitudes towards and involvement in elections, and the performance of democracy, and the findings will be of great relevance to donor and civil-society efforts to strengthen electoral systems and the quality of democracy around the world. Users will include:
(1) NGOs, policy makers, and pro-democracy advocates in the three countries under study. These users will benefit from new information and high quality analyses of the relationship between electoral experience and political behaviour and attitudes, which will enable them to better understand public support/resistance to free and fair elections and to design better interventions.
(2) International promoters of free and fair elections in the UK policy community (FCO, DfID), in the international donor community (European Union, United Nations Development Program, US government) and in regional consultative bodies (African Union, East African Community). These users will benefit from comparative lessons on how new forms of electoral practice can reshape established expectations, and findings that will set out the conditions under which public support for free and fair elections is most likely to grow.
(3) Legislators, political actors, interest groups, and citizens in the three countries under study will benefit from a greater understanding of the relationship between national level political leaders, electoral systems, electoral commissions, and popular attitudes. In particular, the project will generate new ideas about the nature of the barriers to free and fair elections, and the measures that can be taken to overcome them.
Principal academic beneficiaries
(1) Academics studying elections, political culture and democratisation, who will benefit from advances in the study of the relationship between electoral process and political consciousness.
(2) Academics from a variety of disciplines who will benefit from a new network of interdisciplinary elections research through collaborative panels at international conferences, as well as dissemination workshops and conferences.
(3) Research assistants in the three countries under study, who will gain in capacity and research skills through training and the experience on an inter-disciplinary comparative project.
To maximise impact, dissemination strategies have been tailored to the specific needs of the academic and policy communities:
(1) Academic dissemination through specialist, comparative, and case study articles in international journals. Project findings will be publicised via conferences in Nairobi and London, and drawn together into a monograph co-authored by the investigators and submitted to a major university press.
(2) Policy and public dissemination through policy briefs, a final research report of 10,000 words, one-page press releases, media engagement, and the two conferences.
User engagement, including the training of research assistants in communication and dissemination techniques will be the responsibility of Willis, Cheeseman and Lynch, who collectively have a track-record of high-impact research including:
(1) Multiple high-quality and widely-cited publications
(2) Policy briefings for the Cabinet Office, FCO, DfID, the World Bank, the US Department of State, and the Electoral Commission of the Government of Kenya.
(3) Ongoing research on the 2013 Kenyan elections, funded by the UK government's Africa Conflict Prevention Pool, and involving regular high-level briefings for staff from FCO, DfID and the Ministry of Defence, as well as representatives from foreign ministries of European Union partners
(4) Media appearances on television, radio, and print media in the UK and elsewhere.